Default KDE 4.10 desktop in Kubuntu 13.04 Daily Build

To be honest, KDE 4.10 is really a wonderful experience. And that’s even with my low specs graphics card from Intel. I read a lot of complaints over the Internet, mainly here, but for me the experience was great. It’s good to see such a feature-rich desktop keeping improving and heading towards the right direction, at least as far as I’m concerned. But let’s see what is new in KDE 4.10 first.

First, the Plasma Workspaces received improvements. From the announcement, the “taskbar received some usability features, with a smoother look for groups or windows”. Minimized windows will be greyed out in the taskbar and now the look of taskbar entries doesn’t provide a border for each window, but only for the active one. It looks smoother indeed, at least from my perspective:

I don’t know if this is new or not, but I like the Expand group/Collapse parent group options when right-clicking on a group icon application in the taskbar. This allows you to have access to all the opened instances of that application by clicking the specific icon in the taskbar. I couldn’t find the Stack icons grouping option from this post by Aaron Seigo.

According to this bug entry, the tiling support in KWin, introduced in KDE 4.5, has been removed because of stability issues, not supporting multi-screens, conflicting issues between KDE components. Too bad, that was a useful feature.

Unfortunately, there is a feature which it seems is unavailable in KDE (KDE 3.5 had it, GNOME has it) – showing .desktop file entries with their Name field instead of the file name. I do like the plasma widget which allows you to select a custom folder and display it on the desktop (like a, hummm, regular desktop):

As you can see, the file names are shown instead of the name field. This is not a bug because it’s logical to be this way, but it does seem kind of like a misfeature. Maybe there is a workaround for this, but I couldn’t find it. Dolphin displays them the same.

In addition to KDE 4.10, Kubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’ comes with Linux kernel 3.8.0, LibreOffice 4.0 Beta 2, Firefox 19 and Amarok 2.7.0.

I liked how the package installer now only contains a brief description when clicking the Details buttons, instead of the raw output of apt-get that you get when installing the packages in a terminal. Firefox doesn’t automatically start after it is installed (which would be desired, since the user probably expects to run it when it first clicks on the Firefox icon in the menu), but that’s no biggie.

I also noticed some downsides – keep in mind this is a development version, not a stable one.

Dolphin received many bug fixes and improvements. Support for MTP devices has been added, the panel icons size can now be changed (?!), current directory and files can be reported to the activity manager.

“There has also been an impressive number of performance enhancements. Loading folders, both with and without previews, is significantly faster and requires less memory while using all available processor cores to be as fast as possible. Minor improvements were made to search, drag and drop and other areas.”

On a downside, choosing not to show the Up button in Dolphin is quite a bad decision. Enabling it is a few clicks away, but still that’s a useful toolbar shortcut and most of the users are used to it. Also, the view mode doesn’t seem to be persistent. It changes for the current directory but when going up the directory tree it switches back to folder view. Setting double-click to open files and folders doesn’t seem to work.

Kate, one of my favorite text editors besides Emacs, received notifications that appear at the top of the editing area. And due to the KDE coding sprint, the number of opened bugs has been reduced from 850 to only 60. Now that’s really impressive!

Konsole brings two new features which were available in the KDE 3.5 version: print screen and send signals, as well as an option to change line spacing. For the latter, go to Settings->Edit Current Profile->Advanced and change the value of the line spacing adjustment.

Okular, Gwenview, Kontact, games, and Marble also received improvements. The KDE typing tutor, KTouch, has been completely rewritten.

A little more about Gwenview. Maybe others don’t find this bothering, but it’s a pain to always see images resized to fit the window and no option to cancel this. The option is not even saved between switching images, not to mention between sessions. I hope Gwenview will get back this functionality, available back in the KDE 3.5 days.

For developers, SDK components for Plasma are now part of PlasMate, which is an IDE for development of Plasma components. You can install it in Kubuntu using sudo apt-get install plasmate. You can create widgets, themes, KWin scrips and effects, as well as runners and window switchers in languages like QtQuick, JavaScript, Python or Ruby. Starting a default widget development has all the code in place for displaying the usual Hello world text on the Plasma workspace. I think this is too easy, and may encourage even users who don’t have much programming experience in developing widgets for Plasma (or any other components).

I did experience some issues, mainly how KDE freezes for several seconds every once in a while. This seemed to appear in 4.10, I couldn’t notice these freezes in 4.8 on Mint. Sometimes it’s only Firefox, sometimes it’s the whole KDE. I’m not sure what causes it, should it be the graphics card or something else. Whatever it is, it should be fixed as it is very annoying and counter-productive.

