Everyone knows what a Linux shell is -- you open up a Linux terminal window (such as Konsole or xterm), type in some commands, and there you are, using your Linux shell. Write your commands to a file, make it executable, run it, and you're a shell programmer. But did you know that there are different shells that you can use, and that each shell operates in a slightly different way?

When I have a few spare time or just want to loosen up a bit, I always indulge myself into playing some computer games. Since most of my extra time is very limited, I usually pick those that are less stressful and less time consuming. I go for the old-fashioned and graphics card-friendly puzzle and arcade games.

So as I sat down to Ubuntu, I was curious about the dreaded command line. Would it would suck me into the dark swirling abyss of Geeksterism?

Alien Arena is an open source First Person Shooter (FPS) that takes the fun extraterrestrial theme of games like Area 51 and combines it with the hard hitting deathmatch action of great shooters such as Quake and Unreal Tournament.

"Look through a list available packages for any free OS and you’ll find a sometimes bewildering choice of browsers, mail readers, editors, desktops and tetris-clones available. Despite this many will just blindly install the first one they’ve heard of. Is this a good policy? What good is all this choice if we don’t use it and what are those choices? ..."

The multiplatform, multilingual office suite OpenOffice.org announces the official release of version 2.4 with 9 new chart features, 5 PDF export enhancements, text to columns in Calc, rectangular selection in Writer, bug fixes, performance improvements, improvements supporting the growing library of extensions such as 3D OpenGL transitions in Impress, and much more.

Foresight Linux is a release that I hadn't heard of before they appeared in the "latest distributions" bit on Distrowatch when I was hunting for new review material. One of my favourite things to do is try releases I've not heard of before... And so we enter Foresight.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the open-source Linux kernel, was once mauled by a very small penguin while on a trip in Australia. The experience had a lasting impact on him and later inspired him to make a penguin the official Linux mascot.