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:
I’m used to making a review for each of the new major Wesnoth release, and so it is no exception with the latest version. It’s been almost two years since the last stable release, which was Wesnoth 1.8 released on April 1st, 2010, and 1.10 brings a whole bunch of new features, new graphics and tons of improvements regarding every aspect of the game over the previous versions.
Introduction
Although this is a well known issue and has been said countless times before, I’ll say it again: games are not the strong point on Linux. Still, there are several very good projects out there, but the choices are pretty limited. The same is the situation in the case of real-time strategy games. There is a lot of fuss around projects like 0 AD or Oil Rush, a promising, yet closed-source RTS game. However, even though these get more attention lately, let’s not forget the other good choices out there, and one of them is the game I’m going to talk about in this article, namely, MegaGlest, and more exactly about the latest version released by the team behind it, which was put up yesterday.
The older way of doing this, with gconftool-2 doesn’t seem to work anymore in GNOME 3 – used to be something like: gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename “/full/path/to/file.png”.
However, there is still possible to change the background image, by using the gsettings tool instead. You will need the libglib2.0-bin package, which is probably already installed on your system. To change the background, use a command like the following:
The file used to change various GRUB 2 settings is /etc/default/grub. This file also contains options to adjust the timeout in seconds before GRUB boots the default OS (GRUB_TIMEOUT), change which OS should be selected by default (GRUB_DEFAULT, first entry being 0), and also the option to change the resolution used by default – GRUB_GFXMODE.
CMus
This is one of the best, feature-rich players for console. Build using ncurses and thus offering a text user interface, CMus has several view modes, organizes your music by artist/album, provides playlists and a library view, a filebrowser, it allows searching, Last.fm/Libre.fm scrobbling via this script, and it uses Vi-like keyboard shortcuts. A complete review can be found here and a guide to using it here.
Homepage
CMus is a powerful, feature-rich music player for the terminal which uses the ncurses library
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.
The Alt+F2 keyboard shortcut, used to bring up the run launcher in GNOME, is disabled by default in GNOME 3. To have it back, follow these steps:
1. Start up System Settings – click on your username in the top panel and then click on System Settings entry in the menu that appears:
Shutter 0.88 has recently been released with several new features, looking even better than before.
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.
This article is about two popular IM (Instant Messaging) clients that can be used in a terminal instead of a graphical environment. Both have advanced features and are based on the ncurses library.
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.
Xonotic is a free first-person shooter game for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The Xonotic project started as a fork of Nexuiz, a game which was popular for many years on Linux. The fork was created because Nexuiz was licensed to IllFonic game studios, and it is to be used as a platform for developing a commercial game for Steam, Xbox and PlayStation.
NeonView is a new minimalist, lightweight image viewer, completely free and open-source, licensed under the GPLv2 and developed by TuxArena.
This first release, codenamed ‘Betta splendens’, includes just a handful of features for now, however it is the base on which development of more advanced features will take place. Still, the goal of NeonView is to remain clean and lightweight, while also trying to implement only the needed functions that a simple image viewer should have.
Some of the features of NeonView:
