ChatZilla is an IRC client built as a Firefox add-on and providing enough features to use it just like any other standalone IRC client. ChatZilla will fit best as an IRC client when you don't want to use a separate application for getting on IRC.

Over the years, Xfce gained a reputation of being a lightweight alternative for the two major desktop environments on Linux, KDE and GNOME. In this article I will overview 7 essential applications for the Xfce desktop environment, including screenshots, most popular features, strong and weak points.

World of Padman is an open-source, cartoon-style first-person shooter game available for Linux too, besides Windows and Mac. It is a wonderful standalone game based upon the Quake 3 engine.

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

The fourth alpha of Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago and since I covered it earlier in this article, here I'll briefly overview Kubuntu, the KDE-based distribution of Ubuntu. All the screenshots were taken after a complete dist-upgrade, so the software should be completely up-to-date as of today.

Almost one year ago, on August 13, 2008, the last version of Amarok 1.4 for KDE3 was released. Since Amarok 2 for KDE4 was launched, bringing a completely redesigned interface and changing mostly all the major design concepts, users of this great player divided into two groups, the ones who still like 1.4 better and the ones who look forward for a complete Amarok 2.x (which still lacks many features from the old 1.4).

PainTown is a 2D fighting game somewhat similar with popular titles like Street Fighter (it even allows you to play with a character called Blanka), with versions available for Linux too, besides Windows and Mac. The nice thing about PainTown is that it runs natively on Linux and it's a standalone game, so you won't need any emulator like NeoGeo to play it.

relst.nl: I have an old pc, it's from 2005. I mostly use Linux mint on all my PC's at school, but on my home PC it was getting rather slow and hoggy. I knew it was time to switch.

In the past I reviewed Minirok, which is a minimalist music player for KDE with a simple interface. Well, Decibel surely is its counterpart in GNOME. The version I'm going to talk about is 1.00 running in Ubuntu 9.04 with GNOME 2.26.

Xfe (X File Explorer) is a wonderful, fast and lightweight file manager for Linux built using the FOX toolkit with a customisable interface which can resemble the twin-panel style of Midnight Commander if needed.

Quod Libet is a GTK music player written in Python with support for various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, MP4 and WMA. Quod Libet has a different interface and a slightly different approach compared to players like Rhythmbox or Banshee, for example.

Rhythmbox is the default audio player coming with the GNOME desktop environment, featuring a clean, typical interface which is so common for GTK audio players. I could say that Rhythmbox has little missing features and it is rather complete.

Exaile is a powerful and complete audio player for the GNOME desktop environment, which can easily compete with more popular players like Banshee or Rhythmbox.

PCManFM is the default file manager in LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. Its goal is to offer a fast execution speed, providing in the same time enough functionality for a file manager of its class.

Epiphany is usually the first choice for GNOME users who want to use a web browser which is lighter than Firefox and integrates well with GNOME.

Thunar is a lightweight file manager included in the Xfce desktop environment. What are the features which come with Thunar, and what makes it a viable alternative to Nautilus?

I took some time today to install and take for a spin the latest version of KDE4 today, release 4.3 RC1. I installed the packages from the Kubuntu backports repositories, as explained in this tutorial. All the screenshots were took at 1280x1024 and desktop effects enabled.

A while ago I put up this article, reviewing 5 so-called 'essential' add-ons for Firefox. To continue in the same manner in this second part, here are 5 add-ons updated for Firefox 3.5 which can prove useful. Maybe not the most popular, but they definitely deserve a try.

A while ago I wrote an article called 13 Terminal Emulators for Linux, where I briefly reviewed all those popular shell-like applications and a few flavours of xterm or rxvt. In this article I will talk about Yakuake, a powerful terminal application for Linux, and also the KDE counterpart of Tilda in GNOME.

Eschalon is a turn-based RPG (role-playing game), which tries to reproduce the feeling of classic RPG games. It's closed-source, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, and it comes with a demo too. The full version is available as a download for $19.95.