Xmoto is a motocross game with some neat ragdoll physics. The driver of the bike swings around, moves forwards and backwards and leans back and forth when the bike impacts or when you do loops. The best part of the game are the levels which are all quite professionally made and use various aspects of the game’s engine. Some of the levels have to be done with the bike upside down, and some need stylish flips.

The game doesn’t need much of a graphics card either, and if you can get direct rendering going, you can play it on low end onboard graphics. I’ve managed on a Unichrome that shared 8MB of main memory, and it does play on older chips although it is much slower except on parts without many textures.

In the hope of being simple, the window manager for GNOME leaves out many features, and one among those left out is window matching, which was present in its predecessor in GNOME, Sawfish. So, to perform the window matching functions, we need another program, Devil’s Pie.

Devil’s Pie uses s-expressions to Match windows and perform Actions on them. You put the s-expressions in files with names like filename.ds in your ~/.devilspie folder.

Examples:
1. Move GkrellM to the fourth workspace, above all other windows, remove window decorations and skip both the workspace pager and the tasklist.
(if
(matches (application_name) "gkrellm")
(begin
(set_workspace 4)
(above)
(undecorate)
(skip_pager)
(skip_tasklist)
)
)


2. Put the OpenOffice.org splash at the bottom of everything. I like looking at it when the desktop’s blank, but otherwise it’s annoying.

(if
(matches (application_name) "OpenOffice.org")
(begin
(below)
)
)


Those are just examples. Devil’s Pie can do a lot of stuff and just gets better with each release.

Links:

• Devil’s Pie Home Page
• A Devil’s Pie Wiki (up to date as of 29/05/07)
• The Official Wiki