FOSSwire

How long did you use to spend sitting in front of a PC or NES playing the classic Lemmings? Don't lie. That's right, countless hours.

Well, prepare to do it all over again in the open-source game Pingus.

Pingus is not just a Lemmings clone, it is a complete redesign from the ground up. New levels, new action commands, and the entire theme based on penguins is what this game is made up of.

The game starts you out with a basic storyline, and then drops you right onto Tutorial Island, with 22 full levels. The first few levels will remind you instantly of Lemmings (let's go!), but then you come across some new levels with new action commands to give the lem... err, Pingus, such as a jump command.

After completing the tutorial mode, the game abruptly ends, stating that the rest of the game is to come in another installment. However, that is not all that you are able to play. Along with the tutorial levels, over 250 levels are included with the game. While you cannot access these directly, and some levels are unplayable in their current state, you can open them with the level editor to edit them or play them as you see fit. The stored levels are available in /usr/share/games/pingus/levels on a standard Linux install.

Did I just say level editor? Yes, this awesome game comes with one, and it is a full-featured editor. You can create entire maps for the penguins to run on. In fact, the game was made with it.

Along with the game's excellently designed levels and seamless backgrounds and images, it also has a soundtrack. The music is somewhat reminiscent of music from the Lemmings games, and doesn't seem to get annoying.

The game does have its downsides however. One of them is its obnoxious CPU usage. On the level editor and map screens, your CPU usage may spike up a bit, even though the game appears to be not doing anything. While a minor flaw, it is still a bit of an annoyance when the laptop fan decides to kick on high when you least expect it.

Another small flaw it has is the fact that the music does not loop. If you take too long on a level, the music will just cut out and leave you in silence, only to be scared by the sudden revving up of your CPU fan.

Despite these flaws, I still highly recommend downloading this game by any means necessary. After all, who doesn't like telling mindless penguins what to do, even if it means killing them?

http://pingus.seul.org/

In my last post, I noted that the major upgrade to Feisty as of Tribe 1 was The Gimp. Now it's time to see what has changed in the latest installment, which will be released under the name Gimp 2.4.

The major change for this release seems to be a big usability overhaul. New defaults are now in place that make the Gimp look a little bit like Photoshop, but still has many features that make it unique.

As you can see from the picture above, Gimp has some major and minor tweaks to the default interface. First is the inclusion of a Tango-style icon theme. You now get to finally have icons that match your desktop.

A minor, but still important change, is the inclusion of a color picker in the default layout. This color picker is actually in Gimp 2.2, but it is relatively hidden in dialog menus.

The color picker has been removed from the main tool window on the left and everything color-related is now here.

Two notable features were shown at a Gimp event a few years ago, and only now are they starting to appear: Spot Healing and Foreground Select.

Spot healing is just like the tool in Photoshop. You define a place to "heal" from, then you click on the spots you want to patch up.

In the picture above, I removed the blue blob shown in the first screenshot of this post, only using the Healing tool.

Another feature from Photoshop that was in the Gimp first (but never went public until this release) is the foreground select. You simply doodle on a person or texture you want to select, and it will make a best guess at selecting the object. It still needs a little bit of work, but it works fairly well.

This is one of the Gimp updates that I definitely will be looking forward to as development progresses. It is now becoming more and more "usable."

In GNOME, it's really easy to take a screenshot of your system, you just hit Print Screen and a handy window pops up where you can save it.

For some reason, this functionality doesn't work with KDE out of the box, but that doesn't mean you can't take screenshots. There are many utilities that will allow you to take screenshots, but one that is built in to KDE is KSnapshot.

UPDATE: I've since been told that KDE does do this out of the box. Having only upgraded KDE and not done a new install for a few releases, it appears I was out of date! Still, this tip might come in handy for some people. I stand corrected!

You can invoke KSnapshot by going to the K menu and choosing Graphics > KSnapshot or pressing Alt-F2 and typing ksnapshot.

It will take a screenshot when it opens and you can save it from there or copy it to the clipboard for editing. However, if you don't want the one it's just taken, you can adjust the settings in the dialogue and click New Snapshot to take another one (or if you want to use advanced options like single window capture).

If you want KSnapshot bound so that it opens immediately when you hit Print Screen (and you're running a recent version of KDE), right-click it in the K menu, choose Edit Item and then set the shortcut key under Current Shortcut Key to Print Screen, or your desired key combination.