Firefox 19.0 sometimes becomes completely unresponsive, which is very frustrating. This also happened on Mint 14 with, sometimes when I maximize it from the taskbar it will just show a blank window and then hang. This makes for a terrible experience, needing to kill and restart it manually. But I won’t jump and bash Firefox, most of the time it works perfectly, and this may not even be Firefox-related, I don’t know for sure. Still, makes me smile when seeing that Well, this is embarrasing message every time I start Firefox. Haven’t seen it in a while. This may not even be Firefox-related.

One thing I’ve noticed is that my resolution of choice is now gone. I’m using an LCD with a default resolution of 1366×768, but I normally use it at 1280×768 because it allows me to have a vertical refresh rate of 75 Hz instead of 60 Hz (which is quite useful in shooter games). In Kubuntu, the only available modes are 1366×768, 1280×1024, 1280×720 and several lower ones. More were available in 12.10.

Changing the resolution will bring many artifacts on my Intel card. Here’s how it looks:

I think this has to do with the graphics card, not Kubuntu, since changing it back to the default resolution worked fine. Logging out and logging back in fixed the issue though.

You can download the Kubuntu 13.04 daily build from here. Burn it to a DVD or a USB Flash drive and try it.

If you want to install this KDE release in 12.10, add the following backports repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and perform a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade:

Here’s what I ended up with:

• Linux Kernel: 3.5.0-21
• Desktop Environment: Xfce 4.10
• File Manager: Thunar 1.4.0
• Terminal: Xfce Terminal 0.4.8
• Web Browser: Firefox 17.0.1
• Office Suite: LibreOffice 3.6.2
• Music Player: Banshee 2.6.0
• Chat Client: Pidgin 2.10.6

In addition to these, Mint 14 Xfce also comes with Totem movie player, GIMP image editor, XChat IRC client, gedit text editor, screenshot tool, gThumb image viewer, a document viewer, Transmission BitTorrent client, catfish find tool, a sound recorder, Xfburn burner.

The Xfce release of Mint 14 was made available a little bit over a week ago, featuring Xfce 4.10 and a classic desktop which is already familiar among users who prefer a typical interface. At a first glance not much was changed since Mint 13, but I guess this is actually expected from an Xfce user. There is a new Xfce version, 4.10, which wasn’t heavy on changes when it appeared, new kernel and up to date applications.

What I like about Mint in general is the fact that it has plenty of configuration options available. A solid mention should go for providing Flash and non-free codecs by default.

The desktop preferences allow you to change wallpaper, icons, use a slideshow for wallpapers.

Desktop compositing is available via the Menu -> Settings -> Window Manager Tweaks -> Compositor -> Enable display compositing. Compositing works really well, and I enjoy the simple and clean options without the clutter of other compositing engines.

Firefox
Firefox keeps asking whether to save or not the opened tabs when quitting it, even though I always tick the option not to ask me anymore (I really don’t understand why they refuse to fix this annoying issue). A workaround for this is to open aboug:config in Firefox and set the following entry to false:

browser.warnOnQuit

It looks to be the entry browser.showQuitWarning gets reset to true each time Firefox starts, so I left it untouched and modified the variable above, which seems to work. (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=112076)

Pidgin is the default IM client in Mint Xfce and comes with support for many protocols, however my Facebook account doesn’t seem to work in it. Yahoo! works OK though.

Thunar
To be honest, probably the first thing I install after an Xfce installation is a file manager. Thunar is the default file manager in Xfce, small and simplistic, without support for tabs nor access to network. I understand simplicity is a thing that Xfce thrives for, but the tab support is a must in opinion, especially since it wouldn’t cut much on resources.

Sharing
Sharing is available via the Menu -> System -> Shared Folders, and then clicking on the Lock icon (“Click to make changes”). However it looks like adding folders doesn’t work properly, Mint trying to replace them with the default $HOME location. A workaround this is to just add folders in the Samba configuration file, like this:

[shared_folder_name]
path = /path/to/folder
readable = yes
writable = no

Then restart Samba using sudo service smbd restart for changes to occur.

The relatively new GIMP with a single unified window

Overall
There are small glitches here and there, and some upolished stuff. Although minor, these are worth a mentioning. Some child windows are drawn behind their parent window, with a small screen you have to move windows around a lot to get access to a window which should act like a popup since you need to access it (example: adding accounts in Pidgin). The start-up tips window cannot be moved around by pressing Alt – for example I had to take a screenshot of it by default but the screenshot application is behind the tips window so I had to use command line.

