OpenTyrian: Free arcade awesomeness

During our early video game years we used to pump coins in magical machines that would entertain us for as long as our pocket could handle. There is something really awesome about those arcade shooters and it's not just good childhood memories that pull us to them. It's the simple fun of playing them: blinking lights everywhere, quick reflexes, thousands of ships to destroy, upgrading your own ship with cooler-stronger weapons, playing the same level for 21st time in order to get it right. Not many cool arcades would hit our humble PC screens, but Tyrian was one of them.

Tyrian was released by Epic Megagames(the usual suspect) in 1995 and it was brilliant. It had everything that we loved about arcades. OpenTyrian is a remake of the original game by a group of dedicated developers. Of course as the name implies it is open source and free. It is faithful to the original and it even has an extra level.

The game takes place in the far future where as usual mankind is in trouble. The plot in this kind of games does not matter but Tyrian is kind enough to provide us with one for whoever wants it. There are datacubes that we gather and after each level we we read the new data that progresses the story. During the levels we gather coins to upgrade our ship with bigger weapons, better shields and other cool enhancements.

Download the game, grub your joypad and start killing thousand of spaceships throughout the galaxy.

Linux.fm: Broadcasting the code

This must be the geekiest most useless project in the history of geek IT projects. Linux.fm is an internet radio station that broadcasts a read version of the source code of a random kernel source file. WTF? It uses eSpeak synthesizer for reading the source file. Each time you reload the page it reads a new source file. The whole project is dedicated to Dr. Sheldon Cooper, the asexual super geek character from Big Bang Theory. You 've got to hear it to believe it....

Google announces new Operating System

After Google announced android a couple of years back (that aims at the mobile market) the whole buzz about a Google OS went away. Suddenly yesterday Google dropped a bomb on the IT world. The company announced the Google Chrome OS, an operating system that aims for web use.

Google already supports everyday use with web-based application such as google docs, email, youtube etc and in addition there are countless application on the web for just about everything. Google aims at the netbook market and in the announcement the company metions that is already in talks with manufactures.

Chrome OS supports both x86 and ARM processors and according to Google it is build on top of a Linux kernel with a whole new windowing system. The OS will be opensourced next year.

I do not really know what Google expects from it but the fact is that it has gone from a search engine to a major software vendor for just about any IT field. In a previous post the Google approach is mentioned. On top of the company characteristics mentioned there I should add: "when you see something that is not done correctly and ruins it for the users as well as you as a software vendor, do it from scratch yourself and market it". I am not sure that this applies here but it is the way google thinks about it.

OLPC in trouble. Capitalism is an ugly system.

Nicholas Negroponde announced that the organization is laying off half of the staff due to economic difficulties. Basically what that means is that the OLPC laptop is not selling as much as it was expected and the organization did not take as many preorders as projected (or that some preorders where canceled due to some shady events....).

When OLPC was first announced everybody was talking about it and everybody wanted one. It had a open hardware/software approach that many people liked and the idea behind it was "free education for underprivileged kids of developing countries". Who could object to that? Some companies that discovered a new market maybe?

Capitalism is an ugly system. As soon as word got out, many big companies starting producing their own cheap netbooks and offering countries their solution to compete with the open architecture of OLPC. There were even stories that got out about bribing third world country officials for canceling OLPC orders and choose another solution of a certain company.

You think these kids would benefit from windows?

Lets hope though that this drawback will not be the end of OLPC as is. Negroponde is taking a shift to non free software approach. I wonder why? What there is to gain from installing a non free,closed operating system like windows on the OLPC? The kids certainly do not object to Linux. What about governments? Ahhhh, there you go. But why governments of developing countries object to free software? Think about it...

Open Office 3.0 released

Open Office, the cross platform, open source, office application suit has reached its 3rd major release with the version 3.0. In recent years more and more users and companies jump ship from Microsoft Office to its free open source equivalent and that is not a coincidence. With each new version Open Office adds more functionality, more flexibility and becomes a serious threat for Microsoft's monopoly on office applications retaining close to 20% of the small and medium business market. Originally derived from Sun's Star Office suit, since 2000 has steadily evolved to a user favorite and the small company's free alternative to expensive office software. Its latest release offers even more features and provides better compatibility with its commercial cousin.

The new release features the usual office suit suspects as it core applications with

• Writer (Word processor)
• Calc (Spreadsheets)
• Impress ( Slides)
• Draw (Image and Digram sketching)
• Base (Relational database manipulation)

This release is available for the Mac platform with native interface without the use of X11. Neo Office users might want to check it out. Another important feature is the ability to edit and save Microsoft 2007 documents as well as Microsoft 2008 Mac documents. The new version is fully compatible with Visual Basic and Access 2007 formats. In addition, users can now create and save document in XHTML and MediaWiki formats. Third party addons offer the ability to import PDF documents for editing.


Open source community has done it again. It provided us with an exceptional tool for home and office use. Be sure to check it out. If you have been an Open Office user you know what you wanted to see from your favorite office suit. If you are new to the world of open source software you will be amazed. Whatever your user group is, you are in for a treat.

