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Urban Terror (or UrT for short, not to be confused with Unreal Tournament) is a great standalone first-person shooter available for Linux too, using the ioQuake3 engine. In this article I'll show several ways to make it a little faster by tweaking several variables in favour of performance over good looking graphics. Experienced players will probably know all of this, so this guide is intended to newbies.

I've been meaning to do this for ages, and I finally installed Puppy Linux on a bootable USB drive. I went whole hog and used a 128 MB stick. Yep, that's it. I have a huge 20 MB left for storage.

Canonical's Ubuntu Server Edition is finally showing some ISV (independent software vendor) momentum. The latest two examples involve Openbravo and Alfresco. Here's the news and a bigger picture look at Canonical's attempt to compete against Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE Linux on the server.

Secure collaboration specialist TeamDrive has released its collaboration plug-in for OpenOffice 3.1 users. The freeware TeamDrive OpenOffice Plug-in allows users to create and share TeamDrive "SharedSpaces" (shared folders) and includes version control. Users can exchange files securely and view version comments or open previous versions of a document.

Patrick Michaud posted a journal entry on his use Perl; page that says We will make an “official”, intermediate, useful and usable release of Perl 6 (an appropriate subset) by Spring 2010.

The way we use computers is changing, but Linux isn’t standing still. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that boots a complete live system for every day use. Its foundation and unique approach to the desktop helps it achieve certain goals like preventing system rot and ensuring your system is fresh every time it boots.

Nearly every desktop computer and laptop has some kind of office or productivity suite. Many of these have several applications in them that can be used together to replace a paper office, but the most common three applications are word processors, spread sheets, and presentation creators/viewers. On Win32 machines, there are several commercial suites that reign supreme, and on Macintosh systems iWork and MS Office are common (though NeoOffice is a close 3rd). So what options are available for UNIX/Linux systems? I have found there are six common office/productivity solutions for these platforms with which most of us are already familiar.

This year's Gran Canaria Desktop Summit represented the first time the GNOME and KDE communities have co-located their annual conferences in the same location. 852 free software advocates from 46 countries gathered together last month to discuss and enhance the free desktop experience at the first ever Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

I used to think that 512 MB of RAM was enough to make the average Linux system very usable. But things change, and now I'm not even happy with 768 MB running Ubuntu 8.04.

802.11n is the hot new wi-fi standard, all faster, better, and less interfering with common wireless devices than 802.11a/b/g. But don't get rid of your old devices---give them new jobs. Eric Geier offers 8 great ways to recycle old wi-fi gear.

The following comment was posted in response to my business oriented article about the CentOS situation for O'Reilly Broadcast. It perfectly illustrates why I have made the decision I did: Peter Griffin wrote: "I've been running CentOS as a file/intranet server since 5.0 was released. I started becoming concerned during the protracted period that it took to get 5.3 out. Not about the "lateness" in getting 5.3 out, but the complete lack of security updates in the interim for my 5.2 system. This "No updates available" went on for over a month. My version of Firefox trailed behind Red Hat's by two versions."

We reviewed the FirePro V8700 1GB workstation graphics card back in March, but AMD has now introduced its evolutionary successor to this ultra high-end product, and that is the ATI FirePro V8750 2GB. The FirePro V8750 continues to be based off the ATI RV770 graphics processor, but is now backed by 2GB of 900MHz GDDR5 memory. Bumping the memory speed by 50MHz has raised the peak memory bandwidth from 108GB/s to 115GB/s. How well though does this $1,800 USD graphics card work with Linux? Well, we have all of the benchmarks in this article.

Developers who 'knowingly' ship buggy software may be held liable for damages. That might be good for users -- but a sloppy set of guidelines could hurt open source.

After acquiring On2's video compression codecs in a deal valued at approximately $106.5 million in stock, will Google simply turn around and open source them? It certainly looks that way. In both the press release and the blog post announcing the acquisition of On2, Google makes a point of saying that it believes "high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform" - and that On2 is a means of achieving that goal.

Nationwide unemployment may be heading toward double-digits in the U.S., but among the skills that are in highest demand are those of a Linux sysadmin. That's partly due to the effects of the recession -- more companies are willing to experiment with lower-cost open source alternatives to proprietary software. Still, the good news is qualified: Many of those jobs can be done anywhere on the planet.

The Mac is fairly widespread among musicians because tons of professional programs run on it. Apparently Ubuntu can completely replace the Mac, however, as in the following story.

The OpenOffice.org team has been experimenting with a new user interface for the suite of programs, and they've presented the first rough prototype of this new interface, more specifically for Impress. The general gist? It's Microsoft Office 2007's ribbon interface. The ribbon interface raised quite a number of eyebrows around the world, with many wondering whether it would be wise to ditch the old established garbled mess user interface of menus and toolbars in favour of something completely new. It was all additionally surprising as Microsoft generally isn't the company to change a winning team.

Ekiga, formerly known as GnomeMeeting, is a videophone program similar to Skype. It’s free, open source, and has so far worked better for me than Skype ever did. Today, we’ll cover how to use Ekiga to conference Linux and Windows clients together.

Ubuntu has introduced a new Patent Policy to help developers and rights holders deal with software patent issues. With the Private Support, Canonical hopes to improve its revenue.

Open source isn't just for Linux users, there are many excellent free open source applications available, ready to run, for Apple Mac OS X too. Part 1 of this 2 part feature takes a look at alternative browser, mail, messaging, productivity and image editing applications.