Xfce is fast and looking pretty decent and I think Mint 14 is pretty good, but the release was a little bit rushed if you ask me. Still, Mint is Mint and all the respect to the developers for providing all these separate environments in a separate ISO with Mint-specific settings and interoperability.

Download Mint 14 Xfce

The game resembles an ancient warfare universe, much in the way Age of Empires series did. The new key features in this version include (from the changelog on the official website):

• a new, complete faction called Roman Republic, which comes with a new art set for buildings, units and ships
• a new combat system adding bonuses and weaknesses to units
• a new trading system, which allows you to choose which resource to be gained by a trader, available on both water and over land
• new random map scripts
• new animations for several ships, units and animals
• new AI improvements, including including a serious bug fix and performance increases
• four new music tracks and a re-done track
• many other bug fixes and minor features

Features & Gameplay
The game comes with 3D graphics using OpenGL, allowing you to zoom in/out and to rotate the image. After starting a new game only few options can be configured though, like enabling or disabling shadows, water reflections or the music. 0 A.D. features both single player and multiplayer, with the single player mode offering a skirmish-like mode, no campaigns being available at the current time. In single player you will fight versus qBot, the default A.I. used by the game. A scenario editor which can be started in-game via the Options menu is also available.

Main menu

The multiplayer mode features direct connection only, there doesn’t seem to be an Internet server, so you can either host a game or connect to another game by specifying the machine’s IP.

Starting a single player game

It can be ran in fullscreen mode or windowed mode using Alt+Enter to switch between them.

0 A.D. features a lot of maps, several factions like the new Roman Republic, Iberians, Celts or Hellenes, combat units, buildings for training new units and technologies, a trading system, and naval ships.

The gameplay is pretty much similar to the one of Age of Empires in that you gather food, stone, gold and wood, expand and upgrade your buildings and units, build up a strong army and defeat your opponent.

The new Roman faction (from the official screenshots)

Currently 0 A.D. doesn’t offer configuration options like changing the resolution, configuring keyboard shortcuts or changing the sound/music volumes. The available hotkeys are listed here.

You can use Alt+Enter to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode, or F2 to take a screenshot in PNG format.

Installation
Instructions for installing 0 A.D. in various Linux distributions can be found here. To install 0 A.D. in Ubuntu you can use the repositories provided by the official project by issuing the following commands in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wfg/0ad
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install 0ad

Then run it by typing 0ad in a terminal.

To conclude, 0 A.D. has a pretty slow development rate, but once all the remaining features are implemented it should make a great, classy, real-time strategy game. Plus, it’s completely free.

Download 0 A.D.

Liferea
Also called the Linux Feed Reader, Liferea is a full-featured news reader built in GTK, so I’d warmly recommend it for GNOME users. By default, Liferea’s interface is pretty much the same as Akregator, following the same style with a tree view to the left, and the news list and displaying widget to the right side. However it has three different view modes which change the alignment of the widgets (normal, wide and combined view modes). It supports system tray integration and has an option to disable JavaScript as well as modifying the font size.

Blam
Blam is small with a clean interface and fewer options than Akregator or Liferea. It’s written in Mono GTK and it should fit those who don’t need an application with all the whistles and bells.

RSSOwl
Written in Java, RSSOwl is a very powerful feed reader with support for RSS, RDF and Atom feeds. The first time it starts RSSOwl will show a wizard from which you can import pre-defined feeds, feeds from Google Reader or from a certain website. Being Java-based makes the interface a little slow when it comes to response time, but this is balanced by the richness of features that it provides. The latest version is 2.1.2 and you can download it from Sourceforge. The package contains the binary and you will need Java Runtime Environment or any other compatible Java virtual machine to run it.

RSSNOW
OK, so RSSNOW is a Plasma widget for KDE which can be displayed on the workspace. Some find it very useful, making it a good choice since it just stays on the desktop, providing a very basic interface, appearance configuration and global keyboard shortcut.

Newsbeuter
This one is a simple console news reader that runs in command-line mode, so it doesn’t have an ncurses interface and you have to configure it manually.

BlogBridge
Yet another Java-based feed reader, BlogBridge offers some pretty cool features and a whole bunch of configuration options.

ThinFeeder
This one is also written in Java and comes with various options.

Canto
This is based on ncurses, so it runs in a terminal. You will have to use the keyboard in order to navigate in Canto, and press Q to quit it.

Thunderbird
Thunderbird is well-known for being the email client from Mozilla, but it also incorporates a feed reader.

