Cube2: Sauerbraten - Another excellent open source FPS. One of the coolest things about it is that you can build and edit levels while you're in the game. There's also Quadropolis, a massive repository of goodies for the Cube engine including maps, scripts, and mods.

Eat the Whistle - If you're into uber-realist sports games, go ahead and scroll right past this one. If, however, you enjoy a little bit of humor and some old-school visuals, Eat the Whistle is a must-have download. Features sim, career, and arcade (complete with power-ups) modes.

FreeCiv - Another cornerstone of open source gaming. Inspired by Sid Meier's classic series, FreeCiv challenges you to develop your civilization from primitive roots into a thriving, modern society. Multiplayer mode support up to 30 (yes, 30) players. With more than 100 playable nations and 29 translations, FreeCiv is a truly international Time Waster.

FreeDroid - A modern take on the C64 classic Paradroid. It's a rich, futuristic RPG with plenty of robot butt kicking. In addition to dozens of different weapons, there's also a wide range of magic attacks, and you can even take control of your enemies and use them against each other.

Frets on Fire - If you've been looking for an excuse to rock out with your keyboard, go download Frets on Fire now. Tell your office mates your learning to play like Vadim Pruzhanov. Sure, he plays a different kind of keyboard, but it's still badass.

Glest - This fantasy themed RTS pits the opposing factions of magic and technology against each other. Do battle with mages, dragons, archers, horsemen, ornithopters, and more. If you grow weary of Glest itself, there are plenty of mods you can download to breath new life into the game.

Globulation 2 - A slick RTS that lets you focus on the "S" by intelligently handling part of the nettlesome micro-management this type of game usually requires. The game's built-in tutorial will help you learn how to build a powerful creature civilization that will be the envy of...er...other creatures.

Grid Wars 2 - There are times when playing this game makes you feel like you're trying to take on Asteroids, Tempest, and Gyruss all at once. If you like space shooters, bright, stunning visual,s and frantic gameplay, Grid Wars 2 will keep you riveted.

Hedgewars / Wormux - Two different takes on the turn-based goodness inspired by Worms. Both games feature awesome, cartoony graphics and fun gameplay, though I'm partial to Wormux (it may have something to do with the Gnu cannon).

LinCity - This popular open source city simulation hit version 2.0 this year, and it's looking better than ever. Manage your resources, keep people happy, and watch your creation grow into a booming metropolis - or cram everyone into spaceships and get the heck out of dodge - either way, you win!

Neverball - If Marble Madness was cool, Neverball is absolute zero. Use your mouse to tilt the playing surface and manouver the ball to collect coins and reach the goal marker. The download also includes Neverputt, which is exactly what you think it is - a tilt-and-roll miniature golf game.

Phun - Two-dimensional physics sandbox tomfoolery! Create all kinds of crazy arrangements then turn Phun loose and see what happens. Objects can be made out of different materials, and they react in different ways. See how gravity, friction, and wind affect things. If only grade 12 physics had been this much fun...

Scourge - Scourge bills their project as a "graphical Rogue-like game." If that's true, think of Rogue as the plate and Scourge as a multi-layer, fancily decorated cake piled atop it. It's packed with open source Dungeons and Dragons style action. The project has some ambitious goals and is looking for contributors - if you enjoy playing it and can offer your skills, find the team on the #scourge IRC channel on Freenode.

Smokin' Guns - Take a Quake3-powered FPS, slather on some Briscoe County, Jr., and you've got Smokin' Guns. You can almost smell the black powder and road apples. It's good, old-fashioned, Wild West fun.

Vacuum Magic - If Luigi's Mansion left you thinking all vacuum-based games sucked, give this 2d side-scroller a try. It's just you and your mystical 'vacuum field' against all manner of nefarious critters. Suck in certain beasts and food items and you can spit 'em back out to inflict damage.

