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OpenArena - The OpenSource Quake III Arena

Guess where did I play Quake III Arena for the first time. Not place, I am talking about the platform/Operating System. Nope! its not windows, its Linux . Surprised, right? I was too when I found this brilliant opensource version of Quake III Arena aka OpenArena.

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How to mount Linux LVM volume partitions on Linux

So, one of my friends had this weird system breakdown while upgrading Fedora from DVD. Grub couldn't locate the grub.cfg file. In order to fix the system and take a backup of some important files, we booted in a live session, mounted a lvm partition to find out that most of the data was gone . The end was pretty bad but I think, just like in my case, there will be many more who wouldn't know how to mount a lvm partition. This little adventure of mine might help you out.

My first pocket Operating System - Slax

I never owned a USB flash drive, until recently. I needed one not just for data transfer requirements but because I always wanted to carry an operating system with me. While trying out differnet OSs with various installation methods, my system sometimes had tremendous breakdowns and the only way to access & backup the data was to boot into a LIVE session. Luckily, I came across this really small pocket operating system, Slax. Its just 200 mb and the method to get it bootable on a flash drive is probably the quickest and most effortless of all I have ever used.

Live Bandwidth monitoring became easy with Netmonitor screenlet

So, I think my search for a live network bandwidth monitor finally ended with this screenlet, netmonitor. Bmon and vnstat were working fine, but I was looking for something that can be present all the time on the screen without hindering other apps. A Screenlet was indeed the best option to go for.

The Hot-babe system monitor

One of the peculiar things about linuxers is that we love managing our system and we like doing it so much that we come up with some of the most amazing, innovative and fun tools to ease the job. I am not talking about some cool widget here, its a virtual stripper, named "hot-babe". The harder your system's processor works the more she strips .

How to record audio from mic using FFmpeg aka audio grabbing

Recently a linuxer pointed out that in spite of the amazing and widespread capabilities of FFmpeg, I have just been focused upon its media conversion feature. If you take a look at all our previous ffmpeg articles, the guy is right. So, from now we will discuss other features of the superstar too, starting with audio recording.

Why don't you try out the command first and we will see later how it actually works.

FFmpeg now has the fastest VP8 decoder - ffvp8

The whole story began after the VP8 codec was opened by Google. Soon after its release, Jason Garrett-Glaser, a x264 and ffmpeg developer, came up with a highly extensive review of the codec. And in his technical review, he mentioned that the VP8 decoder is slow as compared to H.264, pointed out some of its weaknesses and also said that VP8 copies too much from H.264 for ease and because of this, the codec could be susceptible to patent issues.

The All in One Deskbar Applet

Have you ever gone through the items listed in the "add to panel" option? If not, then you are missing one of the finest GNOME features. It has a great number of some really useful applets. I just ran into one of them, Deskbar applet and believe me, when they say its an "all in one" tool they are not kidding. It really does almost everything one frequently needs.

How to Lock Folders/Directories in Linux

Whenever I go to home on vacations, I usually share a lot of Music/Videos with my friends. On many occasions, my laptop is being used by someone else and since its a personal notebook, there is a lot of stuff I don't want people to mess around with. Under such cases, restricting other users by locking stuff comes in handy.

Since, most of my hometown friends are neither really techie nor even Linux users, a simple change in file permissions does the trick.

How to Wget - The basics of this great Downloader

Wget is a a powerful, console based network downloader. We are all aware of some good GUI based downloaders, but they would be of no use if you are working on consoles. And once you become aware of what wget is capable of, I am pretty sure you might actually start using it for your day to day needs, even on Graphical Environments.

GraphMonkey - a simple, light-weight graph calculator and plotter

While doing Mathematics assignment in my second semester, I had to look up for a lot of graphs/curves of various functions. I always used gplot, which is no doubt the best tool when it comes to graphs. But usually before using it I had to take a quick look at the keywords in its help guide. Until I found GraphMonkey, I always wondered if there was an even simpler application, which hardly expects you to know anything other than the equation.

Granatier - A Bomberman alternative

During the good old days of console gaming(I mean in 90s), I really liked Bomberman. Once I started exploring the world of Linux games, I did a search for "bomberman" and actually found a pretty good version of it, called Granatier. The description says that its a bomberman clone, but thats not completely true. The environment is pretty different and you won't find the good old monsters trying to crush you all the time.

MOC, a powerful Console based Music Player

When you are working on low spec machines or really old computers, you always try to avoid using heavy applications. But sometimes even the most necessary ones consume a lot of resources. A few months ago, I was stuck with a really old desktop and had to go for some of the lowest resource consuming applications. MOC, Music on console, was my Music player alternative.

Foobillard, an opensouce Billiard Simulation game for Linux

Had a night out with friends, the plan was to watch a lot of movies but ended up playing this awesome game from 3am until morning. And the amazing part - all of us had hardly ever played any cue games before. I never realized that a non-arcade game like this could keep me awake all night .

My whole experience with the game might look a bit false based upon the fact that I haven't played such games in real-life much, but listen to this, "Foobillard was actually suggested to me by a college friend who is a die hard fan of cue sports and a good player too". So, if a real-life player is recommending it, you have got to give it a shot.

A GStreamer based Video Transcoder - Transmageddon

So, after trying out winff, the graphical frontend for ffmpeg, I kept looking for more such tools and found  the "Transmageddon Transcoder". Perhaps the name was inspired from Armageddon . Anyway, unlike winff which uses FFmpeg at the backend, this tool is based upon GStreamer framework and is only a video transcoder.

Bmon, a real-time Bandwidth monitoring tool

So, I have already been using vnstat monitoring tool to keep a track of my Internet usage stats for some time. Recently, I started looking for a real time network bandwidth monitoring tool. Vnstat's live" mode works fine, but while looking for something better I came across bmon, which is actually a specialised console-based real time bandwidth monitoring app.

Edit/Create subtitles with gnome-subtitles, a subtitle editor for GNOME

I like keeping a collection of my favorite TV shows and Movies along with the subtitles. For a single playback, I won't mind fixing the subtitle from the player's settings, even though its frustrating most of the times, but while making a collection, you need perfect subtitles. Finding the correct one is not an easy task and neither is editing it. This is where a subtitle-editor comes in handy. Gnome-subtitles is one such tool and by far my favorite.

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