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.

The good part is that the game is still pretty cool. There are a lot of maps and best of all, the game is multiplayer. Instead of a small bomberman, the players look like a ball here. The powers/bonuses are similar(actually more), only the icons are different.

Instead of just winning rounds fighting monsters in a oneman game, as in bomberman, Granatier is designed keeping in mind the multiplayer support. The aim is to be the last man standing by somehow bombing others. The powers that are hidden behind explodable blocks are not always bonuses. Some may increase you speed or blast range, but others might slow you down or revese the movement keys.

Its not a traditional Bomberman, which I was expecting after reading the description, but its definitely good and one might even say better if one likes bombing a real opponent once in a while .

Installation

I am not sure, but I believe this is a default game for KDE. Since, I mostly work on Gnome on Ubuntu, I ran the following command to install it.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install granatier

You can even click this link to install it on any Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

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 .

This is actually a part of medibuntu repositories where you can find stuff that is't included in official ubuntu repos because of licensing issues. Hot-babe is one of those many such applications. In order to install it, you will first have to include the medibuntu repositories and then either click this link or run the following command in a terminal to install it.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install hot-babe

A piece of warning: If you find nudity offensive, then I would kindly suggest you to not install it.

Once installed, you can find it in Applications->Accessories->hot-babe. When run, it is usually in a lot more clothes than in the screenshot below, but for some reason as soon as its executed, Xorg starts consuming a lot of CPU. It used to work fine when I first used it in Interpid, Ubuntu 8.10, probably some bug/incompatibility issue.

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.

If you always avoid using console based applications, then you have probably never seen the power of ncurses. Ncurses is a great library which empowers a developer to build GUI-like applications in a terminal/console environment. We have already seen one such app before, finch, the terminal based brother of Pidgin, built using ncurses.

Install MOC

If you are an Ubuntu/Debian user, either click this link or just run this command in a terminal to install moc.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install moc

I don't think the package is available in Fedora.

Once installed, run mocp in a terminal to start the player.

On the left side are the directory listings, press "a" to add a song to the playlist, press "A" to add a directory recursively to the playlist. For more such options press "h" for help.

As you can see now, this player provides you with most of the basic features one would expect in a decent GUI based player. So, if you are looking for a light-weight or a console based music player, MOC is your best bet.

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.

[shredder12]$ ffmpeg -f oss -i /dev/dsp audio.mp3

Once you run this command you will see ffmpeg saving some data in the file audio.mp3. What is it? Its actually recording all the audio that is going through the device /dev/dsp. Try speaking something on your microphone and play the file.

We can even do some pretty cool stuff using the device /dev/dsp.

But first, what is this device /dev/dsp? It is an audio sampling and recording device, stands for Digital Signal processor. It converts audio signal(from microphone) to digital(for computer) and vice versa. This device only understands complete raw audio, playing an encoded file (mp3, ogg etc.) will just result in garbage sound. And by raw audio file I meant a meaningful music, you can literally give any file to this device as input and it will play it. All it care for are bits and bytes which is what every file is made of. Try playing any of your hard disk partition for fun sake .

[shredder12]$ cat /dev/sda1 > /dev/dsp

After doing that, you can say and actually mean "Windows doesn't sound good" .

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.

For the introduction part, Foobillard is free and opensource, cross-platform, OpenGL based game and the best part is that it was originally built for Linux and later ported to MacOS and Windows. The games that can be played in Foobillard are - Carambol, Snooker, Pool (8 ball and 9 ball). It can also be played over network, making it a complete multiplayer game.

Probably a little bad thing about the game is that it directly throws you in a game - no menu, no key bindings help, no game options etc. Although, it sucks only the first few times. Once you know stuff, it doesn't look like a bad thing anymore.

If you are planning to try it out, which you should do, I would suggest you to go through the key bindings first. It won't take you much time to figure out the basic controls, but to have a better gaming experience, do learn all the controls.

Install Foobillard

Ubuntu/Debian users, either click this link or run the following command to install foobillard

[shredder12]$ sudo aptitude install foobillard

For Fedora users, run the following command in the terminal

[shredder12]$ yum install foobillard

So, now go on and start playing .

