Not many Linux users can claim they’re familiar with Enlightenment desktop environment, even less than those are able to declare they’ve used it.
Perhaps that is the main reason for why Rage has stayed out of the spotlights of so many Linux users, despite the fact its development has been going for over a year now.
However, notorious or not, this media player certainly deserves some public introduction, so here it goes:
What Can Rage Do?
Well, as you might expect from any media player out there, Rage can play your video and audio files by using either Gstreamer, Xine or VLC as backends.
It also supports keyboard shortcuts and some mouse gestures as well.
Other than the basics, Rage also carries a few bells and whistles to spice up your experience, for instance: it supports OSD (On Screen Display) of both the playlist files and the seeking bar, i.e. it shows live thumbnail preview.
Furthermore, it has subtitle files support and it can also fetch album art when “needed”.
In fact, I’ve found Rage carries all the essential (plus a few extra) features one might require from a current desktop media player, all but one feature I, personally, missed a lot – change playlist order by dragging the files with the mouse.
But hey, this media player is still young, perhaps that feature will be added at some point in the (near?) future, who knows?
And that brings me to –
How to Get Rage?
As an Enlightenment designated app, you may find Rage available to install on distros which supports E desktop environment or better yet default to it.
To be more specific, Rage can be installed via AUR on Arch, or in Ubuntu via Enlightenment E19 PPA.
Users of other distros might opt to install from source, by downloading and compiling Rage from its official Enlightenment about page (link below), which isn’t difficult as it may sound.
Of course, one thing you should keep in mind though is, as E desktop environment is still under quite heavy development so does Rage, ergo it may not work properly or you might encounter some bugs along the way (which you’re recommended to report BTW).
Note: in case you don’t have Enlightenment installed on your machine, you might need to install some of its libraries (packages) for Rage to work. Thankfully E is very lightweight and so are its libraries as well.
