Okay, so that may not be the goal of Fyre, but it does serve that purpose well for those interested. It’s really simple to do get a fancy looking image with Fyre, by running through a bunch of random parameters (Ctrl-R) and changing the background and foreground colours all over the place.

Fyre renders Peter De Jong maps, and since I don’t precisely understand what those are you had better read their about page. Basically, the image is a map of the probability that the point lies at the pixel, and the probability is defined by a funny equation. You change the parameters in the equation and you get many different looking chaotic graphs. It’s actually pretty cool to play with.

Fyre also has a nifty animation feature which animates the difference between two maps. It’s fascinating to watch the images morph into each other, but the animation produces an uncompressed .avi, so you might want to try ffmpeg to encode it into a reasonably sized file.

HDR Images allow you to show a larger range in the colours and intensity of different areas in your subject. Done well, they can yield some really beautiful pictures that showcase a large number of colours. To get a HDR image, you need to have a camera that can take shots at different exposure settings. You’ll also need a steady enough hand to get the shots properly, unless you have a tripod. Once you’ve taken the different shots (bracketing makes this much easier) you just need to transfer them to your computer and fire up qtpfsgui.

There, you just import the files and (if you’ve got some slight movement of the camera) activate the anti-ghosting feature. Don’t set the number of iterations too high or it’ll take way too long. Also, if the pictures have all been jerked around, then the anti-ghosting feature will not work very well, and you’ll get some double images. Once you’ve got the composite image, hit Tonemap, and play around with the settings. Some of the choices will be good for skies, and some others for vehicles and roads. The best way to find the nicest tonemapping operator is to set a low size for the preview and to try each of the operators, move the sliders around a little bit until you’re satisfied and remember there’s only so much a program can do, the rest is up to you

Spring (formerly TA:Spring) is a full 3D RTS. The game is played by getting one or more mods for the engine (which is completely GPL). The original goal was to run all Total Annihilation mods and 3rd party stuff. It seems to have passed that long ago and is now a damn complete game.

The best part of the game is the ability to control specific units from an FPS perspective. Selecting the unit and pressing ‘C’ puts you into FPS mode and you can control that unit directly. This is really cool when you try it out on aircraft in fierce dogfights and adds a really clever element to the gameplay, especially since full 3d air combat means you can fly underneath and above other aircraft (unlike most other RTS games) . There can be thousands of units in the game at the same time, but micromanaging isn’t a problem because some units have a rudimentary AI inbuilt which you can set. The terrain is great and deforms with sufficient damage causing craters and the like.

There are units in every medium and with the BA and other similar mods you’ll have units on sea, air, and land. The mods are usually well constructed and the sides balanced, so the multiplayer aspect of Spring (which is the most important part) is rarely neglected.

Getting the AIs to work seems to be non-trivial, so single player missions may not be extremely easy to setup, but the Random Enemies scripts should keep you busy while you learn. The Setup Guide is well written and easy to follow and they even have a Debian package repository to make installation of the binaries simple. There’s also a section for Ubuntu in the Setup Guide, so things can’t be much simpler.

I still have a large NTFS partition and was wondering how I could write to that drive. It was exceedingly simple. First, login as the administrator user (if you’re the only user on the computer, that’s you), and type in the console:
sudo aptitude install ntfs-3g ntfs-config

And if you’re one of those GUI junkies, just use Synaptic to select the two packages ntfs-3g and ntfs-config. Then accessing the Applications » System Tools » NTFS Configuration Tool will allow you to set what drives should be mounted with write permissions. That simple, and it can all be done from the GUI if you so wish.

To change your settings, you have to go to Applications » System Tools » NTFS Configuration

Syndication feeds are the easiest way to keep track of content that updates frequently, like blogs, news sites or your inbox. Most feeds are either a version of RSS or of Atom. You subscribe to the feed in your

Liferea is a feed reader for GNOME that supports the common syndication methods and less common ones through conversion filters. The interface is the same that most readers employ, a left and a right pane with the right pane divided into top and bottom panes. When you close it, it minimises to the notification area where it will display a number of unread feeds on its own icon (this can be changed)

Liferea stands for Linux Feed Reader (wonder why they didn’t name it Liferead, pronunciation would be so much easier!), and appropriately descriptive name. It occupies something between 12-25 MB of RAM, with the higher end of the range appearing when it uses the Mozilla rendering for pages that you open within the reader instead of in the browser.

LiveCD:

The LiveCD works flawlessly and you can even turn on desktop effects (an older Compiz) to get fancy transparencies and fading. There will be slight tearing on windows if you move them around too much. The video resolution will default to 1280×800, higher resolutions will be enabled by default in the next version of Ubuntu.

Installation:

Installation is straightforward and all the drivers necessary are already included on the Ubuntu CD. There is only Restricted Driver needed, for the Intel PRO 3945 Wireless Card. All other hardware is recognised out of the box. After installation you might want to change the names of the other partitions in grub or you might end up trying to boot your recovery partition when getting into windows.

Usage:

Touchpad:

The touchpad works fine and scroll and click work without any problem. For further configuration you might want to install the gsynaptics package. There is a bug where switching users will cause the touchpad to stop working for the new user. To work around this, either Lock Screen on the first user before switching users (use the Switch User… button in the locked screen dialog) or switch back to the first user and then back again to the new user using Ctrl+Alt+F7 and Ctrl+Alt+F9.

Desktop Effects:

The default effects are nice, but not nearly nice enough and there isn’t a nice application to manage all the settings. Besides, on this computer Compiz doesn’t work as well as Compiz Fusion does, though Compiz Fusion does sometimes fail to start. Compiz Fusion also works better and there is no tearing of windows or slight redrawing that happens sometimes. However, if you’re prepared to wait till October, you might as well do that, because Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon will use Compiz Fusion instead. However, if you do want to go ahead, follow this simple HowTo and then at the end, also install the emerald package.

To make Compiz Fusion run automatically, add it to your Sessions list (System » Preferences » Sessions). Here’s an image of how to add the two programs. Now that Compiz starts as soon as the session begins you can no longer log on to this user on anything but the first display since X.org only provides direct rendering on the first display. Also, since Compiz Fusion is still in development and not stable, it may crash as soon as you logon to the session. In this case, just Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and login again.

If that doesn’t solve the problem and you can’t login to your GUI, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to reach a virtual terminal, login there and then execute killall compiz followed by killall compiz.real Now login and disable Compiz in your Sessions manager.

Bluetooth:

To make Bluetooth much easier to use install the bluez-gnome package.

That’s about it. Enjoy.

Slingshot is a 2-d turn-based game with some really nice gravity simulation. The objective of the game is to destroy the other ship by controlling the power behind and angle of your projectile. The projectile then flies under the influence of the gravity field of that particular map. The planets vary from gigantic ones that can pull your particle into themselves easily if you shoot too close to smaller ones that will barely deflect it unless it is very close. It’s great fun to play this game against yourself and sometimes you can have fun by trying to make the projectile make lots of orbits before the time out kills it or by making it make really neat twisty orbits without hitting the other player. Hitting yourself is an even cooler thing to try when you’re playing against yourself, though if you’re involved in a close match with your younger brother the -2000 points may not be to your advantage, cool factor notwithstanding.

If you’re attempting to install the .deb on a vanilla Feisty Fawn installation, you will need the python-pygame package first. In a terminal, type:
sudo aptitude install python-pygame
Or use the GUI Package Manager (Synaptic) to install that package.

Little useless note: You can use a composite manager to adjust the transparency on the game window and it will still work.