This one is probably aimed more at the geekier end of the market, but it is an application well worth covering.

There are many reasons why you might want to capture the raw network traffic that is entering and leaving your system. This can be for diagnostic purposes when something has gone wrong, finding out if there’s a rogue program on your network, or if you’re just curious about what communications are going on.

Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) is one of the most well known free software packet capturing and analysis tools available. It is cross platform, and runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and many other Unix-like operating systems.

A basic capture can be started by clicking the leftmost button on the toolbar and then selecting your primary network interface and clicking Start.

From that point on, Wireshark will capture all of the packets that are entering and leaving that interface. You can now get to work as normal, or do some action and come back and analyse the results later.

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ManiaDrive describes itself as “an arcade car game on acrobatic tracks, with a quick and nervous gameplay (tracks almost never exceed one minute)” and also as a clone of Trackmania.

What I can tell you is that ManiaDrive is a lot of fun, and extremely addictive at that.

Download the game from the site and on Linux, simply extract the archive and run ./mania_drive.sh. You will need 3D support enabled in your Linux distribution, or the game will run with terrible performance.

Once you’re up and running, you can get started straight away with the Beginner’s tracks. You drive a clapped-out Renault Clio around a simple track. The aim is to get your car through all the checkpoints and to the finish in the quickest time possible (beating the ‘Gold Time’ on each track unlocks the next, and is how you can progress through).

Once you’ve been taught the basics of the checkpoint system, how to run, jumps and more, you can progress into the real levels (under the Pro heading).

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Feed readers are quickly becoming very important applications in people’s daily workflows. Along with your email client and web browser, your feed reader is a hub of information.

RSSOwl is a Java-based application that is designed to run on pretty much all platforms - that includes Windows, Mac OS X and Linux distributions. Here, I’m reviewing version 2.0 Milestone 7 on Fedora 8, but the functionality should be identical wherever you run it.

Installation

You can quickly and easily download the right package for your operating system from the download page. With the Linux version, it’s a simple case of extracting the Zip file, and double-clicking the RSSOwl binary. You do however, need Java installed, no matter where you run it.

First impressions

Once RSSOwl loads, you’re presented with a screen that looks something like this:

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