According to a development update posted on Ubuntu Fridge by the Ubuntu developer Daniel Holbach, Ubuntu 12.04 is on its way to release the first beta next week, on February 29, after the user interface freeze which occured today. “Today User Interface Freeze and Beta Freeze will kick in, next week we will do a test rebuild of the whole archive and Beta 1 will get out next week as well.”
With Unity getting most of the attention lately in Ubuntu and the feature-freeze coming in tomorrow, I decided to take the latest Kubuntu alpha for a spin and see how KDE 4.8 for netbooks looks and behaves. But first, a little about 12.04 as a whole.
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:
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Battle for Wesnoth
Battle for Wesnoth, or BfW for short, is a popular turn-based strategy game which takes place in a fantasy universe and has support for singleplayer and multiplayer, official campaigns (and more available to download), hotseat games. The game comes by default with 6 factions and takes place over hexagons, each player deploying his army and trying to kill his opponent. Wesnoth can be highly modded via WML (Wesnoth Markup Language), and the add-ons server includes many more maps, factions, eras and campaigns. Beside for the usual mode which allows up to 9 players to battle against each other or forming teams, there are also the rumble maps (very small maps), or the survival ones, or the multiplayer campaigns or role playing maps. There is also an unofficial ladder available. Wesnoth is really an awesome, complete game, with a great community, great online playing, music themes, map editor, a great helping system, and much, much more.
Dedicated applications
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.
Dolphin | Homepage
Dolphin is the default file manager in KDE and it features an easy to use interface, tabs, previews, three view modes (icons, details, columns), vertical window splitting, file and folder sorting, service menus, tags, two-mode location bar.
sudo apt-get install dolphin
Ubuntu Unleashed 2011 Edition: Covering 10.10 and 11.04 (6th Edition)
PeaZip is an open-source file archiver with GTK and Qt interfaces, with support for all the major archives out there, including gzip, 7z, bzip2, zip, and arc.
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.
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.
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.
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…:
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.
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.