VDrift - Ever wished you could be just like Vin Diesel? I wouldn't go sharing that with too many people. On a related note, VDrift is an awesome 3D drift racing sim. The latest version boasts a smarter AI, better physics, new sounds, and improved overall performance.

Vega Strike - VS provides the backbone for a number of remix projects (like Pi Armada, Privateer Gemini Gold, and Parallel Universe). Explore space, build a trading empire, and blast your opponents to space dust. Plus, they just got their 'Super Ultra Cool Sound Systems' (SUCSS?) working last month.

Warsow - Warsow's developer credit Quakeworld, Quake CPMA, Jet Set Radio, and Speedball for inspiring aspects of their game, and it's a combination that really works. The game's fast pace and cell-shaded graphics work well together. Other cool features: dual firing modes (weak and strong) for weapons, wall jump, ramp slides, dashing, and dodging.

Widelands - If you enjoyed playing the Settlers games and haven't tried Widelands yet, now's the time. Lead your tribe to glory in single-player mode, or go multiplayer on your LAN or over the Internet. You and your friends can unite to form glorious new empires - or just try to kick the snot out of each other.

Wolfenstien: Enemy Territory - Mein Leben! Ok, so that was from the old, old Wolfenstein. The idea is the same: shoot all the bad guys or they'll shoot you (or blow you up). The links will take you to Planet Wolfenstein where you'll find downloads for all three OSes, map editors, source code, and more.

Yo Frankie! - Built on the Blender Game Engine, Yo Frankie is as good a 3d platformer as you'll find for free. There's lots of lighthearted action to enjoy, and new levels are constantly being developed by an enthusiastic community.

Just a few days after pushing out the first release candidate for Firefox 3.5 to beta testers, Mozilla has made Firefox 3.5 RC2 available to the general public. While the only way to test out the first release candidate was to install Firefox 3.5 beta 4 and upgrade from within the browser, anyone can download and install the latest release candidate... or you can just wait until the full version of Firefox 3.5 is released, which should happen any day now.

Firefox 3.5 offers a ton of bug fixes and new features including:

• Private browsing mode that doesn't save your history or cached data when your browser session is over
• Tab tearing feature that lets you drag a tabs between browser windows or drag a tab into a new window
  
• Watch a video in your browser without any plugins or external programs

Sure, some of these features have been available in other browsers like Google Chrome since day one. But it's nice to see them coming to Firefox. Firefox 3.5 RC2 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

When it comes to lightweight Linux distros, there are two key names people usually mention: Damn Small and Puppy. They're both great, but if you'd prefer a bit more polish on your desktop, the Macpup Opera remix might be just what you're looking for.

If you're an Opera fan and a Linux experimenter, this distro is a double win for you. As you'd guess from the full name, Opera (9.64) is baked in. SeaMonkey is also included, and other browsers are just a repository away. MacPup bundles additional programs for just about every common task, including apps like Transmission, Gnumeric, AbiWord, Gxine, and Xfburn.

Enlightenment e17 handles window management duties, so you can skin your desktop with any of the themes available at Get-E.org to customize your experience.

Since it's Puppy-based, you can roll-your-own distro using Remaster once you have things configured the way you want and burn your creation to a CD or write it to a USB flash drive.

Macpup runs beautifully on minimal hardware and it's an excellent distribution for older machines. Even in a VirtualBox VM running 384Mb memory, performance was solid - especially after installing to the virtual hard drive.

You may not have read much about Lotus Symphony - OpenOffice.Org casts a pretty big shadow over other free Office competitors. Like OpenOffice, IBM's cross-platform office suite is based on the Open Document format and is a very capable alternative to Micorosoft Office.

Symphony doesn't provide the same number of tools as Office or OpenOffice, but it does handle word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tasks. The latest release adds a much needed piece of functionality to Symphony - the ability to open files created using Microsoft Office 2007 (though files can only be saved in 2003 or 2000 formats). A Flash-based presentation of Symphony's features is available for viewing, and there's also a transcript available if you would rather read them yourself.