In addition to these, there is also Gnus Rss, a feed reader for Emacs, or Sage, a Firefox add-on with support for RSS and Atom feeds. Of course, the browser-based ones like Google Reader or Bloglines are available too and Firefox itself can handle feeds in a simple way.

There is also another one for GNOME called Straw, but it looks like it hasn’t been maintained since 2008. And Raggle, a command-line reader which also seems dead since 2005.

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin will be the next long-term supported release and as most of you already know, it is scheduled to arrive at the end of April 2012. Here is the release schedule of Ubuntu 12.04:

• Alpha 1 – December 1, 2011
• Alpha 2 – February 2, 2012
• Feature freeze – February 17, 2012
• Beta 1 – March 1, 2012
• Beta 2 – March 29, 2012
• Release candidate – April 19, 2012
• Final release – April 26, 2012

The 12.04.1 point release is scheduled for July.

This review is based on the latest Kubuntu alpha, after a clean install and performing a full upgrade using sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade.

I had a look at Plasma Netbook, by running the live ISO image on an Acer Aspire One D255E netbook from a USB flash drive. The netbook is equipped with an Intel N570 1.66 dual core CPU, 2GB RAM and Intel HD 3150 integrated graphics card.

Here are the main features available in Kubuntu 12.04:

• Kernel: Linux kernel 3.2.0
• Desktop environment:KDE Software Compilation 4.8.0
• File manager:Dolphin 2.0
• Web browser:Rekonq 0.8.71
• Music player:Amarok 2.5.0
• Terminal: Konsole 2.8

Kubuntu correctly detected the netbook and started off the USB drive directly in Plasma Netbook, it detected the graphics card and enabled desktop effects by default, also the Ethernet card, wireless and webcam worked out of the box.

The KDE interface for small screens is really nice in my opinion, and pretty much a lot more functional than Unity if you ask me.

By default, the desktop looks like this:

There is a strange artifact consisting of some blue vertical stripes in the search box, but other than that, the “Search and launch” page really looks pretty neat.

From left to right, the upper panel bar includes the menu of the currently selected application, the Search and launch page, another page titled “Page one” to which various Plasma widgets can be added (like a weather widget, or a web browser). In addition to these, we have the system tray with Klipper, volume icon (KMix), laptop battery icon, network icon, date and time. Options to lock screen and shutdown are also available.

On the top-right side there is an application selector, which, when clicked, shows a list of all the running applications.

To be honest, I could never familiarize with these interfaces designed for small screens, and Unity in Ubuntu seems to me strange and unusable even now. The idea of having to do additional clicks in order to select an application, or switch your hand from mouse to keyboard and viceversa doesn’t look fast, but I guess that’s just me. However, KDE really does a good job implementing the netbook interface. One of the things I still miss is the Alt+F2 run box which doesn’t seem to work in Plasma Netbook.

Here’s the Search and launch page with changed wallpaper and shortcuts to some applications:

Configuring search and launch:

And the widgets page:

Moving forward, here is the default music player which ships with Kubuntu, Amarok 2.5.0:

Amarok has reached a level of completeness, one of the only drawbacks being the fact that it’s pretty slow, and I’m talking about scrolling in a large default playlist (with album thumbnails enabled) and resizing its three main widgets (services, context and playlist). I guess this has to do something with Qt.

Dolphin, the file manager:

Rekonq the default WebKit-based web browser comes with support for HTML5:

To conclude, Kubuntu Plasma Netbook is pretty cool and intuitive, offering fast access to common applications, a pretty solid interface, and the best of them all, it is, as KDE always was, highly configurable. Hopefully the 12.04 release will be a good improvement over the last Kubuntu versions.

Download Kubuntu Precise Pangolin ISO Image – Daily Build

I think 1.10 is probably the most awaited release, and those of you who are fans of Wesnoth could follow its development by trying all those alphas and betas put out by the team behind it. Although I’m quite a regular player and I love this game, I preferred to stay back with 1.8.x and wait for the stable 1.10 to come out before having the real pleasure of playing it as a polished version (by the way, here is a review of an earlier alpha release).

Well, since it’s been out for over two weeks now and I couldn’t get the time to write a review, here it comes.

