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A couple of days before we had published a detailed review about the 'Red Eclipse' FPS. Hope you folks liked it! Now on to the news piece of yet another game, 0 A.D and updates about Ubuntu tweak, FVWM and Minitube.

0 A.D Alpha 4

For those who don't know, 0 A.D is an ancient warfare game, as the name suggests. This new Alpha 4 release named Daedalus sports the following new improvements to the already addictive game:

Added initial prototype version of opponent AI: It can train female citizens, collect resources, build houses, farms & barracks, train soldiers & send them to the enemy civ center.

• Improved fog-of-war rendering.
• Fixed terrain texture blending.
• Added opt-in automatic feedback system.
• Fixed foundation obstruction handling.
• Added support for build limits.
• Extended animal AI: Animals like Lions, Elephants, etc. can now fight back, and some escape farther away from perceived threats.
• Improved driver version detection code.
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• Various performance improvements.
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If you are so interested as to test this out, grab it from this PPA. Go ahead and try it out, you have nothing to lose!!

Official Release Announcement Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 Pre Beta

Ubuntu itself is updating to a new interface on the 11.04 release. So how can an Ubuntu tweaking application stay idle? I'm talking about Ubuntu Tweak, which provides users with a nice interface to tweak basic and advanced Ubuntu settings and clean up unwanted packages. The new version 0.6 is in pre beta stage, but I installed it on my Natty Beta 2 and found that it is half baked. The 'Apps' tab doesn't work at this time.

FVWM 2.6 window manager

You might be wondering about this strange new window manager I'm talking about. FOSS always gives you choices irrespective of whether you like it or not! FVWM( F Virtual Window Manager) is an odd project within the Free Software community, since we usually get frequent updates of all our applications. While being a FOSS project, FVWM follows large gaps between the release of their stable versions. The new version 2.6 has been released after almost 5 years of development.

Read the release announcement in their mailing list here Official website of F Virtual Window Manager. Minitube 1.4.2 Bug Fix Release

After installing Ubuntu, the first thing you used to do is install the Flash plugins contained in the 'ubuntu-restricted-extras' package, as no one can live without watching Youtube videos! There is enough criticism about the 64 bit flash plugin in Linux having performance issues which results in frequent crashes. This (along with 'freedom' issues) caused the community to cry for a Flash alternative. Open Web Video formats like WebM succeeded in doing this up to a certain level but the number of video sharing sites that support these types of formats are few, and average users just want to watch a video without going into the underlying details. There is a Desktop Youtube application called Minitube, advertised as 'Flash Free'. That means you don't need to install the flash plugin to watch Youtube videos using this app.

Minitube has released their new version 1.4.2 which is a minor one with some fixed bugs! Release announcement is here. You can install it from this PPA. But as of now, it isn't updated to 1.4.2. Wait for it, thats all I can say, or grab it from the source. If any one wants to know how, let me know in comments, I will definitely reply!

Another happy news, Youtube has transcoded all their newly uploaded youtube videos to WebM. Read the news here.