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The Linux Operating System
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What is Linux?
Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds
using the assistance of developers from around the world. Developed under the GNU General
Public License, the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone.
For more info about the operating system that is causing a revolution
in the world of computers see here.
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Want to have a home computer based on Linux?
Let us build you a compatible system. Although there are many, many programs available
in Linux to do each particular job, I have listed what I currently use or have tried out.
I haven't attempted to build the biggest and best system but one that does the job
of a typical home computer with some 3D games and kids in mind.
If you would like a Linux system pre-loaded with a selection of the software and games listed below please
contact us and we will be happy to quote and build a system for you.
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We recommend Mageia Linux click here for details
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Send enquiries to :-
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Games
Linux has a huge range of games available, see the games menu below for a few of my favourite sites. These are some of the "must have" games for your Linux desktop and they are all free:-
| Blobwars | Since their world was invaded by an alien race, the Blobs have faced a lifetime of war. But now they have a chance to win the war once and for all. In Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid, you take on the role of a fearless Blob agent, Bob. Bob's mission is to infiltrate the various enemy bases around the Blobs' homeworld and rescue as many MIAs as possible. But standing in his way are many vicious aliens, other Blobs who have been assimilated and the evil alien leader, Galdov. | | | BZFlag | 3D networked multiplayer tank battle zone capture the flag game. BZFlag is an OpenSource OpenGL 3D networked multiplayer "battlezone capture the flag" tank game for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, Irix, FreeBSD, Solaris, and other platforms. It's playable with software rendering with better game play on hardware 3D systems. Integrated game server locator. | | | Cube | Cube is a fast-paced 3D FPS featuring in-game map editing. It is an open source multiplayer and singleplayer first person shooter game built on an entirely new and very unconventional engine. | | | Dodgin' Diamond 2 | This is a little shot'em up arcade game for one or two players. It aims to be an 'old school' arcade game with low resolution graphics, top-down scroll action, energy based gameplay and different weapons with several levels of power. | | | Enemy Territory | Wolfenstein™ Enemy Territory™ is a free, stand-alone, downloadable multiplayer game in which players wage war as Axis or Allied in team based-combat. | | | Fish Fillets | A Linux port of wonderful puzzle game Fish Fillets. Fish Fillets is strictly a puzzle game. The goal in every of the seventy levels is always the same: find a safe way out. The fish utter witty remarks about their surroundings, the various inhabitants of their underwater realm quarrel among themselves or comment on the efforts of your fish. | | | FloboPuyo | Clone of the famous PuyoPuyo. Group like coloured bubbles to keep from reaching the top before your oponent. You can play against the computer or another human. | | | Frozen Bubble | Full-featured, colorful animated penguin eyecandy, 100 levels of 1 Player game, hours and hours of 2 Player game, a level-editor, 3 professional quality 20-channels music tracks, 15 stereo sound effects, 7 unique graphical transition effects. You need this addictive game. | | | Jump n Bump | A funny game with cute little bunnies for the whole family. Jump'n Bump is a fun multiplayer game which is both fun and addictive for people of all ages. Supports same computer and network gaming. | | | Madblox | Madblox is a falling-blocks game, in which you complete rows to score points. But, watch-out for the madblox! They hide themselves in the falling shapes and wreak havoc on your carefully placed blocks!
| | | Mahjongg 3D | MahJongg Solitaire 3D is an OpenGL enhanced solitaire version of the ancient chinese board game "Mah Jongg". | | | Mother of all Gravity Games | Moagg combines several game types of other genres like races, search & rescue, seek & destroy et cetera into a 2D gravity game. You are pilot of a small space ship and have to navigate that ship through different levels. But beside the gravity that drags you down there are other obstacles like laser ports, magnets, black holes, cannons, rockets and grinders you have to master. | | | Neverball Neverputt | Tilt the floor to roll a ball through an obstacle course before time runs out. Neverball is part puzzle game, part action game, and entirely a test of skill. Also includes Neverputt, a putt putt golf game. | | | Pathological | Pathological is an enriched clone of the game "Logical" by Rainbow Arts. To solve a level, fill each wheel with four marbles of matching color. Various board elements such as teleporters, switches, filters, etc., make the game interesting and challenging. New levels can be created using your favorite text editor. | | | Pingus | Pingus is a Lemmings™-like game, the player takes command of a bunch of penguins and has to guide them around in levels. Since the penguins walk on their own, the player can only influence them by giving them commands, like build a bridge, dig a hole, etc | | | PlanetPenguin Racer | In this game, you are Tux, the Linux penguin, and your goal is to race as fast as you can down several different courses, grabbing herring along the way. | | | Scorched3D | Scorched 3D is a game based loosely (or actually quite heavily now) on the classic DOS game Scorched Earth "The Mother Of All Games". Scorched 3D adds amongst other new features a 3D island environment and LAN and internet play. | | | Search and Rescue | Helicopter air rescue flight simulator. Pilot a helicopter and other aircraft and go on various rescue missions to save lives. | | | SuperTux | SuperTux is a classic 2D jump'n run sidescroller game in a style similar to the original SuperMario games. | | | Trigger | Trigger is a free rally car racing game. Fun for all the family! You race a sequence of 6 courses, with increasing levels of difficulty. Trigger is highly customisable, and it's easy to add new levels and vehicles. | | | Tuxkart | GoKart racing featuring Tux and Gown. Tux the Linux Penguin and his friends are back in a fun Go-Kart racing game. Collect speedups by eating herring, hit 'zippers' for extra speed. There are currently four racetracks, four drivers and a dozen powerups. Not yet completely stable but playable. | | | YS Flight | A very good flight simulator in which you can take off and land, dogfight with AI opponent, attack ground targets, fly a formation leader, trail smoke to draw a picture in the sky, fight against your opponent over a network connection. You can choose your from more than 30 modern planes. | |