The main window stays unchanged in 1.10

For those of you who have no idea what Wesnoth is, it’s a 2D turn-based strategy game which takes place by default in a fantasy universe, offering six default factions, campaigns, single and multiplayer (both Internet and hot seat) modes. Players control armies and the battles take place on maps made up by hexagonal tiles. Various add-ons modify the game using the WML language (Wesnoth Markup Language) offering new maps, new factions, different game play,provides single and multiplayer modes. The possibilities are practically limitless, and the user-made content is great. There are popular maps like Creep War (with dozens of variants), Conquest (which modifies the gameplay completely), or eras that put the player in a an even more dynamic, more fantasy-like universe (take the Era of Magic for example). These are only few examples though, hundreds or maybe thousands of them are available on the add-ons server. If you ask me though, with few exceptions, I always preferred the default maps and era for a serious game. A ladder for statistics is also available, and the same goes for user registration, which can be done via the forums – you can register on the forum and use the same username and password in-game too.

Now let’s see what exactly changed in 1.10, and what new features were introduced.

There is a new mainline campaign, called “Dead Water”, which raises the number of official campaigns bundled by default to no less than 16, and that is without the introductory tutorial and the hundreds of campaigns available via the add-on menu. Dead Water revolves around the mermen race, and you will have to lead a young merman to ascend to his kingdom’s throne. This campaign is rated as intermediate difficulty level and contains 10 scenarios.

The new Dead Water campaign introduces mermen to the main line

New unit animations are available for the Saurians, part of the Drake faction. Also, new graphics for several terrain tiles were made and new terrain types were introduced. The new graphics include revamped grassland, bridges, as well as several new tiles. These new improvements really make maps and lightning look a lot more appealing to the eye. Slowed units are now tinted light blue.

A new feature called Planning mode has been introduced, and it allows to simulate unit movements and attacks, without actually doing it. You can toggle it by pressing P or set it in the Preferences to be enabled by default when the game starts.

A new option when creating a new game has been implemented, “Shuffle sides”, to let Wesnoth assign random sides to players when the game starts.

Except for those already known from previous versions, four new default maps come with Wesnoth 1.10, including 2p – Aethermaw, 2p – Arcanclave Citadel, 2p – Thousand Stings Garrison and 6p – Volcano. Maps which are already well-known from 1.8 and before have also received fixes and minor modifications.

The new 6p – Volcano map – notice the new terrain graphics making it more pleasing to the eye

The in-game editor also received improvements, like the possibility to open several maps at a time.

You can remove several add-ons at a time by using the new window that allows to check each add-on should be removed. This saves time compared to the old method, which only allowed to remove an add-on and then rebuild the cache each time.

Mass-removing of add-ons can be done easily now and in a fast manner

The music was also enriched with two new tracks.

Content creators will be glad to find out that major Lua and WML (the two scripting languages used by Wesnoth) improvements have been made.

There is also a WML plugin for the Eclipse IDE, providing features like syntax highlighting and autocompletion.

It looks like in Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha at least, the configuration directory is located inside ~/.local/share/wesnoth/1.10, while the preferences file can be found inside ~/.config/wesnoth/preferences. I don’t know if this is a Ubuntu-specific modification or this is how Wesnoth stores its configuration files now (as opposed to the usual ~/.wesnoth1.6 or ~/.wesnoth1.8 directories). At least for me, this doesn’t make it easier to access it, and the old style seems to be better.

The multiplayer server

I think that it’s impossible to list all the changes from 1.8 here, and I’m sure there is a good deal of them I’m not even aware of.

Wesnoth already built itself a great deal of popularity, and the community is great. There are the forums, the IRC channel (#wesnoth @ Freenode), the ladder third-party project, the user-made content and much, much more.

Wesnoth 1.10 is really an impressive release, with tons of improvements and new features. This can only add to the delight of the long time players and make new players curious to try it out.

MegaGlest is a free, open-source real-time strategy game set in a medieval fantasy universe, based on a 3D engine, with support for single player, multi player, and mods. It’s available on Linux, Windows, and, starting with this release, also OS X.

New in 3.6.0
The list of changes that come with the 3.6.0 version is rather long, including AI improvements, making it play smarter and to respond more quickly, 15 supported languages, OS X support, server mode allowing to host dedicated game servers, in-game team switching and pausing of network games. In addition to these, improvements have been made to the multi-player chat, mod menu, options for game modifications and total conversions, extended scripting support, balancing Romans faction gameplay, music presentation, low food indication, multi-player game configuration and automatic router configuration.

The minimum system requirements are:

• dual-core CPU with at least 1.5 GHz per CPU
• 1 GB RAM
• audio card with OpenAL support
• graphics card with OpenGL support

The first thing which stroke me when starting it was its interface, which somehow resembles the one found in games like WarCraft III. This may be only me, but it really gave me a comfortable feeling.

