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Below are 8 addictive 3d games for linux users to fill their time with. These games are really good and some have won awards or have been featured on magazines. Most of it is cross platform and free. You don’t have to use ‘Wine’ to be able to play as they come with Linux installers.

1. • 200+ unit types
   • 16 different races
   • 6 major factions
   • ability to multiplay up to 64 players
   • ability to generate bots for practice sessions
   • dynamic lighting system similar to Doom 3

Battle For Wesnoth



David White who started Wesnoth back in 2003, had a vision of a free open source strategy game that had very simple rules, uses a strong artificial intelligence, challenging and fun. Wesnoth has already passed the 1 million mark for downloads. As of March 2007, the game is available in 35 different languages.

A normal Wesnoth player has

to choose from. Actually, you can even make your own custom units, design your own map, scenarios or even campaigns. It’s all up to your creativity. The most interesting part of any game is the ability to multiplay. You can challenge up to a total of 8 friends in multiplayer fantasy battles.

Nexuiz



Nexuiz is a free, cross platform, first person shooter distributed under GNU General Public License by Alientrap Software. It started back in May 31 2005 with version 1.0 using DarkPlaces, a significanlty modified quake engine. The current version, 2.2.3, was released on January 26, 2007. Nexuiz’s logo is based on the chinese character “力” which means strength.

Several notable features of the game include

America’s Army



America’s Army is a tactical, multiplayer, first-person shooter owned by the United States Government and released as a global public relations initiative to help with U.S. Army recruitment. The first version, Recon, was released on 4th July 2002. The current version 2.8.1 was released on 22nd Mar 2007.

It’s the first well known computer game used for political aims. The game is used as a playable recruiting tool and critics have charged the game serves as a propaganda device. A counter on the homepage of the PC version shows over eight million registered accounts as of 2007. GameSpy tracked the game usage and reported an average of 4,500 players at any one time between 2002 and 2005. It is enough for America’s Army to rank in the Top 10 Online Games chart.

Enemy Territory : Quake Wars



is a first-person shooter follow-up to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It also has the same science fiction universe as Quake 4, with a story serving as a prequel to Quake II. Quake Wars is the second multiplayer-only game in the Quake series after Quake III Arena. The gameplay is almost the same as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but with the addition of controllable vehicles and aircraft, asymmetric teams, much larger maps and the option of computer-controlled bots. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is being developed by Splash Damage for the PC using a modified version of id Software’s Doom 3 engine and MegaTexture rendering technology.

At E3 2006(Electronic Entertainment Expo), the game won the Game Critics Award for Best Online Multiplayer.

Tremulous



Tremulous is an open source team-based first-person shooter with a game play that is similar to Gloom(a quake 2 mod) and Natural Selection (a Half-Life mod). The game features two teams, humans and aliens, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game has been downloaded over 200,000 times and was voted “Player’s Choice Standalone Game of the Year” in Mod Database’s “Mod of the Year” 2006 competition.

Tux Racer



Tux Racer is a newbie friendly, open source, 3D computer game starring the Linux mascot, Tux the penguin. Like many open-source games, the replay value of Tux Racer is extended by easy modification of the game. New maps can be created by making three raster images to indicate height, surface, and object placement. The last release of Tux Racer was version 0.61, 29th October 2001.

World Of Padman



WOP is a new and free comic style game that uses the Quake 3 engine. The game was recently featured in 3 German magazine covers; PC Action, ‘BRAVO Screenfun’ and ‘Linux Intern’.

Vendetta



is a first person twitch based MMORPG. New players get an 8 hour trial which is enough to get anyone hooked to it. After that, you gotta pay $5 a month which is quite worthwhile, especially considering the incredibly communicative development of the game. It has a native linux installer as well as one for Macs and Windows.

So part of my “see what all the hype is about” thing is trying out Ubuntu on the desktop. It also helps that a) my 3 year old XP install really needed a nice clean format etc and b) my hard drive developed errors and had to be replaced anyway. I’d been threatening to install some linux distro on my laptop and the hard drive thing was the catalyst. Ubuntu seems to be the most hyped distro and Feisty was recently released, plus it was only a 1 CD download. Also Ubuntu kind of has the hype of being easy and “just work”(tm) which is pretty much what I want from my desktop.

So… installation was pretty quick, not too many options but that’s fine. I was pretty impressed that WiFi worked out of the box (I replaced my Broadcom based mini-PCI card with an Atheros based one a while ago in anticipation). Next to do was dial a PPPoE connection. Um, no shortcut or anything, but help told me to run pppoeconf which worked after accepting the defaults to a million questions. Also told me to use “pon dsl-provider”, “poff” and “plog”. Fair enough. It seems that dsl-provider did get added to the networking applet on the top panel. +10 points for working. -1 point for not having an indicator of any sort of whether I was actually connected (I added a network monitor with ppp0 but that’s not quite the same). It also needs to tell me when my ADSL has been conveniently reset by the evil overlords. And a way to automatically connect when my WiFi connects to a certain AP would be good too.

