If you have played and liked the open source Worms clone Wormux, then you should definitely try Hedgewars. It’s a turn-based strategy game featuring teams of hedgehogs battling on destructible terrain. Hedgewars includes lots of fun weapons, great sound effects, can generate random maps or play pre-made ones, and includes a good computer AI as well as online play.
Hedgewars is open source, and packages of the latest version are available for Ubuntu at GetDeb.

From Hedgewars’ setup interface, you can jump right to quick game against an AI team, start a multiplayer custom game, connect to a network game, or host your own Hedgewars server.
One feature I really like is the teams setup. You can create your own teams, name their members, choose from a selection of hats for the hedgehogs to wear, and even choose what voice your team will have.
Here are the in-game controls you’ll need to get started: move the current hedgehog (right and left arrows), aim weapon (up and down arrows), control power and fire (hold left mouse button and release), open weapons menu (right mouse button), jump (return key). See the Hedgewars FAQ page for more controls.

[via tombuntu.com]

Last week I found an Ubuntu package repository for the Chromium browser, the open source project behind Google’s Chrome browser. I didn’t get excited until I saw this post, which shows that the packages do contain a working web browser!

Chromium for Linux is pre-alpha software, but farther along in development than I expected. The GTK-based Linux interface looks and works just like Windows interface. The browser rendered sites I tested it with just fine, and I haven’t been able to crash the it yet. Lots of features, such as bookmarks, the options window, and even the about window, are simply are not implemented yet.
The big missing feature currently is the tab bar. You can open a new tab just fine, but the tab bar is missing so there’s no way to switch between tabs. Like the Windows version, Chromium for Linux runs each tab in its own process. Tab crash detection seems to not be implemented yet as killing a tab process causes the page to just stop responding.
Chromium, even in this early state, feels much faster than Firefox. I compared the 280Slides presentation editor running in Firefox 3 and Chromium, and the difference was like night and day. Chromium scores very well in the SunSpider Javascript benchmark: 4.7 times faster than Firefox 3, and 2.9 times faster than Firefox 3.1 Beta 3.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 3
1914.6ms ± 6.2%

Firefox 3
3082.8ms ± 0.2%

Midori 0.1.4
1111.4ms ± 1.2%

Chromium
657.4ms ± 2.6%



The Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds PPA makes installing Chromium in Ubuntu very easy to do. However, these packages are pre-alpha and completely untested, they may not work for you at all. Follow the directions on the PPA page to add the software repository. Install Chromium from the package chromium-browser (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

The repository should be updated daily with the latest Chromium code. I’ll definitely be following Chromium for Linux’s development from now on.

[via tombuntu.com]

I use a one terabyte external hard drive for backing up data. The drive came formatted with a FAT filesystem, which I immediately replaced with the more reliable ext3. After formatting the drive as ext3 I noticed that the storage capacity had dropped considerably.
Why did this happen? Linux filesystems such as ext3 reserve a percentage of their capacity for privileged processes. In the case that the filesystem fills up, important processes with be able to continue functioning and writing to the disk.
By default 5% of a filesystem will be reserved. For modern high-capacity disks, this is much higher than necessary. On my 1 TB disk, this 5% works out to be 50 GB! If you’ve got a large filesystem, or a filesystem which does not store your Linux system files, it’s safe to reduce the percentage of reserved blocks to free up that disk space.
Use the tune2fs utility to do this. The command below would set the percentage of reserved blocks on the partition /dev/sdf1 to 1%:

sudo tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sdf1

Be sure to replace /dev/sdf1 with your own path; you can use the df command to get a listing of your filesystem device paths and their mount points.
I freed 37 GB of space by changing the reserved blocks to 1% on my TB drive.

[via tombuntu.com]

This is a guide for running the Windows version of Civilization IV (no expansion packs) on Linux using Wine. I’ve written guides on this twice ;before, but recently I wanted to play and found that my previous instructions were out of date again. Since I last played with Wine 0.9.44, the graphical glitches have been fixed and the game’s disk DRM works without a no-CD crack.
On Ubuntu 8.10 with the Nvidia graphics driver, the game runs almost flawlessly on the highest graphics settings. I’ve played it for hours without a single crash. Here are the only minor issues I’ve noticed:

• The animated busy cursor only shows the first frame instead of animating.
• City growth and production meters on the map don’t work. (See the tweaks section for a workaround.)

Install the latest version of Wine
Wine is constantly improving; it’s worth your time to get the latest version for the best application compatibility. Follow the directions on Wine’s website to set up the official Wine software repository in Ubuntu.
After you’ve added the Wine repository, install Wine from the package wine (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install wine

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Have some spare CPU cycles to burn? Using a utility called XWinWrap you can use screensavers, videos, and other applications as your desktop wallpaper.
One drawback is that you will not be able to use desktop icons with XWinWrap due to a limitation in Nautilus. Compiz desktop effects are not required, but a fairly powerful computer if you don’t want reduced performance.



