Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software

GRUB Customizer 5.0.6

One thing technological progress hasn't made any easier is booting. If you're running a single version of Linux, it's not too bad: Simply make sure you booted with UEFI if you want the GRUB boot manager installed using UEFI and that kernel updates update GRUB accordingly. Most of the time this is all handled automatically. However, things quickly get more complicated with more than one Linux installed, or even multiboot to Windows or OS X occasionally. Each operating system wants its own slice of EFI and UEFI, boot folders, and kernels, which won't always be automatically recognized by your distro when it updates GRUB.

At this point, you normally have to start messing with GRUB's configuration files, and because most distros are now using a sub-derivative of GRUB 2, those configuration files need to be edited and updated in two stages – not a simple procedure. That's why I'm happy GRUB Customizer is still being developed. As much as I love editing configuration files by hand, a visual tool makes it so much easier and far less likely to make a boot-blocking mistake. It lets you add new boot entries manually, change the theme and resolution of your boot menu, remove the timeout, and change the list order.

Advanced options allow you to change boot flags and edit the specific options for each boot sequence. I successfully used GRUB Customizer to add both an auto-detect option for a Windows boot partition and a custom chain loader to detect a Cover EFI installation I use to boot OS X. Performing either of these tasks from the command line would have taken considerable research and left me with a system only booting Windows!

Project Website

https://launchpad.net/grub-customizer/

Don't risk editing GRUB's boot files by hand – use a graphical configuration tool and blame the developer instead!

Software Synthesizer

ZynAddSubFX 2.5.4

This project had been languishing on SourceForge for years, but it's been resurrected, with new features added almost monthly. This is brilliant because ZynAddSubFX, a software synthesizer you can play on your desktop, sounds wonderful. To the uninitiated, this may seem easy to accomplish. Standard audio synthesis is well understood and relatively easy to model in software, but the nuance and subtlety that makes one implementation sound so much better than another is just as difficult to pinpoint in software as it is in hardware, and this is something ZynAddSubFX has – the nuance and subtlety of a classic synthesizer.

The synth itself supports three different sound engines. There's the subtractive sound of the classic Moog design, an additive engine for more experimental and atonal and microtonal timbres, and a standard set of FM sounds, too, plus a PAD engine for creating lovely rich and broad swathes of sound. None of this is really important because it's the results that matter, and the output from this synth, which includes effects to make everything sound much more professional, is fabulous.

ZynAddSubFX is capable of huge sounds that would fit into any style, and it offers control over every parameter. There are banks of example sounds for instant gratification and an advanced mode, so you can dive into the real details of a sound. This new release updates the toolkit when using it as a plugin (and ZynAddSubFX still works well standalone) and fixes plenty of bugs. It also comes hot on the heels of the previous release, and that's what's so great about this renaissance in ZynAddSubFX – we're just glad it's back and getting better. We can't wait for version 3.0.

Project Website

http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/

Don't let its terrible name put you off; ZynAddSubFX is instant gratification for your ears.

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