The interface looks very very boring to start off with so I played around with themes etc a bit. Why the hell are all the buttons and menu bars so huge on all the themes that come with Ubuntu? Are we blind? I honestly felt rather cramped real estate wise because of all the huge buttons/menus. “Redmond” and “SmoothGNOME” seem to be the only ones with reasonable sizes. -2 points for looking like poo. This isn’t ‘95.

Next was getting connected to my desktop PC that I’d backed up all my stuff onto. That worked fine with the Places > Network menu and “smb://”. I used the little “Connect to server” applet in the top panel to connect, strangely it doesn’t actually connect you, it just places a shortcut on the desktop. While I noticed this the first time it’s not immediately obvious. Maybe a little checkbox like “open now?” or something? +5 points for working.

+5 for Gaim connecting to MSN etc. -1 for not supporting custom emoticons (how hard can it be?). +5 for connecting to Google Talk, and -2 for making me Google for the settings I needed. I thought they were collaborating or something? Surely there should just be a Google Talk option there then?

I downloaded whatever updates there were. apt-get is a dream and one of the reasons I chose Ubuntu. It’s like the friendly hip version of Debian. After the update I installed a few things including Automatix. My downloads were also going at the max speed for my ADSL line which I was pretty happy about. +20 for apt-get being totally awesome and fast servers.

I see this is a bug so maybe it’s only Feisty, but Totem won’t play files over “smb://”. Mounting it “properly” worked fine though. A bit of an extension to Nautilus to do that would be cool. Or even to that “Connect to server” applet. I noticed a few other apps also don’t like opening files over “smb://” though, like Linux DC++ which tried to hash “/” when I gave it an “smb://” type address. Movies in Totem were super jerky and unwatchable until I converted to Xine. For some strange reason movies in Xine were super bright though. -10 for still not being able to watch a movie properly.

I tried enabling “Desktop Effects” just to see if it would work on my on-board Intel graphic. It did surprisingly well but completely killed movies or any vis etc.

Another small thing I noticed is the network monitor applet and the system monitor network section show “%” as the units but it seems that 100% is adjusted to whatever the max throughput has been while you were staring at it. It also doesn’t distinguish between or even show what adapter it’s monitoring. There’s no options anywhere for this either. This makes it pretty useless because the numbers are meaningless. -2 points.

I only noticed this when I tried to play a DVD, but my CD-ROM is not detected at all. Damn. Bit of a disaster. noapic or noacpi or something might help, haven’t tried.
I tried out “Swiftfox”. Well actually I’m trying out Firefox at the same time as Ubuntu because I normally use Opera. I ran into a pretty random issue with Swiftfox, I can’t go to any typed in URLs. It’s like “enter” or the “Go” button just don’t do anything at all. I can click links etc fine but can’t go to a URL. I could even use the Google search thing. Using normal Firefox now and hopefully it won’t happen again (edit: Nope, happens in Firefox too, tried switching to another theme). Firefox still insists on opening new windows all the time, I only want 1 window with TABS ffs! Arg! I changed my prefs to open new windows in a new tab but some links still open new windows. Also since I have no middle click button I’d REALLY appreciate a setting/extension that opens bookmarks in new tabs as opposed to the current tab. I know I can hold Ctrl but I don’t want to, I want to change the default behaviour not continuously change to alternate behaviour.

Ok, what the hell is up with vi (or Vim rather) in Ubuntu? The up,down,right and left arrows insert an “A\n”,”B\n”,”C\n”,”D\n” respectively in INSERT mode. The backspace key deletes characters but doesn’t show them as removed until you move to another line. It’s not the terminal because SSH’ing somewhere else and using vi works fine.

Are there any image viewers for psd files? Something like IrfanView for that other OS. The GIMP scores -10 points just because. Why can’t they use MDI type windows? Or do those not exist in Linux? It’s impossible to see what’s going on in GIMP unless it’s on a separate virtual desktop. Speaking of windows I found a few times you would do something like open a new app or even just a dialog within an app and the window would appear behind the current one instead of right on top. -5 points for that.

So that brings to points total to: I don’t know, the points are like Whose Line Is It Anyway… If I can get the CDRW/DVD-ROM working I might stick with Ubuntu a little bit longer, otherwise I think next on the list is PCLinuxOS. Maybe Sabayon.

Why lie about it? Linux right out of the box is lacking style. Even with the new Ubuntu and Linspire packages, people look at Linux as a Legacy Operating system because it’s style looks like something that Al gore would have used 20 years ago. They say clothes make the man, and I think that style supplements an operating system.To get things started, we are going to review the top 5 dock replacements that are out there, to make your Linux system look amazing! I’ve done quite a bit of research, and these are the top 5 OS X style Dock Replacements.

Without further a due:

Number 5:

The Enlightenment Engage Dock

Click on it to see my full review.

Engage is a beautiful dock replacement for Linux. It looks high tech, futuristic, and smooth enough to be on any Hollywood blockbuster.

It’s very similar to OS X’s dock, however, you will notice some differences. For example, there is the option of having a clock in the lower right hand corner, and a spot to place all of your task icons. For example, Gaim, volume control etc… This feature in my opinion makes it easier for people making the transition from the Gnome/ KDE dock.

