Gnac is a graphical audio converter for GNOME with support for encoding/decoding to and from various formats, including the free formats FLAC and Ogg, WAV, MP3, M4A or SPX.

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After Warzone 2100, I decided to take a look at MegaGlest too, another 3D open-source strategy game.

MegaGlest is based upon the original Glest engine, but offers a lot of new features and capabilities, extending the original Glest (which is rather poor in options in my opinion) to a whole new game, including support for graphical resolutions, new factions, tech trees, tilesets and maps. It is available for Linux and Windows and it’s licensed under the GPL v3, while the game data is licensed under another permissive license, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

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I must agree, there aren’t many native strategy games for Linux, especially not those who can usually match the commercial ones for Linux. Actually they are so rare, they could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. I could include here games such as the very popular Glest, Spring or Tribal Trouble.

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Those of you who are using Kubuntu are already familiar with Dolphin, the default file manager shipped in most KDE distributions. There are several very good file managers for KDE, and I must include here Konqueror or Krusader, however Dolphin’s goal is to offer as much as possible functionality while also keeping lightweight and fast. And yes, it does it perfectly well, offering powerful features and a clean interface at the same time.

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AssaultCube is a popular cross-platform first-person shooter with pretty low hardware requirements, with a fast gameplay and many modes – including the classic CTF, TDM, FFA, or the popular TOSOK (Team One Shot One Kill), LSS (Last Swiss Standing), or HTF (Hold the Flag).

Starting a server should be pretty straightforward in Linux, all you have to do is run the server dedicated binary with several parameters, however AssaultCube provided a script, called server.sh for doing it. Here’s an example:

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This is a quick, simple tip (but maybe no very obvious for the first time) for getting back the volume control tray icon in case you removed it by mistake.

The volume control tray icon is actually included in the “Indicator Applet”, together with the Internet connections and the chat/mail/messenger icons, rather than being available by itself. To add it back to the panel:

Right click on the panel, click Add to Panel…:

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Not long ago Mozilla changed the release cycle of Firefox, so that major new versions (Firefox 5, 6 and so on) will be released every 2-3 months. Currently, the latest alpha release is Firefox 6 Aurora, while the latest beta development version is Firefox Beta 5, which has made it into the Firefox Next PPA already. Installing this version should be very easy if you follow the next steps.

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– the new Kontact suite brings next generation groupware to desktop and mobile

– Kontact receives a major architectural boost, using the capabilities of the new scalable Akonadi groupware framework to build interconnected PIM-related applications

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I guess this has been around for some time, however I was not aware of it. I bumped into it in a thread on UbuntuForums, and decided to give it a try.

From the add-on page description, Flash-Aid is a Firefox 4 and 3.5 (and maybe 5 Beta too) add-on which was built to “Remove conflicting flash plugins from Ubuntu/Debian Linux systems, install the appropriate version according to system architecture and apply some tweaks to improve performance and fix common issues.”

Well, I must say it sounds promising at least, especially since the page says it’s designed especially for Ubuntu. Let’s see how it works with Firefox 4.

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