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VLC (VideoLAN Client) is one of the most popular video players on Linux, together with players like SMPlayer or Kaffeine. It plays many audio and video formats (including Xvid, DivX, H.264, Theora, WMV, Real Video, Ogg, MP3, FLAC, APE, AC3, WAV) together with DVDs and DVD ISO images. The version which comes included in the Debian Lenny repositories is 0.8.6h, which uses the wxWidgets kit and it is kind of outdated now. The latest release of VLC is 0.9.8a, which is now built in Qt 4 and includes several improvements over the 0.8.x series.

This article is part of the first-person shooter games reviews I'm putting up. Until now I talked about Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, ioQuake3, UT2004, Nexuiz and OpenArena. I will dedicate this edition entirely to Urban Terror, a great first-person shooter game which was initially developed as a Quake 3 mod and evolved into a powerful and fast standalone game.

Debian Lenny comes with Wine 1.0.1 included in the repositories, which is the stable release of Wine, but it is also a little outdated. Here are a few easy steps for compiling and installing the latest Wine release from source in Debian Lenny. This tutorial should work for the latest Wine release (at the time of writing, the last release is 1.1.17).

The Battle for Wesnoth is a free turn-based strategy game licensed under the GPL. After over one year of constant development, a new stable version, 1.6, was released on March 22, 2009, featuring many graphics and gameplay improvements. To compile this release of Wesnoth on Debian Lenny or Ubuntu Intrepid, you only need to follow the steps below.

Not long ago I reviewed Songbird 0.7.0, and in the meantime version 1.0.0 is out. What are the new features Songbird comes with and what improvements over the previous releases features 1.0? Well, to begin with, I was extremely impressed in a pleasant way with this Songbird release, so let me tell you why. Songbird is an audio player and music collection manager built using XUL, the same language used by Firefox. Songbird is available on all the three major platforms: Linux, Mac and Windows.

KDE 3.5.x comes with Konqueror as the default file manager and it is still used in distributions like Debian (the upcoming Lenny release) or older Kubuntu releases, like the LTS 8.04 version. In this article I will show three tips (which I consider popular) for tweaking or working with this older version of Konqueror.

Ten applications to install after a clean Ubuntu or Kubuntu 8.10 installation: Amarok, SMPlayer, KTorrent, XChat, BasKet, Wesnoth, K3b, Emacs, Yakuake, TVTime.

Opera 10 is the next generation of the popular, closed-source web browser built in Qt, and available on UNIX (including both Linux and FreeBSD), Mac and Windows platforms. In this review I used the Qt 4 version of Opera 10 alpha, build 4102 (the .tar.gz package), but Opera 10 will be available using both Qt 3 and Qt 4 toolkits, so you can choose which one you prefer. I ran Opera in Debian Lenny (KDE 3.5.10) with all the updates to date.

XChat is a GTK client for IRC, available on both Linux and Windows. It is one of the most popular and feature-rich IRC clients on the Linux platform, together with Konversation and KVirc. Of course, there are very good clients like Irssi too, but I'm talking only about graphical clients here. In this article however I will list some of the tips and tricks I consider most popular and useful for the IRC user, leaving all that scripting behind.

Code::Blocks is a complete, cross-platform integrated development environment for C and C++, built using the wxWidgets toolkit. Code::Blocks is available on Linux, Windows and OS X, so you may find it useful on Linux if you switched and are already used to it or an IDE like Dev-C++, for example.

Intrepid comes with pretty much bleeding-edge packages: GNOME 2.24.1, OpenOffice 2.4.1 (OpenOffice 3.0 is now available, but it is not included in 8.10), Firefox 3.0.3 and GIMP 2.6.1. Although Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is out, 3.0.3 is the version which ships with Intrepid, and I guess it's a smart choice considering there was enough time to test this release.

Here are five simple tricks for APT, the Advanced Packaging Tool used on Debian and Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu.

Battle for Wesnoth is one of the most popular and played turn-based strategy (TBS) games on Linux, if not the most popular. It's a free, open-source community-driven project which has done some amazing improvements since its initial release, in 2003. It comes with wonderful concepts for gameplay, it includes great 2D artwork and music, and more important, it can keep you playing inside a fascinating universe, either online in multiplayer battles or in single-player mode in beautiful campaigns or single-map mode versus AI.

Yesterday I reviewed three classic first-person shooter games for Linux, Wolfenstein: ET, UT2004 and ioQuake3. Today I will continue with two other first-person shooter (FPS) games, natively available for Linux: Nexuiz and OpenArena. They both are currently maintained and the wonderful thing about them is that they all are completely open-source, free and usually available in all the major distributions.

Debian Lenny comes with Iceweasel 3.0.3, which is actually Firefox with a changed name and a few minor changes. If you have Iceweasel 3.0.3 installed but want to test this new beta without changing anything to your system, just follow the steps below.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory A true classic and one of the most played online first-person shooter games, Wolfenstein: ET was supposed to be released as a new mod for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but the single-player part of the game was abandoned and it was released at no cost, as a standalone multiplayer game.

Wine is the project which makes possible to run games like World of WarCraft, Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2, WarCraft III and so on. And Wine is also the project which makes possible for web developers to test how their web page is viewed under Internet Explorer. Not to mention hundreds of other applications which work very well or well enough with it.

SMPlayer SMPlayer is built in Qt4 and it uses the MPlayer engine for video playback. It's one of the most powerful applications out there for watching DVDs, and it supports plenty formats like AVI, MKV, MPG, FLV.

In less than a week the new Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex should be out. I took these screenshots using a Kubuntu Intrepid Beta installation after performing a full dist-upgrade, at 1280x1024, with the nVIDIA 173 driver installed. I left all the settings in applications default, but I had to make fonts smaller and resize windows (in Konqueror for example), because they didn't look very well as default. The default theme used is Oxygen.

Although I played a little in the past with Google Gadgets and I was not very much impressed, back at version 0.9.x, I decided to try it again, this time using the last release, 0.10.2.