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GNOME has a basic screenshot application called gnome-screenshot, KDE has an advanced one called KSnapshot, which includes options to take screenshots of selected regions, fullscreen, or window under cursor, with or without a time delay (for taking screenshots of menus for example). But neither one of them compares to Shutter, a complex screenshot tool with many features, and the possibility to edit and apply effects directly from within it.

Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is a free book written by Keir Thomas, the well-known author of Beginning Ubuntu Linux and co-author of Ubuntu Kung Fu, two popular books about Ubuntu Linux. His latest book is called Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference and it is available as a free PDF download from the official website, or as print edition from Amazon.com for USD 11,99.

In this article I'll overview Cube 2: Sauerbraten, an open-source shooter running on Linux, which also provides a gaming engine for developing FPS games. Cube 2: Sauerbraten offers a very fast-paced action and a great feeling playing it, coming with several great modes, three player models, really great maps to choose from and different types of weapons.

PainTown is a 2D fighting game somewhat similar with popular titles like Street Fighter (it even allows you to play with a character called Blanka), with versions available for Linux too, besides Windows and Mac. The nice thing about PainTown is that it runs natively on Linux and it's a standalone game, so you won't need any emulator like NeoGeo to play it.

Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, is scheduled for release in late October, and it will be the 11th release of the most popular Linux distribution. Although it is scheduled to come with GNOME 2.28, it will be the first release to introduce the first changes that will be featured in GNOME 3.

Following the article on configuring Urban Terror, a popular first-person shooter game based on the ioQuake3 engine, here is a guide for configuring the original ioQuake3 game, including customisation of cvars, using new maps, weapons and characters models, and more. This guide will also successfully apply to the newer OpenArena game, which is practically ioQuake3 with changed weapons, maps and models.

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.

KDE 4.3 was released just yesterday, and it comes with a lot of great new features and improvements, like the the new Plasma theme called Air, new Plasma widgets, several improvements to Dolphin, the default KDE4 file manager, improvements to the KDE games, and these are just a tiny part of all the improvements KDE4 introduced. The full announcement including reader's changelog can be found on the official KDE4 website, here.

Miro is a great application for watching videos and high-definition TV podcasts in Linux. The latest release is 2.5.1, a bug fix release for the 2.5 series, which has a faster start-up time, a new, revamped library interface, new keyboard shortcuts, a refined interface and lots of bug fixes. Miro is an awesome multimedia application, especially if you like watching videos at high quality.

Audacious is a GTK music player similar with the older XMMS (X Multimedia System) player. Ubuntu 9.04 ships with Audacious 1.5.1, which is a little old. However, you can easily install and set up the latest Audacious (currently 2.1) following the steps below:

In the past I reviewed Minirok, which is a minimalist music player for KDE with a simple interface. Well, Decibel surely is its counterpart in GNOME. The version I'm going to talk about is 1.00 running in Ubuntu 9.04 with GNOME 2.26.

Xfe (X File Explorer) is a wonderful, fast and lightweight file manager for Linux built using the FOX toolkit with a customisable interface which can resemble the twin-panel style of Midnight Commander if needed.

Quod Libet is a GTK music player written in Python with support for various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, MP4 and WMA. Quod Libet has a different interface and a slightly different approach compared to players like Rhythmbox or Banshee, for example.

Rhythmbox is the default audio player coming with the GNOME desktop environment, featuring a clean, typical interface which is so common for GTK audio players. I could say that Rhythmbox has little missing features and it is rather complete.

This guide explains several methods on installing the latest Firefox in Ubuntu, including installing it from a PPA repository.

Remember Dapper Drake? All the fuss around it, being a LTS (long-term support) release, the three-month delay in order to make things stable, all the forum discussions regarding the 3-month delay in order to polish it well.

I'm sure most of (if not all) KDE users are familiar with Gwenview, especially since it became the default image viewer in KDE4. Gwenview is not only a powerful viewer for images, but also a basic image manipulation application, and with version 2.3 it allows even video previews. Although video support was available in 1.4 (which was for KDE3), it was missing in the KDE4 port of Gwenview, but with this new release shipping with the upcoming KDE 4.3, video support is back.

Several months ago I created an article with 5 APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) tips for both Debian and Ubuntu available here. APT is the package manager in Debian and Debian-based distributions, like Ubuntu. Here's part two of that article, with 5 more tips and tricks for APT.

This guide will show how to download ISO images (CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray) using jigdo, a specific protocol intended to be the main way to download Debian disc images. jigdo (or Jigsaw Download) downloads individually all the files located on a specific CD/DVD, and then it assembles them into an ISO image. jigdo is known to be a faster alternative to download large image files.

Exaile is a powerful and complete audio player for the GNOME desktop environment, which can easily compete with more popular players like Banshee or Rhythmbox.