One I particularly like is the tabbed interface. As with the tabs in my browser, it keeps my workspace just as tidy whether I've got a single document or dozens open at the same time.

The suite is roughly a 200Mb download for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is available from the IBM web site. There's also a large, online library of clipart for you to utilize in your documents.

VirtualBox is a free virtualization application for Windows, OS X, or Linux. Like VirtualPC, or VMWare, VirtualBox lets you run an operating system within an operating system. Say, for example, you want to test out Ubuntu Linux without installing it or even logging out of Windows. Just download the Ubuntu installation disc image, fire up VirtualBox, and load the disc image.

Today VirtualBox 3.0 beta 1 was released. The update brings:

• Support for up to 32 virtual CPUs
• Direct3D 8/9 applications on Windows guests
• Support for OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux, and Solaris guests

There are also a number of bug fixes including better virtual mouse drivers, improved suspend/resume functionality on Solaris hosts, and GUI enhancements. You can read a more detailed list in the release notes.

VirtualBox 3.0 beta is pre-release software, and it could contain some bugs. I wouldn't recommend using it if you're afraid of mucking up your system, but the beta does provide a sneak peek at where this program is heading. The beta is available for download for a number of platforms including Windows, OS X, Solaris, and a whole slew of Linux distributions.

There are plenty of people out there who would be willing to give Linux a try if Linux UI designs looked more like Mac OS X. Mac4Lin brings Apple's UI design to a Linux install near you, including great details like app icons and even the Dock. It looks like the Mac4Lin project had been stagnating for a while, but it's finally at v1.0, and looking good.

Mac4Lin works on a variety of Linux flavors, including Ubuntu 9.04 and GNOME 2.26, but there's no KDE version (yet). A lot of third-party apps that use GTK for skinning, like Firefox and Songbird, look great in Mac4Lin. An unstall script is also included in the latest version, in case you decent you don't like the OS X look, and you'd rather go back to your default UI.

Everyone had a bit of a chuckle when Opera coyly announced that they were about to "reinvent the web," the other day. I certainly had my doubts. After all, we had nothing to go by other than a bright red background, a little cloud, and some comments buried inside HTML code.

While I'm not certain I would call what Opera has done with Unite (version 10 of its browser) a reinvention of the web, it's certainly a clever, inventive twist on the run-of-the-mill web browser.

So what is it?

Unite sits in Opera's side toolbar and adds various server features to the browser. By default it includes file, media, and photo sharing, a web server, chat room, and "fridge" for storing notes. There are no additional Unite services available yet, though it's safe to assume that community-produced options will start appearing soon (developer resources are listed here).

You configure your sharing options - choose a base directory, set access permissions - and Opera provides a URL you can provide to your friends. Sure, there are hundreds of websites we already use to share media, leave each other messages, and chat, but Opera Unite lets you do it with a single registration and without uploading any of your content to a remote server.

Unite's sharing pages render just fine in other browsers, so you friends don't have to be running Opera. As with previous Opera releases, it's available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

The browser itself hasn't changed - it's still Opera 10, love it or hate it. The new Unite functions are very clever and do add a certain amount of cool factor. It will be interesting to see if the new features can increase the size Opera's fan base.

Take Unite for a spin and share your thoughts, or have a look at the gallery (work in progress)!

If you've been looking for a way to stream music from your iTunes library on the web that "just works," you should give pulpTunes a look. With pulpTunes, it's extremely easy to set up a stream at a private URL, and even password protect it. Even better, it's available on all platforms.

The basic premise of a web server for your music is pretty cool, but pulpTunes throws in a lot of other iTunes-ish perks, including AAC support, album art, and iTunes DJ support. You can also download songs from your iTunes, or share a direct link to a song or playlist with your friends. That's a lot of features for an app that's so simple to set up.

