wibom Wine Bottle Management

Application called Wine bottle management (or wibom) is used to (as its name suggests) manage so-called Wine bottles.

Wine is the program for running applications for Microsoft Windows on other operating systems, primary on GNU/Linux. This program creates in the user’s home directory a folder called .wine containing user preferences, the simplified version of Windows registers and files structure of simulated disk C:. Many Wine users don’t know there can be more those folders coexisting. They are called bottles. Because of bottles it is possible to have a few isolated instances of “Pseudowindows” on one system.

Wine offers no system for managing those folders. It is needed to have a basic knowledge of using Bash or any other system shell and knowledge of principles of Wine’s job to be able to use bottles. And this is business of wibom.

Wine bottles can be easily managed, they could be created, cloned. Windows software can be easily installed into them. Everything is possible through easy GTK interface.

Download

Debian / Ubuntu

There is a repository for Debian, Ubuntu and their derivates. Here is the APT line:

deb http://wibom.sourceforge.net/debian ./ #Wibom

In case, you don’t know what to do with that line, just follow the how-to. After adding the repository and updating the list of repositories, install wibom-debian or wibom-ubuntu package as usual. The repository is unsigned, if you want help us with a signed one, contact us.

openSUSE / SUSE Linux Enterprise

There is a repository for openSUSE 11.4 (thanks to Michal Hrušecký). You can add it as root by command:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/hroncok/openSUSE_11.4/ "wibom"

Than you can install wibom, wibom-gtk and wibom-bottle-chooser packages as usual. There are also repositores for 11.3 and Factory. As well as for SLE 11 and it’s SP1.

Mandriva Linux

There is a repository for Mandriva Linux (thanks to Peťoš). You can add it as root by command:

urpmi.addmedia --update wibom http://petos.cz/mandriva/wibom

Than you can install wibom, wibom-gtk and wibom-bottle-chooser packages as usual.

Fedora

There is a repository for Fedora 15 and 14. You can add it by saving the following file as /etc/yum.repos.d/wibom.repo.

[wibom]
name=Wine bottle management
baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/hroncok/Fedora_15/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Than you can install wibom, wibom-gtk and wibom-bottle-chooser packages as usual. Don’t forget to change Fedora_15 to Fedora_14 if using Fedora 14.

Other Linux distributions

Get the tarball and unpack it to your root directory. You’ll need a few dependencies to run Wibom. Here’s the list of Debian packages, they would probably have very similar names in your distribution (packages in brackets are optional):

wine bash trash-cli ruby libgettext-ruby1.8 libgtk2-ruby1.8 hicolor-icon-theme (xdg-utils zenity winetricks wget python-minimal)

Other UNIXes

We would appreciate any help with making packages for OpenSolaris or *BSD.

Screenshot :

Hex-a-hop

Hex-a-hop is a simple yet fun little puzzle game where you take a little girl hopping across tiles in efforts to destroy all the green tiles on the board. The beige tiles on the board are permanent and cannot be destroyed, but once you have stepped on a green tile, it will disintegrate as soon as you step on to another tile.
There are exactly 100 levels which obviously increase in difficulty as you progress through the game. After defeating a level, one or more levels are unlocked to allow you to progress on your tile smashing journey. If you are having particular difficulty on a certain level, you can usually choose a different path of progression, but if you want to beat the game, you’ll eventually have to return to face your nemesis again. There are no time limits or goals, so map things out, take your time, and dominate.

Hex-a-hop

It’s free; it’s simple; it’s fun. Download it now!

Brukkon

In keeping with the puzzle theme, I thought I’d offer a bonus Download of the Week for those of you who have 7 bones to burn. Similar to Hex-a-hop, Brukkon is a puzzle game where you must navigate a grid to reach the finish line, or in this case, finish tile.

Instead of a little girl hopping around though, you command a rolling robot across 35 unique levels including a bonus level exclusive to the Ubuntu Software Center which is featured in the screenshot below.
Unlike Hex-a-hop, Brukkon is more involved and provides features such as movable bridges, different weather conditions, and disappearing tiles.  The game also provides two different camera angles for you to view the entire board and map out your strategy.

 Brukkon and Ubuntu FTW!

