Parameter expansion is a powerful feature of Bash which will allow you to work on strings with great ease and just a little typing. Here are 10 simple examples on how to use just a bit of the power of parameter expansion to quickly modify and work on strings.

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The next Linux Mint Cinnamon edition is knocking on the door and a Release Candidate was put out yesterday. This release will bear the version number 17.1, and it is codenamed “Rebecca”. In this overview I will look at the release candidate for Mint 17.1, focusing on the main new features in Cinnamon, which ships the latest bleeding edge version in Rebecca, and will accompany it with screenshots for the desktop and the new changes that went into it.

Cinnamon has reached version 2.4 in Mint 17.1:

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GOG.com has recently launched a promotion which includes discounts up to 90% for over 700 games, from which over 100 are available on Linux too.

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This War of Mine is a different kind of war game, where you take command of a group of civilians struggling to survive in a besieged city. The uniqueness of the game comes from the fact that rather controlling military soldiers, you will embark on protecting and keeping alive civilians in a time of war.

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The latest update for Urban Terror brings an updated HUD (Heads Up Display), open-sourced menu files and a big number of bug fixes.

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Okular is the KDE document viewer with support for a wide range of formats, different view modes and various viewing and selection tools. Okular can be used to open basically any type of document, from PDFs to mobile formats, text or CHM files.

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The latest Wine development release, 1.7.31, ships with numerous bug fixes, support for a new version of the Gecko web engine based on Firefox 34, support for the Visual Studio 2013 C/C++ runtimes, support for more font metrics in DirectWrite, Direct2D improvements. An impressive 51 bug fixes also found way into this release.

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Mount & Blade is a 3D role-playing game taking place in medieval times, in which you will carry battles, lead armies, expand and conquer, and eventually claim the throne of Calradia. The game is available on Steam with a 75% discount throughout this weekend.

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Space Hulk Ascension Edition is a 3D turn-based strategy game for single-player based on the classic board game released in 1989. The game shipped on Steam yesterday, and provides great improvements over the classic version on which it is based.

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SimpleAudioPlayer is a KDE music player with a simplistic interface which provides two components: a player and a file browser. The latest release is a small incremental update which features a new find function.

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Kid3 is a powerful audio tag editor for KDE, with support for popular formats like Ogg Vorbis, MP3, MP4, FLAC or WAV, features like multiple file tag editing (to edit fields which are the same for a batch of files), exporting to various online services, lyrics fetching, id3v1 and id3v2 MP3 tag editing, plugins, tag removal functionality, filters, next and previous buttons to quickly cycle through music files. I believe Kid3 to a gem for audiophiles who work often upon their music collection.

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Most of the file managers included in distributions have an interface which usually provides a left panel and a main widget to display files and folders, and some even have an option to split the view left/right, like Nautilus in GNOME or Dolphin in KDE. But they don’t follow this view mode by default, and usually they can’t save this choice so it will be displayed like this the next time the application starts (there are exceptions – see Konqueror who will use profiles and will be able to save interface changes). On the other hand, there are the twin-panel based file managers like Krusader, Tux Commander or EmelFM2, from which GNOME Commander is also a part of, with the twin-panel mode enabled by default.

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Although there are many image viewers for Linux, most of them are GTK-based and KDE is left behind with not so many options. Of course, there are applications like Krita or Kolourpaint, but these are image editors, not just simple viewers. Gwenview is the default image viewer in KDE, and it does its job very well. Not only it has enough features to accommodate the more demanding users (like ratings, file browser or thumbnail view), but its functionality can be extended using the KIPI plugins, a KDE set of image plugins used by applications like DigiKam as well, besides Gwenview.

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