The interface is pretty intuitive, and all the configuration options are easy to find. MegaGlest offers a very wide range of configuration options, including video (screen resolution, fullscreen or windowed mode, effects), sound (music, game sound), keyboard (various keyboard shortcuts, including possibility to take screenshots). Screenshots are saved inside the ~/.megaglest/screens directory.

Configuration options

MegaGlest comes with a good number of maps, and more can be installed via the mods menu. Default factions include Egyptian, Indian, Magic, Norsemen, Persian, Romans or “Tech”. Single player offers 3 tutorials based on difficulty, 20 scenarios aimed from beginner to advanced, and the usual custom game mode.

Starting a new single player game

Multi player

The online server, listing available open games

Available game types

Installing mods in-game

The in-game camera allows to zoom in/out, rotate and change 3D view.

The game code is licensed under the GPLv2 and the game data uses the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, making it completely free to use and distribute.

However, there was a downside I could catch, and that’s the impossibility to save the game. From the MegaGlest wiki: “MegaGlest does not currently support this feature, though the Glest Advanced Engine is able to save and load games.” This may not be so important for online games, but it’s a feature which should be available. Hope it will be implemented soon.

Installation
MegaGlest offers a nicely packaged installation binary which you can download from the official homepage (direct link here). Save the .run file to a location of your choice, then make sure to give it executable permissions (e.g. open a terminal, go to the directory where you saved it and type chmod 755 chmod 755 MegaGlest-Installer-3.6.0_i386_linux.run or right-click the file in your file browser and mark the executable tickbox). To install it just double-click the .run file or run it in the terminal, e.g. ./chmod 755 MegaGlest-Installer-3.6.0_i386_linux.run. The installation kit is only 223 MB in size.

You will also need libopenal to run it. To install it in Ubuntu this would be sudo apt-get install libopenal1.

MegaGlest allows you to install it with user permissions, so you can run it without root privileges and install it inside your home directory or any other folder where you have writing permissions.

Accept the free GNU General Public License

Choose the installation location

Installing

To run it, go inside the megaglest directory and double-click the start_megaglest binary, or in a terminal run it as ./start_megaglest.

Conclusion
To put it short: great game! Except for the game saving issue, MegaGlest has everything you would expect from a 3D RTS: single player via custom games and tutorials, good multi player (LAN and Internet, open games are available online at any time), addictive gameplay, a great deal of factions and maps, decent number of mods to choose and install directly in-game, good support for configuration. Overall, I am impressed with it, and this new release makes no exception. If you are looking for a strategy game on Linux, give MegaGlest a try, it surely deserves it.

In-game screenshots

CMus is a powerful, feature-rich music player for the terminal which uses the ncurses library

mp3blaster
mp3blaster is one of the most popular music players for the terminal out there. It uses the ncurses toolkit, and has features like grouping of tracks, playlists, shuffle and repeat modes.
Homepage

MOC
MOC stands for Music on Console and it is a twin-panel music player with the file browser to the left and the playlist to the right. MOC is built upon ncurses and allows shuffle, repeat, volume control.
Homepage

MOC running in Ubuntu 11.10

Herrie
Another ncurses-based music player for the terminal, Herrie is a minimalistic player that comes with playlists, support for various audio files, including Ogg and MP3, jump to next/previous song.
Homepage

mplayer
This is mplayer, the famous video/audio player and converter. However MPlayer can also be used as a command-line audio player, and it supports all the formats out there, including Ogg, FLAC, MP3 or WAV.
Homepage

SoX
Self-described as “Sound eXchange, the Swiss Army Knife of audio manipulation”, SoX is actually a powerful command-line audio manipulation tool which can also be used as a music player, using the command play music_file.
Homepage

PyTone
Written in Python, PyTone is yet another command-line audio player. Simple and clean, it supports formats like MP3 or Ogg.
Homepage

PyRadio
Another program written in Python, PyRadio is able to play Internet radio inside the terminal. To use it, download it from here, unzip the archive and then run the ./pyradio script.
Homepage

With preselected stations, PyRadio is able to play Internet radio inside a terminal

ogg123
This little command-line tool is included in the vorbis-tools package and is able to reproduce Ogg and FLAC. It’s very basic, yet very fast and useful for quickly listening to songs which are encoded in a free format.
Homepage

mpg123
Just as ogg123, only that mpg123 plays the MP3 format.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install wesnoth