Unfortunately, apt-urls are not available for paid items in the Ubuntu Software Center yet, so you’ll need to fire up Ubuntu Software Center manually to purchase and install it.  Brukkon is available on both Maverick and Natty.  For $7, it’s quite the steal.

all credit to Brian Thomason, Published May 2, 2011 OMG Ubuntu

The Clockwork Man

The Ubuntu Software Center has been filling up with new games recently, and I’d like to highlight another one of those this week.
Meet ‘The Clockwork Man’.
The Clockwork Man is an artistic, hidden object game set in the Victorian Era with a strong Steampunk vibe.

Hidden Object Game

In The Clockwork Man, you travel the world searching for the parts necessary to construct the world’s greatest invention.  To reach this goal, however, you must first find collections of items to gain information from in-game characters, fix devices, or solve puzzles to journey on.

If you run into trouble finding a particular piece of a collection, don’t worry, your faithful sidekick Sprocket will help.  Use him wisely though, as he must recharge from time to time.

The artwork in the game is amazing, and it is easy to get lost in it;  The game boast literally hundreds of hand-painted items.  The background music used is also soothing and very well done, which is a pleasant surprise not found in many Linux offerings.

The Clockwork Man is available in both Ubuntu Maverick and Natty for $14.99USD. For more information, you may visit the game’s official site. 

all credit to Brian Thomason, Published June 6, 2011 OMG Ubuntu

Neverputt

Neverputt is a 3D miniature golf game for 1-4 players.  You are in the first-person hot-seat and must control the direction and velocity of the ball in order to be successful.

Neverputt

Whether you’d like to just relax and play a little putt-putt in peace, or challenge yourself with a bizarre combination of holes, Neverputt will not disappoint.  It ships with seven different courses by default, ranging from easy to insanely difficult.

Many of the holes are similar to those you would see at a real miniature golf course, but some of the more complex holes provide pitfalls such as moving tiles and teleportation.

Neverputt is free software available for all currently supported versions of Ubuntu. For more information, please visit the project’s website on icculus. Please note that most of the information you find there will pertain to Neverputt’s better known big brother, Neverball. 
 

By Brian Thomason, Published July 19, 2011 in OMG Ubuntu

I do not qualify for credit. 

Oil Rush : Ubuntu Download

 Oil Rush From Unigine, the company that develops the cross-platform 3D engine for Linux, Mac, Windows, and PS3, comes a new RTS game called Oil Rush.

Battle in the City

In this fast-paced, real-time naval strategy game, you must not only out-drill your openents for oil, but also amass your army by capturing other platforms and subsequently defending them from invasion tower-defense style.
If you spend too much of your efforts pumping oil, your enemy will take over all the platforms in the sea and quickly destroy you; however, if you focus too intently on capturing other towers without spending time drilling and upgrading your arsenal, your enemy will capture all of the oil and leave you with no fuel for your forces.
The key is to think quickly, act quickly, and most importantly, form a balance of resource gathering and terrain acquisition.
Oil Rush is now available in the Ubuntu Software Center for Maverick/Natty i386/amd64 at the price of $19.95.  While the game is still in development, you will receive instant access to the latest beta which is already quite polished.  Please note that you will need a beefy video card, even at low settings, for an enjoyable experience with this game.  For more details, please visit the Oil Rush website.

By Brian Thomason, Published August 29, 2011:

Just another share OMG Ubuntu UK

Starry – A New 3D Space Shooter in a Retro Style

Starry is a new space shooter that is vaguely reminiscent of the classic X-Wing/Tie Fighter series, although the style is totally unique. Graphically, the game is beautiful. With simple wireframe and flat-shaded rendering and 8 bit music, it’s a modern game with a retro feel. The game is rail based so there is no worry about getting lost or fighting to figure out a radar system, just simple, fun 3D spaceship blasting.

As they say, a screenshot is worth 1000 words:

If a video is more to your tastes, there is some in game footage here.

Download the Demo

There is a demo available to download from the website. Just simply extract the .tar.gz for your architecture, double click “starry” and click “Run”.

How to play flash games offline and put an entry in Ubuntu’s main menu

Download the flash game you want

The first step is to get the game onto your computer. To do this, go to the webpage where the game is found, for example:

http://www.newsandentertainment.com/zfcurveball.html

Then on the page right click, and view the source. Then find the url for the actual game source. The easiest way to find the url is to search for it (common keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F). Try searching for the name of the game, or for .swf.

