Linux has games. I'm not just talking about solitaire, chess and mines; I'm talking about the dozens of great 3D first person shooters, puzzle games, role-playing games, community games, simulators, and more.

Many distributions have special releases around Christmas and New Year. I was planning to look at some of these this month like last year's Ubuntu Christmas Edition. But instead I found a release that's useful enough to maintain all year around. ZenEdu is a Live distribution that packs a whole bunch of educational tools on top of the Slackware-based light-weight and zippy Zenwalk Linux.

Virtualization is the technique of running a "guest" operating system inside an already-running OS; for example, Windows inside Linux, or visa-versa. This article compares four virtualization products available for Ubuntu Linux: the free, open source Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the newly-available, commercial Parallels.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, will on Thursday begin making commercial applications available to Ubuntu users directly through the desktop, in a step designed to simplify software installation.

A first-person shooter Star Wars video game, released in the US on 1 March 2005. It was developed and published by LucasArts for the Microsoft Windows and Xbox platforms.

The game is set during the events of the Clone Wars that started at the climax of the movie Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. In the game, the player is expected to take command of a Clone commando team, made up of elite Clone troopers.

Subtitles may not mean much for the English-speaking part of the world, but for the rest of us, they are the difference between truly enjoying a movie or just watching the screen, trying to decipher the events. While Windows has a nice variety of tools to manipulate subtitles, Linux applications too can accomplish such tasks. From editing to ripping to converting, here is a list of some useful tools.

"The SeaMonkey project has released SeaMonkey 1.1.8, an update that fixes seven security vulnerabilities, including three rated as critical, one high, one moderate and two low, including the unauthorized directory traversal due to a bug in the chrome protocol handling..." ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/seamonkey/releases/1.1.8/

As a Linux user, I've found it difficult to subsidize my computer habit. Oddly, more people were willing pay to see me rock out on a set of strings than finger-tap like Eddie Van Halen on my keyboard. Go figure.