Ok, now there’s numerous ways to play MIDIs in Ubuntu 
There’s my previous How To with Audacious. But now Ubuntu should be able to play MIDIs by default through any gstreamer based player with the new gsteamer-plugins-bad package in Hardy. Whoohoo! 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gstreamer/+bug/111555
I love Virtualbox It’s amazing and simple to use. I wanted to set up a virtual machine so I installed VMWare Server from the Ubuntu repos. Unfortunately it just gave me a headache. Literally. Ok so I got my guest OS installed, but when I went to install the guest addons, it couldn’t compile the vmhgfs module due to the way a few things changed in the 2.6.22 kernel. Ok so I found a solution after searching that involved modifying some code in the driver. Then I couldn’t get the USB to work in the guest OS. I also couldn’t mount a CD in the guest either. Then I couldn’t get the shared folders working. I’m not sure but I don’t think VMWare Server has shared folders. So after probably after 3 hours of getting no where but a headache, I gave up.
Then I decided to try Virtualbox. I grabbed the .deb from their site and installed it, added myself to the Vbox users, logged out and back in, and fired it up. Installing the guest was easy. Then came time to install the guest extras. To my surprise it just worked! I didn’t even have to install build-essential in my guest. Ran the script and rebooted my VM. Resolution was perfect and I had access to shared folders! I was also able to mount CDs in the guest. I am totally amazed! I love Virtualbox, it just works!
So there’s actually a story behind this 
My conkyrc file has grown to a fairly large size and it’s a bit of a pain to go through it to change the colors. After all there’s lots of ${color} in it
So I needed a command that could do this for me. That’s when I found sed, a stream editor. sed can replace a word or set of words with a different word or set of words.
There’s a couple different ways to use sed. You can have it replace only the first instance of a word in a sentence or you can have it replace the word globally.
To replace only the first instance of a word in a sentence the command looks like this
sed -i ’s/original_word/new_word/’ file.txt
To change all instances of a word in a file the command is
sed -i ’s/original_word/new_word/g’ file.txt
the “g” at the end tells sed to perform the action globally.
You can also do more than one word, like a phrase. To do this correctly you need to use a “\” backslash before the space. So for example I wanted to replace all instances of “black” with “light blue” in my conkyrc. This is what the command looked like
sed -i ’s/black/light\ blue/g’ .conkyrc
That saved me about 5 minutes of editing my conkyrc.
So there you have it, a very useful time saving command.
Or you can use the Replace button in Gedit which somehow I managed to overlook while trying to figure out a command to do this! 
Official Announcement
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/alpha4
I’m really looking forward to the release of Hardy in April. A lot of things are starting to take shape in Alpha 4. It includes the 2.6.24 kernel. One of the new features is PulseAudio which I’m really looking forward to. The current state of sound on Linux is a mess. PulseAudio will greatly enhance the Linux sound system.
Policykit
With Alpha 4, PolicyKit integration is visible in the administrative user interfaces. PolicyKit makes it possible to run administrative applications as a normal user, and have them get a particular set of extra privileges for certain operations, which allows fine-grained control over user permissions and enhances usability, as well as eliminating the security implications of running the whole application as root.
Transmission
gnome-bt-download has now been replaced with Transmission.
Brasero
The Nautilus CD burner and Serpentine have both been replaced by Brasero.
World Clock Applet
The world clock applet has been added
GVFS
I’m really excited about this.
Nautilus 2.21.6 in Alpha 4 uses GVFS, the virtual filesystem abstraction layer that’s set to replace the aging GnomeVFS in GNOME 2.22, as its backend. In the near future, GVFS will make it possible to fix shortcomings of Nautilus such as the inability to restore files from trash, pause and undo file operations, and make it possible to escalate user privileges for certain operations using PolicyKit for authentication. It also brings a significant performance boost to many operations.
Yes, at some point in the near future, Nautilus will finally be able to restore items from the trash! Not to mention Nautilus will have an increase in performance.
This is only a few of the new features in 8.04. The complete list is on the official announcement.
8.04 is really coming together nicely and I can’t wait for the release in April
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