Anyway, I have been looking for some cool free tool to do this for me and I have found SlimTimer. This tool is fairly simple, you basically make a todo-list and whenever you start working on something of the list, you click the item and the timer starts running. This all happens in a ‘client’ page, which you can simply bookmark (as a sidebar in Firefox).

On the SlimTimer website, you can view all your tasks and see the total amount of time spent per task (which may have been spread over any amount of time).

My only problem so far was that I had to keep my browser open while timing. Even the sidebar in Firefox is not perfect, because it gets in the way and if I accidentally close the browser it’s gone and the timing is stopped. Luckily, this issue is solved by viewing the page in Bubbles. (I guess there must be a Linux equivalent to Bubbles out there somewhere.)

Symfony was chosen for, as far as I am concerned, no apparent reason. But I think it came to my attention due to its growing popularity. Anyway, Symfony has a number of features that are not present in most of the other frameworks.

First of all, Javascript integration. Symfony allows you to enhance your application with Javascript, using mostly PHP!. AJAX is also pretty straightforward and Prototype is part of the package.
Furthermore, there are a few useful generators. The most notable is the admin generator.

Besides these features, Symfony has all the conveniences you would expect from a framework. It can really speed up a project once you know how it all works. I am currently in the process of doing just that, learning how it works. This is my first time actually using a framework, though, but I got the hang of it quite fast. I do have to look up all of the built-in functions, which is slightly annoying (Symfony’s reference documentation is not as good as, for example, PHP’s).

By the way, if you like using jEdit, like I do, there are some nice tips on how to use it with Symfony. Those tips should be useful for almost any framework, though.

New versions have been released since the time when I first played it, but the concept is still the same. The game is 2D and viewed from the side. The basic idea of the game is to build, mine and survive. As a player, you are in control of one or several small humanoid creatures… Clonks. They can dig, build, chop wood and do a whole range of other things. Mining is one of the most fun things (which is good, because it needs to be done often), because you get to dig a whole tunnel network underground. Survival is an important aspect of the game. The environment is never really friendly; it can rain, it can snow, it can freeze, there can be volcanic eruptions and so on. For example, while mining, you don’t want your mine to be flooded because of the rain.

Actually, you should see it for yourself. The old release is now free of charge (a registration key is provided). The new releases are shareware, but there are still many features available. You can use these versions on Windows. If you are using Linux, please read on.

Now on Linux!

The latest version of Clonk (currently a Beta release) has introduced a couple of gameplay improvements. The most significant improvement, however, has nothing to do with gameplay: the game is available for Linux!

I have just installed this release on my Ubuntu system and I must say that it works very well. It’s great to see that the developers of a less well-known game like Clonk are introducing their game to the Linux platform (they also ported it to Mac OS, by the way, great work!).

So, that is another addictive game to add to the Linux games list. How about getting it installed?

Basic installation guide (Linux)

Clonk is not completely open source (yet) and it has been released for Linux only recently. Obviously, it is probably not in your distribution’s package repository. Therefore we need to install it the unofficial way.

First of all, get the files for Clonk Rage.

Now make sure you have the following things installed on your system:

• SDL (Clonk requires SDL_mixer, you might have this installed already if you have more games on Linux)
• Timidity
• GTK+ >=2.8
• libstdc++6

If you don’t have these, the game might not work or just crash, so beware. You can probably find the packages you need by searching with your package manager.

Extract the contents of the previously downloaded archive to any folder you like (I just dumped everything in a folder in my home directory). You’ll probably want to make sure you have read and write permissions on whatever directory you choose, as to prevent privilege issues (if these might exist). Feel free to extract anywhere you like, though.

Now run the install.sh script which was included in the archive (run it from the directory where it was extracted). It creates a few files, including a (local) desktop entry. The Clonk Rage icon will now show up in your applications menu. I had a little problem with that, though, because it would not launch that way. I can start the game properly by executing the executable file from the installation directory, though.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this game as much as I do. Consider buying the game if you play it often; it’s a nice reward for the developers who are spending time to port this great game.

By the way, I might try to make a Debian package for Clonk if some of you think this game is Linux-worthy.

jEdit is a cross-platform editor. On Windows it works fine, on Mac OS it does too (I guess) and on Linux it should as well. Getting it installed on Ubuntu might be a hassle, though; it is not in the official repositories. There are 3rd-party repositories for jEdit, though, but I’ve tried those myself and those packages tend to install badly.

You might get it to work from the unofficial repositories, I am not stopping you. But I found that installing jEdit manually (well, it’s semi-automatic, in fact) went very well. So here is what to do:

1. Make sure you have Java installed. I recommend Sun’s version.
   Also make sure that this version of Java is your default.
2. Download the Java-based installer from the jEdit website.
   The latest development version (4.3pre9 at the moment of writing) should be a good choice.
3. Run the installer.
   This should be able from your file manager, but, alternatively, you can run:
   java -jar jedit4.3pre9install.jar
4. At the step that asks for installation locations:
   program: ~/jedit/4.3pre9
   shortcut: ~/bin
   man: ~/jedit/man/man1
   (~ is your home directory, eg: /home/joe)
   Note that the man page for jEdit will not be indexed by the man-pages this way. Don’t worry, you probably won’t need it.
5. Finish the installer.
   You might consider unchecking the API documentation, since you probably won’t need it either.

So now you have jEdit installed on Ubuntu. To see if it works, browse to ~/bin and run the file named jedit. Fine, it should work. You can start using it like this, but it would be great to be able to start jEdit from the applications menu like any other editor. Luckily, you can also do this for individual user accounts.

1. Open your favourite editor. This could be jEdit.
2. Make a new file with the following contents:

   [Desktop Entry]
   Name=jEdit
   Comment=Programmer's text editor
   Exec=/home/username/bin/jedit %F
   Icon=/home/username/jedit/4.3pre9/doc/jedit.png
   Terminal=false
   Type=Application
   Categories=Application;Development;WebDevelopment;
   Encoding=UTF-8
   MimeType=text/html; text/css; text/x-javascript; text/x-python; text/x-perl; application/x-php; text/x-java; text/javascript; text/x-php; application/x-cgi; application/x-javascript; application/x-perl; application/x-python; application/xhtml+xml; text/mathml; text/x-csrc; text/x-chdr; text/x-dtd; text/x-sql; text/xml;

   Replace username with your user name, so Exec and Icon point to the correct location.

3. Name the file jedit.desktop and save it in .local/share/applications (which is a hidden folder in your home directory).
4. Check whether the jEdit icon is now visible in your applications menu. You might have to login again before it shows up.

Well, that’s it. jEdit is now installed. Note that this is not a global installation; because we installed everything in the home directory, only one user can use jEdit. It shouldn’t be hard to install this globally, you’ll need to use different installation directories and be root, though.
I personally don’t think it is necessary to install jEdit globally; it is small and easy to install and it is not an official package, so you never know whether something will break if you install globally. I haven’t tested this method for a global installation, so I won’t post instructions about it either.

jEdit does not look very much like the rest of your software, because it uses Java for its appearance. You can tweak it a little to make it look a bit more native, though:
Launch jEdit. Go to Utilities › Global options and select Appearance. Uncheck all the boxes under Experimental options. Your jEdit windows should now be managed by your current window manager, so that will look better in most cases.