When you think you’ve got it, (from the page above the url you should have found is: http://www.newsandentertainment.com/curveball.swf ) click on it, and it should open up in a new tab. If it was the correct URL, save the page. When you do this, check that it is just downloading the .swf file. I suggest adding a . before the name to make it a hidden file and saving it to your home folder.

Adding the entry to the Main Menu

Now, to create an entry for it in the games menu, right click on the gnome menu and go to ‘Edit Menus.’

Then go to internet, find your Chrome or Chromium entry and view its properties. Copy the command field. Now go to games, and click New Item to add to create a new entry.

Paste the command you copied before and add –app=file:// followed immediately by the path to the .swf file.

For example here is mine:

/usr/bin/chromium-browser --app=file:///home/chris/.curveball.swf

The –app opens the file as if it is an application, rather than a webpage, so your game will look native, rather than look as if it were running in a browser. Once your done with the command field, you can fill out the rest: name, description, and even give it an icon. Click ok and give it a try.

If you’re a Firefox person, you can’t run it as an app, but if you enter ‘firefox’ followed by file:// and the path to the game, it should open the game in a full browser.

The result

Launch your app from the Main Menu and you should see something like this:

H-Craft Championship hover racing game for Ubuntu

H-Craft is a futuristic hovercraft racing game which sees players compete in championships to level up and unlock new vehicles to race with.

It features 28+ racetracks, a unique driving physics simulation, a fresh design, and a challenging Championship mode.

The game, which is over 3 years old, still has pretty sharp 3D graphics with support for high resolutions, texture filtering and anti-aliasing.

The Game

Menu presentation is slick, and the gameplay is smooth and challenging – I found myself falling off the track countless times until I got used to how the hovercraft slides around. The computer competitors are fast around the track as well, and the levels are varied enough.

The developers should also be praised for their choice of music – the soundtrack is certainly fitting.

Although there are no weapons, it still reminds me very much of the popular Wipeoutseries for Sony’s PlayStation.

If development hadn’t ceased (see below) I would probably encourage Irrgheist to focus on improving re-playability, with more incentive for the player to win races and level up (other than simply getting new vehicles, most of which look the same anyway).

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to include weapon pickups either, just to give a bit of a boost to the action and show off the slick visuals with some mean explosions and other particle effects.

Trailer

There’s a trailer available to watch on YouTube, also embedded below.

Download the free demo / purchase the game

I’m not sure what the future holds for H-Craft Championship as the latest post on Irrgheist’s News Feed is dated September 1st, 2009 which leads me to believe the company may have disbanded.

The company also apparently owns and runs Indie Game Videos (http://indiegamevideos.com) but the latest video on there is nearly a year old.

Either way, you can still pick up the game for around $15.00 USD or download the free demo version for Windows or Linux and enjoy one of the best looking racing games available for Linux.

           

          

Glest!! An Alternative To Warcraft III

For those who’s hate to play warcraft III game using wine or other emulators on your linux desktop, but you couldn’t find other games similar to warcraft III that could run natively on linux, you should try Glest!!
Although I’m a cyber cafe owner but I am not a games freak, but Glest had caught my eyes 3 years ago, when I started osscc.org. Glest is a good 3D real time strategy game, the game is still under good development progress. You can play Glest on LAN or single player also. Although Glest is not as advance as Warcraft III, but I really enjoy playing it some time, even those kids when we did an exhibition last year gave us a positive feedback when they play Glest on our diskless linux gaming system using DRBL.

Installation
Installing Glest on Ubuntu Linux is far too easy, open your terminal and type the following command:

# sudo apt-get install glest

Glest is a free 3D real-time strategy game, where you control the armies of two different factions:Tech, which is mainly composed of warriors and mechanical devices, and Magic, that prefers mages and summoned creatures in the battlefield.

Glest is not just a game, but also an engine to make strategy games, based on XML and a set of tools. A few mods already exist.

Mega Glest

Their other project called MegaGlest seems doesn’t  has so many progress since they registered the project at SourceForge.net on Jan 22 2010, and is described by the project team as follows :
“Currently there is no active development of the real time strategy game glest. This project aims to improve the game and its content. It already has a lot more content than the original game and contains bugfixes and improvements.”