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Kids and Educational
This category is fairly limited but there are still a few excellent programs for Kids and Educational. Here are a few you can try:-
| Celestia | Celestia is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. | | | Concentration | The classic memory game has some new life in this recreation for the Linux platform. Your object is to find all matching pairs of icons in the fastest time possible. | | | GCompris | An award winning educational application suite with more than 50 activities for kids aged from 3 to 10. Areas of learning include computer discovery, algebra, science, geography, games and reading. | | | Scramble | You are given 6 letters. From these 6 letters you are to create as many words as you can. But you have a time limit, you must create as many words as you can before the time runs out. | | | Sticker Book | Sticker Book is a program which lets you place images on a background scene. Every parent surely knows how much fun kids have with these. Indeed, they are a must for any long plane or car ride. Our program is even better than the paper version (assuming you have a laptop) since you can resize, recolour and reorient the stickers that you use, and since you never need run out of stickers. You can even paint with them! | | | Tux Paint | Tux Paint is a free drawing program designed for young children (kids ages 3 and up). It has a simple, easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who helps guide children as they use the program. | |
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Software
Linux has a huge range of quality productivity software available. Open Office is a brilliant alternative to Office, and Firefox is a must have for Internet browsing.
| FireFox | Firefox is the award winning browser from Mozilla. Firefox empowers you to browse faster, more safely, and more efficiently than with any other browser. Firefox imports your Favorites, settings and other information, so you have nothing to lose. Supports tabbed browsing, try it press "CTRL-T". | | | gLabels | gLabels is a program for creating labels and business cards for the GNOME desktop environment. It is designed to work with various laser/ink-jet peel-off label and business card sheets that are generally available. gLabels is free software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). (Works with KDE too). | | | OpenOffice.org | OpenOffice.org is a free productivity suite compatible with all major office suites. It incorporates WRITER, a powerful tool for creating professional documents, reports, newsletters, and brochures. CALC is a feature-packed spreadsheet which can turn boring numbers into eye-catching information. IMPRESS is the fastest, most powerful way to create effective multimedia presentations. Your presentations will truly stand out with special effects, animation and high-impact drawing tools. DRAW will produce everything from simple diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations and special effects. The Database User Tools give you all the tools you need for day to day database work in a simple spreadsheet-like form. They support dBASE or any ODBC or JDBC compliant database for industrial strength database work. | | | Scribus | Scribus brings award-winning professional DTP to Linux and *nix desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Since its humble beginning in the spring of 2001, Scribus has rapidly developed into one of the premier desktop applications for Linux. Called by Newsforge, "..one of the killer applications for Linux". | | | Thunderbird | Thunderbird is Mozilla's next generation e-mail client. Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry's best implementations of features such as intelligent spam filters, a built-in spell checker, extension support, and much more. | |
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Multimedia
Programs that let you record and edit audio and video and also turn your PC into a Home Theatre system with remote control access.
| Audacity | Audacity is a free audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. | | | Freevo | Freevo is an open-source home theatre PC platform based on Linux and a number of open-source audio/video tools. MPlayer and/or Xine can be used to play audio and video files in most popular formats. Freevo can be used both for a standalone PVR computer with a TV+remote, as well as on a regular desktop computer using the monitor and keyboard. Great when used with Linux Infrared Remote Control Software. | | | MPlayer | MPlayer is a movie player for Linux (runs on many other Unices, and non-x86 CPUs, see the documentation). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies, too (without the avifile library). | | | XMMS | XMMS is a multimedia player for unix systems. XMMS stands for X MultiMedia System and can play media files such as MP3, MOD's, WAV and others with the use of Input plugins. | |
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Emulators
There a numerous emulators for Linux. An emulator lets you runs programs that were written for other operating systems.
| DOSBox | DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. You can "re-live" the good old days with the help of DOSBox, it can run plenty of the old classics that don't run on your new computer! | | | Wine | Not technically an emulator. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. There is a commercial version of Wine targeted for gaming called WineX (recently renamed Cedega) available at Transgaming. | | | Xmame | MAME is an arcade machine emulator. Started in 1997 by Nicola Salmoria, MAME started out as a series of emulators for individual games. This series of emulators was combined into a single multi-game emulator. | | | xtrs | xtrs is an emulator for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I/III/4/4P (also the Dick Smith System 80). It includes lower case, the real time clock, hi-res graphics, serial port, parallel printer, mouse, cassette, sound and music output (requires OSS), 5" and 8" floppy disk drives in single and double density, and even hard disk drives. | |
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This is a work in progress to show what can be done on a Linux desktop.
Let me know if I've missed anything glaringly obvious or if you have any other comments/suggestions to :-
The Majority of the games mentioned above can be found at the Linux Game Tome.
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