Minefield: Experimental lightning fast Mozilla browser

Mozilla Firefox may be a great browser with countless plugins for anything imaginable but has arguably very poor performance when it comes to javascript and speed in general. It is not comparable with Safari or other webkit browsers. Firefox 3 was slightly faster, but nothing spectacular. Google recently released Chrome. Chrome is aimed to provide great performance when working on javascript-heavy pages. Anyone who has tried can testify on it being slightly faster than Firefox but it is by no means as expandable or stable. I mean ok it is in Beta but it is not even working correctly with Google's own services. In addition Chrome is only available for Windows and does not yet provide support for OSX or Linux.

Recently Mozilla foundation announced a new experimental browser called minefield. At this moment it is not even in beta, but more of an alpha release. No matter though as, it is reportedly stable (more than what I can say for Chrome) and it is bleeding,lightning fast. Ars Technica performed some tests and cocnluded that it is even faster than Google's v8 Javascript engine. Minefield is a hybrid of firefox with the new tracemonkey javascript engine under the hood. You can download the latest nightly build from here.

Any javascript site I have used feels like a breeze. Try opening a heavy portal or Google Documents to see the difference. Being on constant development it gets better eveyday. 2 days ago it would refuse to load any document from Google but today's build loads everything just fine. Give it a try to see what the future holds for Firefox.

Ubuntu 8.10 to be released

The new Ubuntu 8.10 is going to be released in a few days. The brave souls can download the release candidate and play around with all the new features. From my experience the Ubuntu release candidates are quite stable and you can drop the old repositories for the new ones to get all the update after the official release. So if anyone is in a hurry he/she just might as well install it on his/her machine. I would not recommend it on production machines though because you never know when the nasty bug will hit you.

There are numerous upgrades on this release. We have the usual suspects of new versions for gnome and kernel but more “exotic ones” as well such as the encrypted directories and the long awaited improved connection manager that allows the road warriors to manage their 3G connections of their laptops.

The list includes:

• Gnome 2.24
• X.Org 7.4
• Linux Kernel 2.6.27
• Encrypted private directory
• Guest session
• Network Manager 0.7
• Dell Kernel module support
• Samba 3.2
• Pam authentication
• Totem BBC plugin

Along with Ubuntu, the Xubuntu and Kubuntu distros will be released for the fans of Xfce and KDE desktop environments. The new releases will not be LTS, even though this will not be an issue if you are not planning to use it on a production server.

I was not very happy with the previous release and had problems with it. Lets see if all the issues were resolved in 8.10.

New Perian Quick Time codec pack version is out

The team behind Perian, the codec library that allows quick time player to play unsupported formats in Mac OS X, has just released a new version. Perian allows the playback of various formats such as flv and divx that are unsupported by quick time officially. Quick time player limitations force users resort to others solutions like the, excellent in my opinion, VLC player. Using Perian you you can view videos natively, capture video from various sources and even have subtitles support through quick time.

Perian supported formats:

• File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
• Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture
• Audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), and MPEG Layer I & II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO
• AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
• Subtitle support for SSA/ASS and SRT

On the down side Perian does not offer wmv support yet. Thus you will still have to rely on Flip4Mac for that. Then again, you just might use VLC for everything and forget all about quick time player and its limitations.

Make your choice and happy viewing.

Linux turned 17! Happy birthday Linux!

Linux turned 17 last week. Our beloved OS has evolved to be an excellent dektop, server, console, mobile phone, any many other things, Operating System over these years. So in order to celebrate that, I am reposting the original post of Linus Torvalds on the minix newsgroup 17 years ago that started it all. Happy birthday Linux and many more..!!!

Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
for you :-)

As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a
minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage
where it's even usable (though may not be depending on what you want),
and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is
just version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already), but I've successfully
run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it.

Sources for this pet project of mine can be found at nic.funet.fi
(128.214.6.100) in the directory /pub/OS/Linux. The directory also
contains some README-file and a couple of binaries to work under linux
(bash, update and gcc, what more can you ask for :-). Full kernel
source is provided, as no minix code has been used. Library sources are
only partially free, so that cannot be distributed currently. The
system is able to compile "as-is" and has been known to work. Heh.
Sources to the binaries (bash and gcc) can be found at the same place in
/pub/gnu.

ALERT! WARNING! NOTE! These sources still need minix-386 to be compiled
(and gcc-1.40, possibly 1.37.1, haven't tested), and you need minix to
set it up if you want to run it, so it is not yet a standalone system
for those of you without minix. I'm working on it. You also need to be
something of a hacker to set it up (?), so for those hoping for an
alternative to minix-386, please ignore me. It is currently meant for
hackers interested in operating systems and 386's with access to minix.

The system needs an AT-compatible harddisk (IDE is fine) and EGA/VGA. If
you are still interested, please ftp the README/RELNOTES, and/or mail me
for additional info.

I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be
out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got
minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjouyed doing
it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for
their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and
modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.

I'm also interested in hearing from anybody who has written any of the
utilities/library functions for minix. If your efforts are freely
distributable (under copyright or even public domain), I'd like to hear
from you, so I can add them to the system. I'm using Earl Chews estdio
right now (thanks for a nice and working system Earl), and similar works
will be very wellcome. Your (C)'s will of course be left intact. Drop me
a line if you are willing to let me use your code.

Linus

PS. to PHIL NELSON! I'm unable to get through to you, and keep getting
"forward error - strawberry unknown domain" or something.