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.

That's when he teamed up with Ronald Bultje and David Conrad to come up with a community-developed and completely free decoder for FFmpeg, ffvp8.

Don't you just love OpenSouce devlopers .

In a blog post, Jason told that after a few weeks of work the new FFmpeg decoder, ffvp8 is "bit exact" with the official VP8 decoder, libvpx. And surprisingly, after only the first round of optimizations, it shows dramatic performance improvements over libvpx.

They used two 1080p video clips to test the two decoders along with the latest revision of FFmpeg from SVN. Even the developers are suprised to see it performing better than libvpx on all different systems, especially on ATOM processors, for which they haven't even started optimizing .

A number of optimizations are still to come and based upon its performance, once released, ffvp8 is definitely going to be used by a number of multimedia applications and probably the browsers too.

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.

GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework which provides an interface to programmers for writing various multimedia applications.

Transmageddon was made keeping in mind a regular user needs who just wants to play video on his mobile devices, doesn't really care about formats or codecs. So, it comes with a bunch of presets for converting videos to formats compatible with various mobile devices.

Transmageddon is not all about presets. You can always go for simple format->format conversion aided with manual selection of codecs. Just use "No preset" while doing this.

It even provides various options to rotate/flip the output video.

The project's homepage clearly states that this is tool is under-development so you might face some trouble. It makes use of the most cutting edge libraries so, installing latest versions is not easy.

While Transmageddon converts almost any format into the one's listed for output, I actually ran into some issue while trying to convert a flv and a mp4 video to 3gpp format. It prompted me to check the availibility of a codec/plugin named "Quicktime Muxer" to make the conversion possible. But unfortunately, it was not available, so nothing happened :(. Well, I don't think its even an issue with the app, its just the unavailability of a codec due to licensing issues.

By the way, I am using Version 0.15, the default in Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx. The latest being 0.16, released this May, which adds WebM support.

If you are having some kind of trouble with it or can't install a decent version because of dependency issues then go for another GStreamer based transcoder, Arista.

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.

A few words of warning before you start adding Deskbar-applet to the panel. It might take some time to start, took around 10+ seconds on my system. So, be patient. Once done, you know where to find it. Now, click on the icon and you will see a search bar.

This simple looking search bar has tremendous capablities. You can send an email by typing in an emailID, search google, send a tweet, search through your folders, launch an application and a lot more. All these functionalities are managed by plugins. For a whole list, Right click on the icon and go to Preferences.

Now, you can see what all this applet can do. Check the plugin you wish to enable and when highlighted, click "more" to see extra configurations required to run the plugin.

Here is an example of the twitter plugin

• Don't forget to fill your login info by clicking "more"
• Now, write your tweet, move down and hit Enter.

• Here you go ;)

So, its time you start exploring Deskbar. You might find a few things, you do frequently, can be done faster with it.

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.

Install bmon

For Ubuntu or Debian systems, either click this link or run the following command in a terminal

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install bmon

I couldn't find it in Fedora repos .

Since, this is an console based tool, open a terminal and enter the command "bmon" and you should see the following output

As shown, it lists all the available interfaces. At the bottom, you will find two options to open graph and detailed output by clicking g and d respectively. If done, the output should look like this

As you can see, the tool is pretty good for real time monitoring but unfortunately the project is probably dead now. The last major release of this software was Version 2.0.1 released in October of 2004, which is the available version in Lucid's repo. So, I am guessing that the project is no longer under development.

Well, before I end you might be interested in knowing that Bmon is not just about the small screen shown above. It is actually known for sharing these stats in a variety of ways. I just used one of them - throwing the output in HTML files. So, if you keep those files somewhere in your /var/www directory, the data could be easily accessed remotely through the webserver.

You can do this by simply running this command in a terminal

[shredder12]$ bmon -O html:path=<path_to_dir>

Here is a screenshot of the html output

For more features, you might want to take a look at its man page. I am pretty sure better network monitoring applications would have been released in past 6 years, but as far as simple bandwidth monitoring goes, bmon is good.

I will keep looking for better monitoring tools, preferably graphical this time. If you use or have any in mind, do let me know.