● 05.23.09

● Links 23/05/2009: Gaming, Phones, and Sub-notebooks

Posted in News Roundup at 5:53 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Kickfire is having a contest where you can win a Kickfire appliance. You’ll have to compete with me, of course, and others who want to win the ultimate Linux device but we’ll all have fun doing it.

• Operating systems aren’t immortal beings, and by rights, there can’t be (there shouldn’t be) only one. McKenzie reiterates Brian Proffitt’s take on the Freeform Dynamics report, highlighting the idea that visual artists and graphic designers generally find using Linux less appealing (or workable) than those in IT departments, or even generalized office workers.

• I’ve been very impressed with the latest Ubuntu and it seems that the polish goes far deeper than just the eye candy.

• Next week I’m off to Melbourne and the office lent me a nifty 3G USB wireless dongle, a Huawei model E169, supplied by Optus.

Events

• An agenda has been posted for the FreedomHEC Taipei open source conference in Taiwan. Scheduled for June 10-11, the conference focuses on embedded hardware running open source Linux, and includes presentations on Linux fast-boot technology, GPL licensing, the Qi bootloader, and Coreboot.

• The Red Hat Open Source Forum will explore how to carve out costs with open source technologies in the current economic climate. Taking place in London on 16 June, 2009, the full day conference, for IT professionals will feature testimony from Red Hat partners and customers on the benefits provided by open source solutions.

Applications

• GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer program that Linux folk have used for ages. It allows you to turn one terminal into many, and run processes even after logging out. In this article we will give a brief overview of screen usage for the uninitiated, then talk about how Ubuntu’s defaults and new screen-profiles package have taught us about new and wonderful features of screen.

• Gnome Art is an art website which allows you to download and install various items such as icons, backgrounds, desktop themes, login window theme and gtk engine. This website comes with a very interesting application which is in the Ubuntu repositories. If you want to install it, run this in a terminal:

• Yesterday, I took a day off from serious things like redesigning the library structure of KOffice, working on the Krita part of the redesigned KOffice website, trying to optimize the hell out of freehand painting and several other things, like being too sick to actually think straight for two consecutive moments and so not making much progress with any of these things.

• I took a holiday, in short, a chance to add a nice little feature to Krita: image backgrounds.

Games

• Regnum Online, a Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game that has a native Linux client offered by its developers (NGD Studios), has received a major overhaul. Regnum Online is one of the very few MMORPGs that has a native Linux client, but now its own game engine got a whole lot more powerful. The game engine has been reworked greatly and is now known as NG3D2.0, but later this year they already plan to introduce another major update on top of that.

• Koonsolo is starting production on their next game, but as you might know this can be quite costly especially for a small game developer. In order to gain some funds quickly, they are doing a promotion and sell their current game ‘Mystic Mine‘ at a huge price discount!

• With the Friday night release, Linux-friendly space MMO Vendetta Online has launched Dynamic Warfare: a new long-term battle and large-scale warfare mechanic designed to permit factional conquest of geographical areas.

Desktop Environments

• EarCandy

• [...]

• Gloobus

• [...]

• Tracker Search

• If you’ve got a netbook, then you’re probably wishing you had a little more vertical room on your monitor. The default setup on GNOME includes two panels that take up valuable space at the top and bottom of your screen. Here’s a few tips to free up some space on your GNOME Desktop layout.

• It is the time to announce the new version of Lancelot that will be shipping with KDE 4.3.

Devices/Embedded

• The $659.42 (Linux) and $765.78 (XP) price points won’t help its cause either. For these prices, UMID could’ve used an aluminum chassis and maybe an OLED screen and higher-capacity 32GB SSD.

• At Computex, Intel and Amahi plan to demonstrate an embedded version of the latter’s Amahi Linux Home Server software designed for Intel Atom N270 processors. The open source Home Digital Assistant (HDA) will provide media sharing and backup on integrated media servers and home routers, says Amahi.

Phones

• Behold the HT-03A, that according to this Japanese blog (memn0ck.com) is DoCoMo’s future Android powered phone. The HT-03A running Android 1.5 Cupcake (aka HTC Magic) (Eric Lin introduced us to it on video here).

• Speaking at a press conference in Japan, Keisuke Ishii, board member and director of the Mobile Terminal Business Unit at Panasonic Mobile Communications, said the company is “seriously considering developing an Android-based handset and entering overseas mobile phone markets in fiscal 2010.”

Sub-notebooks

• Most Linux distros are suitable for netbook use. But fine-tuning your particular flavor of netbook by finding an even friendlier Linux distro isn’t too difficult. Matching up your rig’s configuration: screen size, devices, and drivers — and your own style of work and play — with the most conducive Linux distro, you’ll get the max out of your mini-laptop.

• Intel’s new operating system, designed for cloud-computing devices like smartphones and netbooks, is a potentially fatal stab wound to Microsoft’s operating system empire.

• [...]

• Intel’s decision to develop Moblin was clearly driven by the success of smartphones and netbooks, both of which rely on the cloud to do most of the processing and storage that traditional PCs perform on the device itself. Microsoft has tried to float the idea that it will survive the obsolescence of traditional PCs and laptops because of the largely spurious idea that Windows 7 is optimized for netbooks.

Free Software/Open Source

• Talking about Alfresco’s business strategy I happened to mention that the European open source observatory released guidelines for open source procurement.

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