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While most of the proprietary games get all the attention on Windows, on Linux it's the other way around. Of course, this is because we're stuck with only few choices for mainly any type of game, from arcade to shooters or strategies. But there are good, if not great, alternatives in Linux.

Introducing Granola a software to help save some energy from your PC, and in the while help the nature. This is a small followup from my article Linux for a green Desktop Granola site say: “Granola will green up your Linux or Microsoft Windows computers by cutting energy consumption by up to 35%. This will not only save you money, but help to save the planet by reducing CO2 emisions. Granola will not turn off your computer or give you any noticable performance loss, and it is totally free! Do your part to save the planet by installing Granola.” I’m now testing it on my Ubuntu 10.04

The Mandriva Linux distribution has been forked by a number of Mandriva contributors with the fate of this distribution formerly known as Mandrake being unknown due to financial troubles and layoffs facing Mandriva's parent company. This new forked version of Mandriva is being called Mageia.

Late last year I did a posting detailing how Windows 7 crushed Ubuntu 9.10 in the area of 3D performance. Nine months later I am happy to say: Linux out performs Windows 7 in OpenGL benchmarks!

Today I found another Linux CAD software that will be out soon, I'm talking about DraftSight. While not available yet in Linux version it's a free alternative to other programs in 2d drawing. According to the manufacturer "Mac OS and Linux support will be available later this year". A very important feature related to Draftsight is the name of developer - Dassault Systemes - Don't you know them? And if I mention the name SolidWorks? And Catia? Well, we are talking about a major cad dealer. Can this mean that we have competition on CAD software on Linux?

The much anticipated Diaspora source code was released earlier this week. I followed the instruction at http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora but encountered an error when installing bundler. It appears that there was a slight problem with the RubyGems PPA on the instruction page.

dnsmasq is a lightweight, open-source DNS forwarder and DHCP server. In this article we go through how to prepare the system in order to run dnsmasq and also how to configure the latter as a caching-only DNS server. A configuration file is also provided as a drop-in replacement for the default dnsmasq.conf that ships with your system. dnsmasq is available in most Linux distributions.

Finch is a TUI (text user interface) IM client for Linux which uses libpurple, the same library on which the GNOME IM client Pidgin is based on. Usually, if you have Pidgin installed, you should have Finch too, unless Pidgin was compiled with the text interface option disabled. In addition to this, Finch supports every protocol that Pidgin supports, and even though it is a terminal-based application, it offers enough configuration options, and more can be done using the .gntrc configuration file, which is discussed later in this guide. If not, installing the latest Finch release, even from source, should be easy.

Dell responds to criticism by releasing code for Streak tablet. Dell, responding to complaints from users and open source advocates, has released the modified Android code used on its Streak tablet PC. When Dell first released the Streak it used a customised version of Google's Android operating system. But, because Android contains numerous open source-licensed components, Dell came in for a lot of criticism for not releasing the changes it had made.

A disk usage analyzer is a utility which helps users to visualize the disk space being used by each folder and files on a hard disk or other storage media. This type of application often generates a graphical chart to help the visualization process.

On September 9 the news of Broadcom's release of the code for some of its wireless Ethernet chip sets sent shockwaves throughout the Linux community. Broadcom owners, as well as distribution developers have a reason to celebrate.

One thing I think many users fail to consider (or perhaps don't care about) is the level of 3D performance their distro gets. You may think that your choice of distribution does not matter in this area, but you will soon see it very much does. Which distro do you think has the best 3D performance?

GNOME Shell is a window manager designed specifically for the upcoming GNOME 3 desktop, with the intention of offering a rather different way of interacting with the desktop, providing a workspace which hardly resembles the classic desktops.

Microsoft has jumped on Oracle's prosecution of Google to attack Android and promote Windows Phone 7, while revealing a limited US rollout for its mobile phone platform. Even before Android's day in court, the chief financial officer of Microsoft's mobile phone group is reported to have taken Android's patent infringements as a fact.

A perennial whinge is "Linux and FOSS have too many choices! It's confusing and scary!" So what's the answer, a single global dictator?

Today, Mark Shuttleworth’s blog was added into Planet Gnome after he made a request for it to be added. Why is this a controversy? Mainly because some people want blogs that are featured on Planet Gnome to be from authors that are active in the Gnome community and to actually blog about Gnome as a topic. If Canonical’s contributions to Gnome are being called into question (as evident from the links in closing thoughts below) then what results is a controversial decision for Mark’s blog to be added in.

PeaZip 3.3 is released, this release brings various fixes and an improved user interface focused in better integration with web search (optionally on multiple search engines at once) and in launching favorite applications, scripts or websites/web services from PeaZip.

We already introduced a beautiful collection of GIMP tutorials before, it's time for some more. But this time, they are a bunch of GIMP video tutorials and are solely meant for absolute beginners, those who only have the vaguest idea on what GIMP is and what it is capable of.

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20100917 today, new verbs crypt32, devenum, d3dx9_26, winhttp. Another fortnight, another Winetricks.

Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, unveiled the a list of provisional tracks for the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) scheduled for October 25-29, 2010 in Orlando, Florida.