Number 4:

KX Docker

Click on it to see my full review

One great advantage of the KXDocker, is that it allows you to stack and separate icons. For all of you that are not quite shell savvy, there is a graphical configuration tool, so you won’t be spending most of your time trying to tweak random shell script files.

Number 3:

Pimp out the Current Gnome Dock

Click here to see my full review

The Gnome Panel at the bottom of the screen, is honestly the one thing that bothers me the most about Linux. Although efficient, and an obvious copy of the Windows Task Bar, it’s ugly.

Like your next-door neighbor’s little sister you never noticed, you’d be surprised how Linux can blossom, and draw looks if you tweak it right. This tutorial will show you how to make your Gnome Dock look great without installing a thing.

Number 2:

The Avant Dock

Click Here for my full review

This amazing project is a Gnome Based Dock, that sits on the bottom of your desktop, and keeps track of all of the programs running, and also provides a short cut to start up programs. Much like the OS X dock for Mac.

Applications control their own icons, as this program uses a D-Bus Back end. If you happen to use the popular email client Evolution, Avant will show how many emails are waiting for you in the evolution icon in the dock.

and finally….

Number 1:

The Kiba Dock

Click here for my full review

Beryl and Compiz have exploded with popularity in this past year. Graphics that in my opinion out weigh vista’s Aero, OS X’s Aqua, and Sun’s Looking Glass. And with this new popularity, lots of plug-in’s and add on applications have appeared on the internet.

This OSx looking dock is by far the most advanced that I have reviewed in regards to graphics, and eye candy. Check out my installation instructions, and videos on my review of my favorite Linux Dock Replacement here.

While you are here at the website, check out our forums! It’s a great place to get advice and help from the community. I’ve just opened them, and would love to hear what you have to say, and to see some great discussion regarding the aesthetics of Linux.

http://www.linuxgames.com/
http://happypenguin.org/

I’ve tried many different bit-torrent clients, and as an ex-Windows user, uTorrent was the best application out there. I always wanted a client that was simple and similar to uTorrent. I tried the standard Bit Torrent software that came with Feisty Fawn - though its good for beginners, it doesn’t serve as a torrent download manager. Azureus sporadically terminated on me, as well as took up all of my resources (Java will do that to you). KTorrent was the closest match to uTorrent, but as a GNOME user I didn’t like loading up all of those KDE libraries.

Enter Deluge.

“A bittorrent client written in Python and GTK+. Deluge is intended to bring a native, full-featured client to Linux, BSD, and other *NIX GTK desktop environments such as GNOME and XFCE.”

Not only was it a GNOME application, but it perfectly resembled uTorrent’s key features and interface. Deluge was a sure winner for me, and is my bittorrent client of choice.

Debian Package URL:

http://download.deluge-torrent.org/ubuntu/feisty/

Hello… I am NOT a linux Geek, I am a windows user. But vista is
horrible… and more and more people are looking for alternatives.

Many of you are frustrated with vista, I know… but there are new
alternatives coming out, and they are free too.

At last, a superb Linux is out. Its called PCLINUXOS 2007
and its the most user friendly linux that I have found up to date. It
puts ubuntu linux to shame. I never liked ubuntu much anyway.

get it here http://www.pclinuxos.com/

It worked with a 3d desktop for me after I went to the icon “configure
your computer” on the “taskbar” and then turned on the 3d effects with
an icon it has there.

And I must note that these 3d effects work on a card that Vista does not
think is good enough for it! LOL

You can see some of the effects on youtube HERE

The effects are NOT important to me, what was important was that it
could play and display various media without hassle… and it did!

I played various media without a problem, and without me needing to
install anything else! The cd is only 700 mb yet
it has a multitude of free applications to do anything you want…

Now think about that.. vista needs 10gb to install and it has only a few
applications included. This linux has a huge collection of programs
preinstalled.

I played DVDs, Avi videos, mpgs, mp3, photoshop psd’s with gimp, word
documents, PDFs… even flash was preinstalled on firefox. It also
includes the latest Thunderbird email and newsreader 2.0 (something that
the latest ubuntu lacks).

I also was able to use the preinstalled remote desktop client to control
my other computer that is running XP.

This is a linux that is easy to use! Also you can try it out before you
install it by running it from the cd as a live cd, so no harm will be
done to your hard drive. Also there is a very nice option to load the
whole CD into the RAM if you have 1gb + ram, and that makes the OS
lightning fast… This option is on the first screen when you boot the
pc with the cd inside. I did that and I was impressed.

PClinuxOS 2007 is totally free. like most other linux’s.

Another use for this linux is to use it as a “rescue disk” if for
example your Windows computer does not start, you pop in the pclinuxos
cd, the computer starts, you can see ALL your files from the hard disks,
and you can copy them to a USB flash drive, via the network, write them
to a dvd, or save them to an external drive.

The flash drives and externals are detected automatically, and it has a
built in burner program! lol it cant get any easier!

It had used the previous version of PCLinuxOS, but this is even better….

At last a linux has been created that is easy…. have fun!