Our favorite IM client has just gotten a really cool plug-in, Facebook chat for Pidgin. So now we can connect to 16 different IM protocols with Pidgin. Pretty cool, right?!
The plug-in itself comes in a pretty easy installer for Windows and Linux. Tested and works very well.
Battle for Wesnoth is a pretty cool game RPG style where you’ll build up and lead an army to conquer the entire map / world. The game has over 200 units in 16 different races so there you’ll not get bored easily.
Being open source any one has the freedom to build other maps and scenarios. You can also do the social gaming thing through its multi-player interaction. I actually enjoyed this while in college, a nice way to kill time and while interacting with other people across the globe.
Reddit is trying to strengthen its web presence, as a competitor to Digg, by releasing their code to the open source community.
Being released under Common Public Attribution License , reddit is now allowing users to download the full code that powers its website. The real intent is to have developers provide improvements for reddit itself, making it a bigger and more powerful platform that only their small team of 5 can not possibly manage.
If you’re afraid of the Linux transition because of your loved Windows-only app, your fears are greatly reduced with Wine.
Wine is a compatibility layer that will allow you to run and install Windows programs. A huge list of softwares has been tested to run with Wine pretty successfully. Specially now, that after 15 years in the making it has achieved its milestone 1.0 release. A large help was provided by the support received from Google to speed this development.
Released yesterday, Firefox 3 has surely surpassed its objective of 1 million downloads in 24 hours. A new world record!! (No one actually knows if there was a record to be broken…)
Mozilla’s site went down but at the end of the day everything went well. On our office HQ, the Ubuntu install already has FF 3 installed and the same on our Windows install.
The count of downloads at the moment this article is being written registers at over 8.5 million copies. A pretty impressive number. The largest number of downloads are coming from the US, Germany, the UK, and Italy.
The folks at Mozilla will be giving us the full stable Firefox 3 in a bit more than 24 hours. A really really nice improvement from the 2.0 release which now seems pretty ancient for all of those already testing beta releases and release candidates.
Mozilla is even trying to set a new world record for most number of downloads of a single software in one day. Join in the campaign if you’d like as well.
Songbird, our favorite open source music manager has just released their 0.6 version. According to the website, the new release is “harder, better, faster, stronger”.
Looking at the release notes, it shows that the team has been placing quite a bit of work to improve its performance and usability. This project created by Mozilla promises to be the next big thing in the way you discover, play, and manage your music. We actually agree.
Workrave is a Windows and Linux only program that can help prevent dreaded repetitive strain injuries. Unfortunately techies are quite familiar with RSI.
Once installed, Workrave runs silently in the background monitoring how much time you’re using the computer. In pre-set times of activity, the program gives you alerts on when breaks are needed. You’ll see three types of alarms:
The times established for each alarm can be modified according to your preferences or, better yet, you can leave everything as standard.
I have a 1GB mini SD card inside my cell phone that I barely use the space. So, I thought I’d add a Linux install inside it for those moments I have to use a computer at a cyber café (I’m cautious about security), or just do an emergency data recovery of a computer.
Puppy Linux was my distro of choice for this task. It is very small, the ISO is just 88MB. Also I felt this was the right moment for me with the release of Puppy Linux 4.0 aka Dingo, which seems to be much more user friendly.
Virtualbox, our favorite multi-platform virtualization software has just been upgraded to version 1.6.2. This was mainly a bug fix upgrade.
The main reason for me to post this here is to remind our readers to make an upgrade to one of the most recent versions of Virtualbox if your current version is giving some problems.
My VirtualBox on Linux was completely gone, all of a sudden it just stopped working. But then all I needed to do was uninstall it and install again. What happened was that after it got purchased by Sun, the repositories changed so for some reason the software wasn’t cooperating much with me.