AssaultCube
Being based on the Cube engine, AssaultCube is a very fast-paced first-person shooter with a gameplay that changes from mode to mode. There are the usual TDM or CTF modes, but also TOSOK (Team One Shot One Kill), KTF (Keep the Flag), OSOK, LSS (Last Swiss Standing) or even PF (Pistol Frenzy). It doesn’t have high system requirements and the online servers are most of the time filled with players.

sudo apt-get install assaultcube

Neverball
Neverball is a 3D action where you control a ball and you have to collect coins. You can start with a beginner level and advance to more advanced levels. Although the concept seems pretty simple, the game is not easy to master and it becomes addictive even in the first minutes of playing. Neverball allows configuration of sound, resolution, graphics details. It can be played in fullscreen mode too, and you can choose from various ball models.

sudo apt-get install neverball

Xonotic
Xonotic is based on Nexuiz, the result of a fork which aims to keep it free and open-source. Xonotic is a shooter with a fast game style, single player and multiplayer modes, lots of maps, models and weapons to choose from.

Download

Hedgewars
This is a Worms-like game, completely free and open-source, which keeps the funny atmosphere the original Worms had. Players control the so-called “hedgehogs”, which take turns, and they have entire arsenals at their disposal to blow their enemies off the orbit. A very funny and addictive game.

sudo apt-get install hedgewars

Warzone 2100
Warzone 2100 is a real time strategy game set in a future, apocalyptic universe, and it provides single player mode, multiplayer, campaigns and lots of maps. The true thing that sets Warzone 2100 apart is the unit/building tech tree, which can be upgraded differently using over 400 technologies.

sudo apt-get install warzone2100

Shutter
This is a very powerful and feature-rich tool for taking screenshots. Written in GTK and blending well in GNOME, Shutter offers just about anything you would ask from such an application: timer, screenshots of whole screen, windows, widgets, a quick and easy-to-use editor for fast retouching or pointing out certain aspects of the image, support for plugins, exporting/importing and saving to PNG, JPG or BMP. Definitely a winner in my opinion.

GNOME Screenshot
This is the default screenshot application that comes with the GNOME desktop environment, offering a very basic graphical interface. It’s triggered by pressing Print Screen, and by default it will take the screenshot of the whole screen. Here’s how it looks:

Although it allows to take screenshots of only windows or section of the screen, unfortunately these are not available in the graphical interface, but can be triggered by running gnome-screenshot in a terminal with certain parameters. For example, gnome-screenshot -w will take the screenshot of a window, gnome-screenshot -a will take the screenshot of a screen area, while gnome-screenshot -B will take the screenshot of a window, excluding window borders. Why these don’t have a corresponding tick box in the graphical window is still a mystery to me. That being said, GNOME Screenshot is a very fast choice if you quickly want to grab the whole screen and dump it to a file.

KSnapshot
This is the screenshot application used by KDE and provides a timer as well as possibility to take the screenshot of a particular area of the screen or only a window, include or exclude window decorations. Pretty fast and easy to use.

ImageMagick
Actually the tool is called import and it’s included in the imagemagick package. It can be used in the command-line mode and comes with various options. It can be a little hard to manipulate it and maybe not the best recommendation for a person who uses only GUI, but otherwise it’s very powerful. The easiest way to take a screenshot using it would probably be something like import image.png, and then select the region of the screen you want to capture.

scrot
Or SCReen SHot, scrot is yet another powerful tool for taking screenshots in command-line mode. The simplest way to use it would be scrot image.png, which will take a screenshot of the whole screen and save it in the current directory as image.png. To set a delay time in seconds, use the -d switch, e.g. scrot -d 3 image.png.

…And one more

GIMP
Probably well-known by most users who use to edit images on a daily basis or even occasionally, GIMP is a very powerful and feature-rich image manipulation application. One of the features it also has is the ability to take screenshots. To use it, go to File->Create->Screenshot… and select the desired options in the window that appears.

For those of you who didn’t hear about it before, it’s probably time you have a look at it. Shutter is probably the most powerful screenshot-taking application available for GNOME, including countless features and several useful tools to take screenshots and manipulate them in any way possible.

The latest release brings several new features, including:

• improved uploading by adding a bunch of new image hosting services
• improved CLI interface

Other changes include rewritten code and fixed bugs.

To install the latest Shutter release in Ubuntu, open a terminal and type in the following two lines:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shutter/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install shutter

The first command will add the Shutter repository to your sources list and the second will fetch and install the latest version.

Features

Shutter supports sessions, exporting to various Internet services, it can save in various image formats, including PNG or JPG, it supports plugins and comes bundled with a lot of them. In addition, Shutter is also highly configurable via the Edit->Preferences menu entry.