[via AppScout]

I've enjoyed using the preview releases on my MSI laptop (due in no small part to its ability to sleep and resume better than Ubuntu on my system), and at long last the big day is finally here. After being pushed back, Fedora 11 is now available to the public.

The new version ships with either Gnome 2.26.1 [torrent] or KDE 4.1.2 [torrent]. One of the biggest additions to Fedora 11 is OpenChange, which provides full MAPI connectivity to Microsoft Exchange servers. It's the first open source implementation of the MAPI protocol.

For a complete list of what's new, check out the release notes from Fedora - they're available in 40+ languages at Fedoraproject.com. The US-English overview is presented here and a list of changes for desktop users is right over here.

It's not a lab-quality demo, but you can see the Fedora 11 preview outrace Ubuntu 9.04 in the video above. It's a solid distro, and well worth downloading.

Mozilla has just pushed out a new version of Firefox 3.5 beta, which it's dubbing beta 99. Now, the last public beta was Firefox 3.5 beta 4, so either Mozilla went through 94 builds that they didn't feel like telling you about, or this is pretty close to the final product.

There's not a lot of information about the changes between 3.5b4 and 3.5b99. But several users have reported problems displaying some web content including errors with Wordpress 2.7.1's admin pages and problems displaying some elements of web forum pages.

You might want to hold off on upgrading until the kinks have been worked out. But if you just can't resist, you can upgrade from Firefox 3.5 beta 4 to beta 99 by clicking the Help button in the menu bar and then selecting "check for updates." You can also download Firefox 3.5 beta 99 from Filehippo and several other file download sites, although it's not yet available from Mozilla's Firefox beta download page.

Update: It looks like the preview release includes bug fixes, JavScript engine updates, and improved support for OGG based audio and video playback.

Apple is taking the beta label off of Safari 4 today amid a flurry of news at WWDC. A public beta of the web browser has been available for Mac and Windows since February, and in fact when you go to the Safari download page, you're still greeted with a beta version of the browser. We're guessing the full version will be available later this afternoon. Update: It's available now.

Apple claims Safari 4 runs JavaScript up to 4.5 times faster than Safari 3, 4 times faster than Firefox 3, and 8 times faster than Internet Explorer 8. The company says the browser loads HTML web pages 3 times faster than Firefox 3, although the company admits that performance can vary from system to system. I'm going to venture a guess that it may differ from web page to web page as well.

When OS X Snow Leopard is released later this year, Apple says Safari will be able to run as a 64-bit application, boosting performance by up to 50%.

Safari 4 features a Google Chrome/Opera style new tab page which provides you with thumbnail shortcuts to pages you visit frequently. The browser also features full page zoom, and a smarter URL bar with auto-complete functionality.

Safari 4 is available for Windows XP, Vista, or mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer.

Update: It's worth pointing out that Safari 4 is also the first non-beta browser release to get a perfect score on the Acid3 test.

Update: Nope, sorry, nope...Chromium still beats Safari on V8 (rather soundly, at that)...Dromaeo results in in a few minutes! --Lee

Update: Ok, on Dromaeo the results were much closer. My Chromium Nightly Build won 26 categories while Safari claimed 23. I tried several Chrome Experiments, and they generally run much more smoothly on Chromium. --Lee

[via Engadget]

The first line in the game description of Hedgewars is "each player controls a team of hedgehogs." Ok, where do I sign up? Hedgewars is similar to old-school games like Worms Armageddon or Scorched Earth, in that your weapons can remove chunks of terrain from the playing field, deforming the game board and destroying your opponents. Your hedgehogs take turns moving and attacking with everything from baseball bats to dynamite.

The game would be pretty fun to play against a computer, but it gets better with the addition of multiplayer online games, and even tournaments. Go tap into the community at Hedgewars.com to find teammates and opponents. Hedgewars is free and open source, and also has a recent Mac port, so friends on all operating systems can get in on the hedgehog-battling action.