In this tutorial I’ll show how to get some nicely colored man pages by adding several lines inside the .bashrc file, explaining what the code means and how it works.

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GNU find is a powerful command-line utility that lets you search for files and folders in a hierarchical tree directory structure. It is the backend for all those utilities out there like the graphical searching in KDE or GNOME. However, find can be a little hard to handle at first by beginners. In this tutorial I will try to explain some of the capabilities of find, show some useful one-liners and provide more explanations regarding this command.

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0 A.D. is a strategy game that has been around for quite some time now, and it reached a decent level of completeness despite the fact that Wildfire Games are releasing only alpha versions. It’s free, open-source and available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and the latest alpha, codenamed ‘Ides of March’, comes with a whole bunch of new features and fixes.

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Akregator
This is the KDE-based feed reader with support for RSS feeds. Akregator comes with lots of features and it has a simple interface, with a tree-like view to the left side for the feeds list and a large area for reading news. It supports tabs, sharing to websites like Twitter or Identi.ca, while links and pages can be opened in an external web browser. It uses the WebKit engine for displaying web pages. It allows the configuration of its appearance, like font and colors, sharing services, article archiving and it support system tray integration.

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According to a development update posted on Ubuntu Fridge by the Ubuntu developer Daniel Holbach, Ubuntu 12.04 is on its way to release the first beta next week, on February 29, after the user interface freeze which occured today. “Today User Interface Freeze and Beta Freeze will kick in, next week we will do a test rebuild of the whole archive and Beta 1 will get out next week as well.”

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With Unity getting most of the attention lately in Ubuntu and the feature-freeze coming in tomorrow, I decided to take the latest Kubuntu alpha for a spin and see how KDE 4.8 for netbooks looks and behaves. But first, a little about 12.04 as a whole.

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin will be the next long-term supported release and as most of you already know, it is scheduled to arrive at the end of April 2012. Here is the release schedule of Ubuntu 12.04:

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I’m used to making a review for each of the new major Wesnoth release, and so it is no exception with the latest version. It’s been almost two years since the last stable release, which was Wesnoth 1.8 released on April 1st, 2010, and 1.10 brings a whole bunch of new features, new graphics and tons of improvements regarding every aspect of the game over the previous versions.

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Introduction
Although this is a well known issue and has been said countless times before, I’ll say it again: games are not the strong point on Linux. Still, there are several very good projects out there, but the choices are pretty limited. The same is the situation in the case of real-time strategy games. There is a lot of fuss around projects like 0 AD or Oil Rush, a promising, yet closed-source RTS game. However, even though these get more attention lately, let’s not forget the other good choices out there, and one of them is the game I’m going to talk about in this article, namely, MegaGlest, and more exactly about the latest version released by the team behind it, which was put up yesterday.

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The older way of doing this, with gconftool-2 doesn’t seem to work anymore in GNOME 3 – used to be something like: gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename “/full/path/to/file.png”.

However, there is still possible to change the background image, by using the gsettings tool instead. You will need the libglib2.0-bin package, which is probably already installed on your system. To change the background, use a command like the following:

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The file used to change various GRUB 2 settings is /etc/default/grub. This file also contains options to adjust the timeout in seconds before GRUB boots the default OS (GRUB_TIMEOUT), change which OS should be selected by default (GRUB_DEFAULT, first entry being 0), and also the option to change the resolution used by default – GRUB_GFXMODE.

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CMus
This is one of the best, feature-rich players for console. Built using ncurses and thus offering a text user interface, CMus has several view modes, organizes your music by artist/album, provides playlists and a library view, a filebrowser, it allows searching, Last.fm/Libre.fm scrobbling via this script, and it uses Vi-like keyboard shortcuts. A complete review can be found here and a guide to using it here.
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CMus is a powerful, feature-rich music player for the terminal which uses the Ncurses library:

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Battle for Wesnoth
Battle for Wesnoth, or BfW for short, is a popular turn-based strategy game which takes place in a fantasy universe and has support for singleplayer and multiplayer, official campaigns (and more available to download), hotseat games. The game comes by default with 6 factions and takes place over hexagons, each player deploying his army and trying to kill his opponent. Wesnoth can be highly modded via WML (Wesnoth Markup Language), and the add-ons server includes many more maps, factions, eras and campaigns. Beside for the usual mode which allows up to 9 players to battle against each other or forming teams, there are also the rumble maps (very small maps), or the survival ones, or the multiplayer campaigns or role playing maps. There is also an unofficial ladder available. Wesnoth is really an awesome, complete game, with a great community, great online playing, music themes, map editor, a great helping system, and much, much more.

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Dedicated applications

Shutter
This is a very powerful and feature-rich tool for taking screenshots. Written in GTK and blending well in GNOME, Shutter offers just about anything you would ask from such an application: timer, screenshots of whole screen, windows, widgets, a quick and easy-to-use editor for fast retouching or pointing out certain aspects of the image, support for plugins, exporting/importing and saving to PNG, JPG or BMP. Definitely a winner in my opinion.

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