It allows you to take screenshots of the whole desktop, a window, a section of desktop, a child window, a single menu or cascading menus, only a tooltip, and it provides a timer too.

For quick editing, Shutter comes with the Shutter Drawing Tool, an application which can be launched from the menu or from the toolbar, and which includes basic painting tools like straight lines or rectangles, but also text or the pixelize effect. However the current version seems to have a bug when trying to save the image, the window closing unexpectedly. Still, exporting to a huge number of image formats works, as well as PDF or SVG.

Drawing tool

The configuration window allows to change the default image format for saving screenshots (PNG, JPEG or BMP), automatically save file, change the default file name (including the numbering style), include or exclude the cursor, include or exclude window decorations, automatically resize window, generate thumbnail, border, reduce colors, enable/disable popups, change the default keybinding in GNOME, upload images to various services.

You can start Shutter at login, hide the window on first launch and also hide the notification icon. Tray icon integration is also provided. Shutter also comes with several plugins, mostly for applying image effects.

Plugins

Behavior options

In addition to these, Shutter also includes several nice command-line switches which provide the possibility to take screenshots directly from the terminal (for example shutter -w will take the screenshot of a window while shutter -f will capture the fullscreen).

Finch
Based on libpurple, Finch is developed by the Pidgin project, and it pretty much supports the same features of it, except for the graphical part, of course. There are many chat protocols which it supports, including AIM, IRC, MySpaceIM, WLM, SILC, Yahoo! or ICQ.

Finch allows you to change the status, report idle time based on keyboard activity or turn it off, it supports plugins, file transfers, sounds, status messages, chat timestamps, customization of the contact list. In addition, it also lets you change and remembers the position and size of the windows.

The very nice thing is that once you get to know how to use it, Finch becomes a great tool for getting the job done.

Finch plugins

Several plugins can be configured and some of the plugins that come bundled with Finch by default include:

• Autoaccept – auto-accept file transfer requests from selected users
• Buddy Notes – store buddy notes
• Grouping – provides alternate ways to group buddies in the contact list
• Join/Part Hiding – hide join/part messages in large rooms

For using Finch you can find a comprehensive guide that I wrote a while ago following this tutorial. This page on the official homepage may be of help too.

Some of the basic keyboard shortcuts include Alt+Q to quit, Alt+A to open the options window, Alt+N to switch to the next window, Alt+C to close current window, Alt+R to resize a window, Alt+M to move a window, Tab to switch through options and Space to tick/untick an option.

CenterIM
CenterIM is another powerful IM client which is being actively developed, and supports the following protocols: ICQ, Yahoo!, WLM, AIM, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu and LJ.

When it starts, CenterIM shows a configuration window with various general options that can be changed or toggled by pressing Enter. The window that follows allows you to set up accounts for all the supported protocols.

CenterIM provides a default interface with the contact list to the left, and the discussion windows to the right. The online contacts are separated from the offline ones. I tried it using the Yahoo! protocol, and the contact groups seem to be ignored. After writing the text you want to send, press Ctrl+X to send it. Use the Escape key to switch to the contact list and Q to quit CenterIM.

Configuration window

CenterIM supports aways messages, anti-spam features, windows size configuration, keyboard binding, logs, aways system.

One feature which I found to be great is the possibility to enable Emacs/Vi keyboard bindings in the text editor, this making it easy for a person who is used to one of these ways of text input.

Xonotic uses the Darkplaces game engine, an engine which started as a Quake modification, but it was under heavy development and new improvements were made. Currently the developers of Xonotic state that the game is “on the par with most commercial games from 2006-2007″. Which, for the Linux platform is pretty important.

Xonotic is a fast-paced shooter set in an unreal world, and comes with a wide range of weapons, maps, various player models and a whole bunch of community-created content. Its strong point is the multiplayer mode, however it also includes an instant action mode vs bots and a singleplayer campaign with bots support.

Here’s how Xonotic 0.5 looks like:

Xonotic is full-featured and provides ambient music, keyboard configuration (including switching from fullscreen mode to windowed-mode in-game, without restarting the game), various graphics effects, player models, weapons and maps. The toggle fullscreen option works like a charm, while screenshots can be found inside the ~/.xonotic/data/screenshots/ directory. I wasn’t able to take screenshots of the configuration options though from within the game, so I had to use an external application for that.

Configuring Xonotic

To install Xonotic 0.5 in Ubuntu 11.04, download the zip package from the official website, uncompress it and run the appropriate executable (e.g. ./xonotic-linux32-glx, ./xonotic-linux-glx.sh.