And the stable release of MegaGlest is version 3.3.3 and can be downloaded from here :http://glest.org/glest_board/index.php?topic=6054.0

You can visit their site to find out more about this game:
Glest Official Website : http://glest.org/en/index.php
Glest Blog : http://glestblog.blogspot.com/
Glest Forum : http://glest.org/glest_board/

source

Hedgewars sees special 0.9.15 Winter Release

Hedgewars, a popular open source Worms-like strategy game, has received a winter update which brings a variety of new features.

Worms fans will recognize the game which runs natively on a variety of platforms, as it heavily takes inspiration from the 2D turn-based strategy game we all know and love.

Version 0.9.15 – the Winter update

The developers have released version 0.9.15 which they’ve dubbed a “winter release” and it brings a variety of new features, weapons and bug fixes.

Winter has never looked this cool

• There’s a new theme to chill in: Christmas!
• Let it snow! Watch the ground on maps using the Christmas and Snow themes, because the falling snow may change it to your advantage or disadvantage.

New weapons

• Are your enemies busy digging for oh-so-tasty earthworms instead of facing combat? Time to send a Drill Strike after them!
• You want to push somebody from distance? Weapons are too expensive for you? You like to play in dirt or snow? A Mud Ball* should do the trick! (*wind effected; not recommended to be used as food replacement)

Optional Gameplay modes

• Capture the Flag! Bring your enemy’s flag to your home while protecting your own!
• No Jumping! The temporary loss of floor contact makes you feel insecure? Then play without jumping and see new strategies evolve!
• Random Weapon! You want to test your luck and skill? Then let the game give you and your enemies a random weapon each turn!

Draw your own maps

• YES, you read that right! Now you can create and save your own hand-drawn maps and play them on any theme you want and with who you want!

Fans of the game will be especially pleased with the last feature in the list, which gives you the ability to create any level your brain can come up with. Don’t be tooprovocative however as the developers ask “please do not use maps with motives not suitable for children on the official server, thanks!”

Download and install now

Head on over to hedgewars.org/download.html to grab the latest version.

You can build from source or use PlayDeb to get the latest packages in Ubuntu.

source Ubuntu Gamers

First Person Shooters Games For Ubuntu

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There’s nothing like shooting up some bad guys, be they zombies, terrorists or aliens, everyone loves a good FPS.
Luckily for you, and thanks in part to the open-sourcing of a number of Quake engines, there happen to be a few high quality First Person Shooters available in Ubuntu’s Software Center – and they’re all native and completely free of charge.
With no wine configuration spaghetti and gorgeous graphics, these shoot-em-ups will work out of the box and may literally blow you away.

Tremulous

Tremulous is a free, open source game that blends a team based First Person Shooter game with elements of a Real Time Strategy game. Players can choose from two unique races, aliens and humans.
Players on both teams are able to build working structures in-game like a Real Time Strategy game. These structures provide many functions, the most important being spawning. The designated builders must ensure there are spawn structures or other players will not be able to rejoin the game after death.

Website: http://tremulous.net/

Nexuiz

Nexuiz is a fast-paced 3D deathmatch game with high-end and complex graphics effects. It is intended to be played over the Internet or over a local network.
Several different game types, such as classic deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag are available. Nexuiz also supports a single-player mode and has AI bots so you can play against the computer.

Website: http://alientrap.org/nexuiz/

Warsow

Warsow is a first person shooter consisting of cel-shaded cartoon-like graphics with dark, flashy and dirty textures. Warsow is based on the E-novel “Chasseur de bots” (“Bots hunter” in English) by Fabrice Demurger. Warsow’s codebase is built upon Qfusion, an advanced modification of the Quake II engine.

Website: http://www.warsow.net/

Alien Arena

One of the best looking games available for Ubuntu, Alien Arena is a standalone 3D first person online deathmatch shooter crafted from the original source code of Quake II and Quake III, released by id Software under the GPL license.
With features including 32 bit graphics, new particle engine and effects, light blooms, reflective water, high resolution textures and skins, high poly models, stain maps, Alien Arena pushes the envelope of graphical beauty rivaling today’s top games.

Website: http://icculus.org/alienarena/rpa/

Urban Terror

Urban Terror is a free multiplayer first person shooter developed by FrozenSand, that (thanks to the ioquake3-code) does not require Quake III Arena anymore. It is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh. The current version is 4.1.
While it’s not available in the Software Center, it’s still fairly easy to install thanks to binaries for 32 bit and 64 bit being made available on their download page.

Website: http://www.urbanterror.info/news/home/