OpenMW

Just wanted to take a second to show the new OpenMW Wordpress theme that I made! Doing the phpBB forum next, and then the wiki...

How Fark Does Patents

Following up on my recent post on patents, here's a (WARNING: strong language) blog post from Fark about their recent troubles. Good to see more people calling this stuff out for what it is.

Patents in the Blagosphere

Patents seem to be all the rage at the moment, ever since NPR did a piece called "When Patents Attack!" It's a bit dry, but gives a really good overview on the current patent situation. Well worth a listen, or a read (pdf) if you prefer.

The Economist also recently did an article entitled "Patents Against Prosperity" that gives a revealing look into the ridiculousness of recent patent legislation.

And then there's this recent post on Google's own blog, calling out its competitors for effectively ganging up on the open source Android platform. In an update to that very post, it looks like the Department of Justice was having none of it, going so far as to slap the GPL on all acquired patents:

"All of the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2, a widely adopted open-source license, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license for the Linux System."

Here's hoping all of this recent dialog pushes patent reform into public discourse. I've got my fingers crossed!

Linus Torvalds moves to XFCE.

Albeit grudgingly, Linus Torvalds himself has gotten fed up with Gnome's disregard for usability, and has switched to XFCE. Along with Ubuntu Studio's somewhat recent switch, this is great news for XFCE, hopefully heralding further adoption and contribution to the project.

So nyah. :P

A Year In The Life

So it's a little more than a year since my last post, but I'm sure you'll forgive me. What's happened in the world of Linux gaming!?

Well, nothing revoutionary. But there have been some important and exciting steps forward. On my ATI 4670 card, I can now play some modern games, such as Doom 3 and UT2004, using the open source driver. I am using the r600g driver provided in the xorg-edgers ppa. While it's disappointing to have to use an unstable, unsupported external repository just to get basic functionality out of my hardware (yes, I just called speedy 3d acceleration "basic functionality", welcome to the world of the User) this is an unprecedented event in Linux for me. I'll be excited to see if this driver makes it into the 11.10 release of Ubuntu.

Hot on the heels of my fresh driver adoption, I gave 0 A.D. another whirl. I was excited to finally be able to get my hands dirty with this forthcoming open source game project, and it did not disappoint. While the game is still in early alpha, and only very basic gameplay is implemented, I had a grand time goofing around with it. This project is very promising, keep your eye on it.

A few more things: I've also been following the OpenMW project very closely. Unfortunately, development has been a slow trickle, though a constant one. My fingers are always crossed that development speeds up, but given the track record of projects like this, it's not likely. XFCE also finally implemented the freedesktop.org menu specification, which is awesome, but it just means that now I'm in the market for a good menu editor. Lastly, I got nQuake and Skulltag (a Doom port) working on my machine, which is tons of fun.

Slowly but steadily we are moving forward, which is great. Things could be better all around, but for now I'll enjoy what I can!

Busy busy

Sorry I've kind of abandoned this. I plan to post lots more when I have time, but I have been super busy with work. Stay tuned!

10.04 Tomorrow!

I've been busy busy with work, with no real time to post. But Lucid Lynx comes out tomorrow! Wee!