Ubuntu® Linux® Bible: Featuring Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Third Edition

Chapter 17. Would You Like to Play a Game?

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Default games for Ubuntu

• Chess, Go, and Scrabble

• Arcade games

Games on UNIX-like systems such as Linux have come a long way from "Hunt the Wumpus," a text-oriented adventure and exploration game that I spent many an hour playing in 1982 on a PDP-11 running primordial UNIX. Today, as you'd hope, Linux games are sophisticated graphical applications with plenty of performance and eye candy. One thing that you'll see in many of the games discussed in this chapter is that Linux games also have a sense of humor, which I always find refreshing. Losing and laughing is almost as good as winning (at least, that's what I tell myself).

As emphasized throughout this book, Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for people, and people are supposed to relax and have fun at times. Computer games are the aspect of desktop computer systems that give us all the opportunity to escape and relax without leaving our desks—hmmm, I'm not sure that this is exactly where I wanted to go when discussing relaxation, but c'est le way it is.

Ubuntu comes with a small number of games preinstalled as part of your basic desktop" distribution, but you can easily install an even better selection by installing the gnome-games package. A huge number of other Linux games are available in the Ubuntu repositories and in source and package form on sites across the Internet. This chapter discusses a good selection of games that are available for Ubuntu, highlighting the fact that ...