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Wine is a compatibility layer which allows Windows applications to run on Linux by translating Windows system calls into native Linux calls. Wine runs successfully a variety of Windows applications and games on Linux - the official website offers an application database which organizes those depending on how well they perform under Wine, known issues and solutions, screenshots and helpful comments.

This is one of my favorite KDE applications. BasKet is called by some a kill application for Linux, due to its completeness regarding features and a different approach compared to other notes applications.

Firefox 4 is knocking at the door and the latest beta release looks just awesome. The seventh beta release introduces several important changes, including a revamped user interface (with the tab location above the address bar and navigation buttons), tab grouping, improved bookmarking system, re-open recently closed windows, built-in synchronizing system, rendering engine improvements, and more. This article contains a screenshot gallery with all the main features and changes brought until now by Firefox 4.

Alien Arena 7.50 (a.k.a. Alien Arena 2011) was released yesterday and it comes with several new notable features regarding the physics engine, as well as two new maps, updated player and skins models, new music for various maps, revamped in-game IRC client, as well as several bug fixes and improvements.

Opera 11 was released just a few hours earlier today, and it comes with several notable features, a new interface, and many other improvements. Written using the Qt toolkit and taking advantage of its own Presto engine, the Opera browser has been around for years, and it comes with unique features, which make it a popular browser even among the free software users on the Linux platform, with a respectable third position after Firefox and Google Chrome.

Yesterday I reviewed AssaultCube, a realistic shooter game based upon the Cube engine, so today it’s time to have a look at Sauerbraten, another game in the series of games based on this engine. The version which I’m going to talk about is the latest available at the moment, “Justice Edition”.

Previously known as Wormux, WarMUX is a free, open-source clone of the popular game Worms, with completely new, free-licensed graphics and music/sounds, available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Starting with version 0.9.0, WarMUX introduced single player games versus AI too. The available game modes are single player (vs AI) and multiplayer on the online server.

recordMyDesktop - This is a powerful command-line screencasting application which uses open formats to save the obtaining video (Ogg Theora for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio). recordMyDesktop also provides GTK and Qt frontends, for both GNOME and KDE (the Qt version is not included in Ubuntu's repositories, but it can be downloaded from SourceForge).

Clementine gains more and more popularity with its port to KDE4 based upon the Amarok 1.4 player, and the latest version bundles a fair amount of new features. In case you didn’t try it yet, Clementine is a free, cross-platform music player available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Before proceeding let me say that this is a really, really improved release which shows a good amount of work has be put into it.

The first Amarok 2.4 beta, codenamed “Closer”, was released just a few days ago, on December 7, and it looks very promising. It comes with quite long list of new features, improvements and bug fixes, and among the top highlights are a collection scanner rewritten from scratch, option to transcode tracks when dragging and dropping them to the local collection, support for iPod Touch 3G devices, writing statistics and covers directly in files. These are not all though.

Review of ten popular applications as replacements for applications which ship by default with Ubuntu Desktop CD.

A Quake-style terminal is a drop-down terminal which can be shown/hidden just like the console in Quake (and most of the first-person shooter games out there), using the press of a key (~ in Quake). Guake is a terminal application written in GTK which uses the F12 keyboard shortcut by default to show or hide it.

Linux came a long way concerning music players in the last couple of years and if in the past there were only few choices for users - XMMS has to be mentioned here - well, now there are so many players to choose from, and if most share the same features, each one provides an alternative by bringing a new feature or a different interface. This I can tell, can satisfy any user's taste. Without further ado, here are no less than 16 graphical music players for Linux.

0 A.D. is an open-source, 3D real time strategy game based with an ancient warfare theme, developed by Wildfire Games, and using the Pyrogenesis engine.

Seven of the most popular applications for KDE4 starting with Yakuake: This is a great replacement console for the default Konsole which ships with KDE and implicitly with Kubuntu. The great thing about Yakuake is that is uses a Quake-style show/hide function, which can be accessed by default using the F12 keyboard shortcut. Press F12 to show the terminal, do you work, then hide it again when you don't need it anymore. Yakuake supports profiles (which can be configured the same way like a Konsole profile), global shortcuts, allows to change default size and animation speed, it supports skins, transparency, start-up options (like start with window shown or hidden), transparency. Supported are also multiple tabs, which can be switched by pressing Shift+Right/Left Arrow.

Goggles Music Manager (or GMM for short) is a music player written using the FOX toolkit, with support for Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MP4, ASF and Musepack. FOX is a fast toolkit for creating graphical interfaces (another application which I reviewed in the past which uses FOX is Xfe (review here), a file manager for Linux).

This is a guide containing the most popular and useful ways of using the APT and DPKG commands, and it applies to both Ubuntu and Debian (and their derivatives). I mentioned where super user privileges are required, the ones without a mention can be executed as normal user. If you're using Ubuntu, precede a command with sudo in order to gain root privileges (and enter your user password); on Debian, type su, enter the root password, and then type in the commands as shown below.

When it comes to music players, Linux evolved heavily during the last three or four years, and new players are announced on a regular basis. I remember that in 2006, when I was starting up with Linux, there were only a few applications to choose from, like Amarok, Rhythmbox, Listen or XMMS, and a few more less popular and not so full-featured. But times have changed and now the Linux platform benefits from players of all kinds: there are replacements for XMMS for both GNOME and KDE (Audacious and Qmmp), collection-oriented players like Amarok, Banshee, Exaile or Rhythmbox. There are less-known players like Quod Libet, Guayadeque or Jajuk, or the client-server oriented ones like MPD. And the ones I just listed are the only the ones which came to my mind at the moment. Some would say having so many players for a single task is a bad thing, but I say it's not. Having enough options to choose from is a great advantage. If you don't like one style, try the next player, if you don't like its approach either, try the next one, and so on.

I bet at one point or another you felt you missed the system tray integration feature in some application, be it xterm, an audio player, a file manager or any other program. Well, KDocker is just the thing which comes to help: a simple, yet practical docking application built for KDE4 (older KDE3 version can be found here), but not only. Let me tell you how to use this program in a productive and useful manner.

Debian is one of the oldest and most popular distributions among the Linux users. There are probably hundreds of distributions which are based on Debian, or others (like Mepis) which are based on distributions which in turn are based on Debian. Although I'm not a Debian developer, I use it for over two years or so, and slowly got to love this OS.