Free and Open Source blogger with an attitude
Right now I’ve been playing Urban Terror (or UrT), it is a First Person Shooter (FPS) game similar to Counter-Strike. The game was developed using the open source Quake III Arena engine and can be played under GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.
You can download Urban Terror binaries from Urban Terror Official Website
The game is available for 32bit and 64bit platform and is tested on Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) releases
A few years ago, I wrote about Linux Mint as an unofficial Ubuntu distribution that is preinstalled with proprietary codecs and plugins then I write a follow up article when the project has evolved into providing a user-friendly Linux distribution, with additional application but is still based on Ubuntu.
But now, the Linux Mint teams has taken another step forward by introducing Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), which is based on Debian GNU/Linux distribution (Debian-Testing or Debian Squeeze). LMDE features a new installer which was developed from scratch with Debian in mind, bleeding-edge application from the Debian-testing repos and the same proprietary software addons from Linux Mint own repositories.
LMDE is however is not compatible with Ubuntu repositories as there are differences between the binary and the configuration files. Those who are seeking for full compatibility with Ubuntu, should download Linux Mint standard edition instead. Another caveat is, LMDE currently is only available on 32 bit X86 platform and GNOME, with no immediate plan to release 64bit edition or with KDE environment, due to complications with the process of making Debian much more ‘friendlier’ to keep up with Linux Mint standards.
LMDE can be downloaded from its official website : http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php, it comes with a DVD ISO image (875 MB)
In a welcoming step, Broadcom finally released the the source code of its wifi (802.11n) Linux drivers under open source license. The source code can be found on the Linux staging-next tree at git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-next-2.6.git in the in the drivers/staging/brcm80211 directory. The open source drivers will support current chips (BCM4313,BCM43224, BCM43225) and it also acts as a framework to support future chips by Broadcom.
This can be considered as a significant move made by the company, as Broadcom chips are widely in use on laptops and netbooks in the market. Its competitor, Atheros, has already open sourced its drivers back in 2008, which in turn, made Atheros drivers much better supported on various operating system platform compared to Broadcom.
Previously, Linux users with Broadcom chip, have to rely on NDISwrapper utilities to enable the wifi functionality on their laptops.
There are times where I am required to calculate the day/month/year differences between two dates, which I found a little bit troublesome to do repeatedly even if it is just a simple estimate. So in turn, I created this mobile app to do the job, which greatly increase my productivity! Here i’m releasing the source code to DateDiff, which is coded and compatible with all JavaME phone:
DateDiff.jar – binary (MIDP 2.0)
datediff_src.zip (source code)
DateDiff is copyrighted by me, and is licensed under a BSD-like license, you can read the terms of use from the ‘About’ menu or from the source code.
Good news to old time gamers, now you can play Dune 2 on Linux operating system natively (without dosbox or other emulator) with Dune Legacy project. For the uninitiated, (to my best knowledge), Dune 2 is the first RTS game for DOS (by Westwood, then acquired by EA Games) that spawn several other popular games in the genre such as C&C, Red Alert, Red Alert 2, etc.
Youtube video of Dune Legacy :
The Ubuntu binary (playable under Lucid Lynx) is available from – http://www.myway.de/richieland/dunelegacy_0.96_i386.deb and http://www.myway.de/richieland/dunelegacy_0.96_amd64.deb
Naturally you would need the original data files and maps to play Dune Legacy natively on Linux. Binaries for other operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X) are also available from the Dune Legacy Project website.
Anticipating your favorite Linux distro releases? Now you can put on countdown widget in your blog and share your anticipation with the rest of the world.
Distro Release Countdown Widget
Both are provided from their respective official website, so you don’t need to worry about its accuracy. For the curious, here’s the sample of the countdown graphics
