If you’re an Ubuntu user looking to create the next Braid or Super Meat Boy, you may be wondering whether or not it’s possible given that you’re not running Mac OSX or Windows. Fear not — if anything, Linux is the home of programmers and those who work with code and software design, so you’ll soon find you’re right at home!

Ubuntu is built on coding, but that’s not all it can offer. If you’re used to using Wine to get the most out of your software capabilities in Ubuntu, then you’ll soon find that there are a lot of Windows design programs that will allow you to piece together animations, draw assets and create music that will work near-perfectly the majority of the time.

If you’ve noticed that iOS or Android games development is an attractive market, then you’ll be pleased to know that all the shiny new devices you see at o2.co.uk can be developed for on Ubuntu. Here’s a list of native programs that you can use to facilitate your games development process: Netbeans, code::blocks, jedit, Eclipse, MonoDevelop, vi/vim (old school).

Of course, you’ll also need graphics and assets, but what a lot of developers do until they’ve got everything in place is to use placeholder assets from other games or even just basic blocks with indicators on them to show their current state. There are a lot of aspects to a good game – art, music, design, mechanics, genre, good code – and all can be achieved by taking a look at the Ubuntu Software Center, which has a range of free software to assist you in achieving your goals.

There are also a lot of strong communities built on indie games development, from TigSource to IndieGames, and you’ll soon find that code is a language that transcends operating systems, bringing together everyone to help you solve a particular problem.

Now get out there, and go make games!

Just type the following in Gnome Terminal:

sudo apt-get install fortunes-ubuntu-server -y

Now execute below command several times to get really useful Ubuntu command line tips:

ubuntu-server-tip

Here are some examples:

Use lsof to find out which process has open handles for a file. ‘lsof +D /path’ will find all processes for the given path. This is useful for unmounting media.

If you know you typed a command or password wrong, you can use ctrl + u to delete the whole line or ctrl + w to delete just a word.

If you are using a PostgreSQL database, use “ptop” to monitor real time usage. Btw, export of PostgreSQL to file is easy.

Browse the command line history with ctrl-r and then type a few characters that you know are part of the command you are looking for.

A for loop in bash syntax: ‘for i in * ; do echo $i ; done’.

To make a backup without typing the full path twice: ‘cp /long/path/to/file/name{,.orig}’ to create a copy with the suffix .orig

This post is a part of series of Ubuntu Command Line Tricks posts in which I try to share really useful CLI commands — as it comes from terms “terminal command”, “console command”, they are to be executed in Terminal: Ubuntu Main Menu –> Accessories –> Terminal.

Need to print part of text file, e.g. the lines starting from 20th to 30th? It’s no need to use bash scripts or other things like python for that anymore! Here you go:

sed -n '20,30p' /etc/passwd

This command just outputs the line range from 20 to 30. Damn it, I was using the long bash equivalent for the same task for years

Have you ever tried to describe how to use video converter to person who is not too savvy in computers? Or how to cut some episode from home video clip? After a few attempt it becomes clear that tools like ffmpeg or similar simply aren’t applicable if you need to help who hadn’t ever used Ubuntu and Linux on the whole. That’s why in this post I would like to tell you about the most easiest way for video conversion and editing I have ever used – Movavi.

Movavi video converter is pretty cost-effective software for Windows and Mac OS X (oh yeah, I know this is Ubuntu related blog) that allows to perform massive range of tasks related to video converting. Movavi Video Suite comes as a bundle of video editing and processing tools, it includes conversion, editing, filtering, recording, burning video and audio discs, creation of slideshows and more.

A few words about functionality provided by Movavi Video Converter. In general it makes it possible to convert more than 170 video, audio and image formats into format you need. Movavi video converter software supports all possible video formats including AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV, ASF, 3GP, 3GPP, MKV, MP3, MOV, QT, VOB, IFO, MOD, DAT, M2T, MTS, VRO, FLV (full list of supported formats is literally impressive). Moreover it supports bunch of devices like iPad, iPod, iPhone, PSP, Nokia, BlackBerry, Android, Sumsung, etc. Besides other features provided by Movavi Video Converter I would also name the possibility to extract soundtracks from video & DVDs, Frame Capture functionality and sharing video capabilities.

This post contains portion of quality Christmas wallpapers for your Ubuntu. Every background presented here has resolution of 1280×1024 pixels so should fit almost any screen. Click ‘Save Link As…’ to save any wallpaper.

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This is multipage post dedicated to best of Ubuntu Icon Themes. Feel free to download and then apply any of them to make your Ubuntu look even better. If you wish to share something here — just contact me via e-mail and your icon theme will appear here soon.

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In this post I would like to share with you the website I came across recently — iomoio.com Online Music Store. It caught my attention as a website for mp3 downloads with more than competitive prices in comparison to its rivals and really huge range of music available. Just FYI, as for today it offers 13.3 TB of music that includes 57.5 thousand of artists and 163.5 thousand albums… No worries you’ll find those bearded gods of the guitar and all their albums ever

Here is the list of some major advantages of iomoio: all music is DRM free and comes with high 320 kbps mp3 bitrate, it means that downloaded music can be played on any mp3 player like iPod, Zune or other devices including iPhone and iPad. Moreover DRM free mp3 files can be copied between devices without any caveats of restrictions. Just like copy/paste action. Iomoio is easy as ABC, in order to download soundtracks, albums of your favourite rock band (or Justin Bieber, who knows?) it’s enough to go through simple registration and type in payment details. From that point you can buy and download mp3 songs, albums, soundtracks literally by a few clicks.

It is worth to add that once registered you will get 0.32 USD for two tracks for free so you would be able to test drive iomoio before to actually buy more mp3s there. That’s reasonable idea, I like it btw. It’s also very important that almost any mp3 track at iomoio is available for 0.16 USD, that’s much better price than Amazon or iTunes. Iomoio also provides pretty cool feature — using this mp3 music downloads store you can create ringtones online just in a few clicks. No need to cut part of mp3 file using some additional software — just click a few buttons at iomoio.com and get the ringtone ready for uploading into your iphone or other device.

One more thing, all music at Iomoio is legal so you can be 100% sure that downloaded music doesn’t break any licenses, regulations etc. If don’t resale or broadcast it of course.

If you are fan of command line like me and agree that in many situations it’s better/easier to use terminal than graphical interface, you should try terminal plugin for nautilus file manager. This smart plugin makes it possible to open popup terminal in any directory you opened in nautilus and use it for file manipulations or anything you want. If you still don’t have it installed you definitely should.

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A few days ago the media exploded with astonishing news that OpenOffice.org developers created fully independent The Document Foundation and developed new fork of OpenOffice.org suite — LibreOffice. Moreover Mark Shuttleworth said that “Office productivity software is a critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu”. So it’s time to see how LibreOffice looks like and get it installed on your Ubuntu!

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The latest stable version of the most inspirational music player for Ubuntu has been finally released. Banshee 1.8 comes with dramatical list of improvements, changes and bugfixes including official support of Amazon MP3 store, Miro Podcasts, reworked Apple devices support and much more. See below for more details.

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