Anurag Bhandari

Adobe Shockwave is an advanced platform for 3D applications on the Internet, and online games benefit the most out of it. But unfortunately, Adobe never released a version of Shockwave for the Linux platform.

If you are a Linux user, worry not. Using Wine, you can easily play for favorite games made using Shockwave. Wine is a software that allows running Windows applications on Linux. Wine is an open-source, free software, and is now available as a stable 1.0 version.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Install the latest version of Wine.
2. Install the latest version of Shockwave for Windows using Wine. To do that, open command-line (Konsole/Terminal) and cd to the folder where Shockwave’s installer has been stored. Next, issue the command: wine Shockwave_Installer_Slim.exe. This will install Shockwave as it does in Windows.
3. Next, install the latest version of Mozilla Firefox for Windows using Wine, in the similar way as above.
4. After it’s installation, open Firefox, go to the desired URL containing your favorite Shockwave application, and viola! The Shockwave application is ready to be used.

The screenshot in the beginning of this post shows Miniclip’s Table Tennis game being played in Google Chrome installed in Linux using Wine.

[ To installed Google Chrome using Wine on Linux, refer to this excellent tutorial ]

Google is everywhere these days. Most of their products, or “innovations” as many people like to call them, usually get very successful. Like GMail, Orkut, Google Docs, and many more. Some time back, they decided that we, the people, need an all new browser that would redefine our browsing experience. So, here we have yet another browser. And the name is Chrome, Google Chrome.

Just a day before the launch of Chrome, a blog entry was made on the Official Google Blog on 1st September notifying the readers about the launch date of a beta of Chrome. That was when I came to know about it. So, I eagerly waited for the next day to arrive. Although I had my exam the day following the lauch date, I still preferred to wake up at night and be one of the first ones to download it.

My first attempt on downloading was when I went to the official Chrome site for it. From there, I got a 470KB executable which would download the actual Chrome browser from the Internet. As my modem has a tendency to disconnect very frequently, I made 3 unsuccessful attempts of downloading Chrome through that 470KB file. On some googling, I got a direct link to the actual Chrome installer which was around  7MB in size.

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Anwsers.com defines an easter egg as:

A hidden feature in computer software, a DVD, or a video game.

Over the past few days, I got to check out some cool easter eggs in the softwares I use often. I got to know about some of them from the Internet and the rest of them from a popular Indian computer magazine Digit. Although I was used to seeing these easter eggs in video games and movies, but softwares? I didn’t even know they existed in softwares too. Anyway, here I share 10 cool easter eggs worth mentioning:

Mozilla Firefox
Firefox needs no introduction. It’s one of the best web browsers available and is growing at a rapid rate. The following 2 easter eggs associated with Firefox work no matter which version you are using.

• Type about:mozilla in the address bar and hit enter. You’ll see a page with maroon background and white text written on it. Now what is written is in the style of Bible verses and tells briefly about the history of Mozilla and Netscape. This message varies from version-to-version, but the idea behind what is displayed remains the same. This trick even works in Netscape browsers.
  
• Another eater egg here is that when you type about kitchensink in the address bar, you are redirected to a webpage where you are shown an animated picture of a kitchen sink, designed wholly with ASCII characters.
  

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