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This guest article was written by Vivek Kumar from TNerd.com, a blog focused on technology news, tricks and tips and Linux tutorials.
It’s a good idea to ensure that you have a backup and restore system in place. Today we’ll see how in a few very easy steps you can setup system backup and restore in Ubuntu. The good part is that there’s no rocket science involved.
In order to achieve this we are going to need software called SBackup. This is not installed by default in Ubuntu and hence we need to install it. First, let’s see a little bit about this wonderful software.
Homepage: http://sbackup.wiki.sourceforge.net/
Description: SBackup is a simple backup solution for Linux. It is generally developed with a Gnome desktop in mind, but will also work in other desktop environments and also on the console.
Features of SBackup

• Back up using GUI and hence avoid the terminal.
• Restore using the GUI in simple steps.
• You can easily setup automatic backup.
• Custom choose the files to backup.
• Exclude and include files using regular expressions.
• Backup files depending on size and extension.
• You can also use terminal to backup and restore.

Limitations of SBackup
As of now you can only backup data to local or remote machine. Backing up to DVD or CD is not available as of now. However, it’s not difficult to burn a backup to disk yourself manually.
Install SBackup
Install SBackup from the package sbackup (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install sbackup

Launching SBackup
In order to launch SBackup go to System->Administration->Simple Backup Config.
Configuring and setting up backups using SBackup
Once you launch SBackup it’ll open a configuration window for you to configure backup and restore.


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On Saturday I moved Tombuntu to a new virtual private server at Linode (the computer in my basement just wasn’t enough anymore). I chose Linode (referral link) because they sell unmanaged Linux VPS systems, so I can continue to run whatever software I like.
I used Linode’s control panel to install Ubuntu 8.04 64 bit. Their Ubuntu images are not exactly the same as an installation from a CD, so I learned a few things while setting up.
Install a more comfortable environment
The Linode Ubuntu system is extremely minimal, things like man pages and tab-completion are not installed to save space. Install the ubuntu-standard metapackage to get a more comfortable command line environment:

apt-get install ubuntu-standard

Setting up users
A Linode Ubuntu system comes configured for only the root user. I prefer the Ubuntu way of using sudo instead of logging in as root.
Create a new user:

adduser myuser

This new user doesn’t have permission to use sudo yet. Open the sudo configuration file (let’s use the simpler nano editor instead of vi):

EDITOR=/usr/bin/nano visudo

Add this line to allow users in the admin group to use sudo:

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

Save and close the editor. The admin group may not exists yet, so create it:

groupadd admin

And add the new user to the group:

usermod -g admin myuser

Fix locale warnings
While installing updates and starting some programs, I noticed warnings similar to this one:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.<br />perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:<br />LANGUAGE = (unset),<br />LC_ALL = (unset),<br />LANG = "en_CA.UTF-8"<br />are supported and installed on your system.<br />perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").<br />locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory<br />locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory<br />locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Installing the language-pack-en package fixed these warnings:

apt-get install language-pack-en

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It looks like there will be no theme overhaul in Ubuntu 8.10, but a number of nice themes and concepts have been proposed. I’ve been using one of these themes, called Dust.
Dust controls and window borders:

Dust Sand controls and Dust window borders:

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Wouldn’t it be useful if your computer could email you? I’d like to be notified by email when my server is in trouble, but I don’t want to run my own mail server. sSMTP is perfect for this; it’s a simple way to send email from your system to an SMTP mail server, like Gmail’s.
Here’s how I set up sSMTP on Ubuntu to send mail through my Gmail account.
Install sSMTP from the package ssmtp (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install ssmtp

sSMTP can be configured from one text file. Open /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf in a text editor:

sudo gedit /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

The configuration file is very short and well commented by default. Here’s the options I use for sending mail through Gmail:

root=myemailaddress@gmail.com<br />mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587<br />AuthUser=mygmailusername<br />AuthPass=mypassword<br />UseSTARTTLS=YES

If you’re using Gmail like I am, change the root, authuser, and authpass options to the email address, username, and password of your Google account. If you’re using another mail service you’ll need to change mailhub to the relevant SMTP server.


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Flash Player 10 adds new filters, 3D effects, better typography support, and more. For Linux users this version offers windowless mode support (transparency through Flash, and page elements rendered above Flash), V4L2 camera support, smooth fullscreen video playback, and better performance.
[update] Adobe still does not provide a 64-bit Flash Player. I don’t have a 64-bit Ubuntu installation to test on, but Alejandro left a link in the comments that could help 64-bit users.
The Flash Player in Ubuntu 8.10 has not been kept up to date with recent testing versions, so it’s not looking likely that this final release will be included now. However, Adobe is now making it much easier for Linux users to install the Flash Player.
[update] This version of the Flash Player is now available in Ubuntu 8.10! Install it from the flashplugin-nonfree (click link to install) package.

I’ve tested these steps on both Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10.

1. You’ll need to first remove any previous versions of Flash Player you have installed. This includes manual installations and the flashplugin-nonfree package from Ubuntu. Use this command to remove Ubuntu’s Flash package:
   

   sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree

2. Visit Adobe’s download page, select the .deb for Ubuntu 8.04+ download, and install the package.
3. Restart your web browser.

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