45003513
submission
dartttt writes:
Dell has launched a new Ubuntu gaming desktop (first ever?) . Alienware customers can now choose either Windows or Ubuntu when buying a new X51. Ubuntu option is initially available to US customers only and the price starts from $599.
39373219
submission
dartttt writes:
In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is not an open platform anymore and Linux has everything they need: good OpenGL, pulseaudio, OpenAL and input support.
35993137
submission
dartttt writes:
John Carmack recently presented a keynote at QuakeCon. He said that Linux is still not a viable gaming platform and the two forays they have made have not been successful commercially. Valve announcing Steam Linux support changes things a bit but its a tough sell on.
34844631
submission
dartttt writes:
Blizzard has banned all Linux users who are playing Diablo III on Linux using Wine. A number of Linux users suddenly got a message from Blizzard that they can no longer use their account to play Diablo III any more.
34204087
submission
dartttt writes:
After more than 14,000 votes by Linux users and efforts by Brian Fargo, Unity 3D has added Linux support to their popular game engine. Starting with Unity 4.0, Linux will be supported as a publishing platform allowing Unity games to be played natively on Linux. Only standalone desktop games will be supported initially. There is no word on Linux support for game editor and web player.
32940319
submission
dartttt writes:
There was a very interesting session at UDS by Google developer Thomas Bushnell. He talked about how Ubuntu, its derivatives and Goobuntu (Google's customized Ubuntu based distro) are used by Google developers. He starts by saying 'Precise Rocks' and that many Google employees use Ubuntu including managers, software engineers, translators, people who wrote original Unix, people who have no clue about Unix etc. Many developers working on Chrome and Android use Ubuntu.
Ubuntu systems at Google are upgraded every LTS release. The entire process of upgrading can take as much as 4 months and it is also quite expensive as one reboot or a small change can cost them as much as 1 million dollars.
32899357
submission
dartttt writes:
Florian Echtler has developed an open-source driver for the Microsoft Surface 2.0 touch screen. According to him, the open source implementation works surprisingly well on Ubuntu 11.10. The process requires you to boot Linux on your Surface 2.0 in the first place. However, it can be done by just booting Ubuntu from a USB hard disk without modify anything on the original Win7 installation.
31253339
submission
dartttt writes:
Skeltrack is a Free and Open Source Software library by Igalia for tracking the human skeleton joints from depth images.
It is implemented with GLib and uses plain mathematics to detectthe human skeleton and although it does not use any database, it was inspired by Andreas Baak's paper:A Data-Driven Approach for Real-Time Full Body Pose Reconstructionfrom a Depth Camera
Skeltrack devs have recorded very cool videos showing Gnome Shell and Linux games being controlled through gestures.
31187351
submission
dartttt writes:
Dmitry Grinberg has successfully booted Ubuntu 9.04 on an 8 bit micro machine with 6.5 KHz CPU and 16 MB RAM.
Grinberg did this experiment on a ATmega1284p, 8-bit RISC microcontroller clocked at 24MHz and equipped with 16KB of SRAM and 128KB of flash storage. Since the RAM was too low, he added 30-pin 16MB SIMM to the machine and a 1 GB SD card to host Ubuntu image.
Minimum system requirements for running Linux are considered to be a 32bit system with proper Modern Memory Management Unit (MMU) and 1 MB RAM. The experiment was done to prove that Linux can successfully run on an 8 bit micro.
To get the world's slowest Linux Computer running, he had to write an ARMv5 emulator which supports 32bit processor and MMU. A similar machine can be made very easily and everything should come in about $20. He has also provided full source code and a porting guide.
31128045
submission
dartttt writes:
Adobe has released Flash Player version 11.2 with many new features. This is last and final Flash Player release for Linux platform and now onward there will be only security and bug fix updates. Last month Adobe announced that it is withdrawing Flash Player support for Linux platform. All the future newer Flash releases will be bundled with Google Chrome using its Pepper API and for everything else, 11.2 will be the last release.
26165406
submission
dartttt writes:
Not many people know that Kernel releases have their codenames. Most of the Linux 2.6 and 3.x kernels include a name in the Makefile of their source trees, which can be found in the git repository. They are not publicized as such but some of them are really hilarious. How does 'Pink Farting Weasel' sounds?
23897000
submission
dartttt writes:
To counter the piracy problem, Tiny Build Games who released No Time To Explain few days back, uploaded their own version of game on Pirate Bay. But there is a difference is this version and the original game that you can buy from the game website.
All in game characters wear Pirate hats and entire game is Pirate themed basically making it No Time to Explain 'Pirate Edition'.
