Three Wise Men

Standardization. This is something that every single Linux distribution is lacking. There are no real standards when it comes to UI’s, API’s and file locations. Linux Standard Base is an attempt to fix a small part of these problems. In general, it failed, for more than one reason. Partly because of the RPM dependency and partly because it covers only a small subset of things that need standardization. Even today, after twenty years of Linux, we have very few standards on how to write applications. They are more or less just guidelines. If you decide to write KDE application things are pretty much clear, but not always. The same goes for Gnome  2 or Gnome 3. The main problem lies in the above mentioned ‘pretty much’.  When it comes to a single distribution, you are in trouble. With Ubuntu, you’re really in trouble.

Recent Indie Humble Bundle provided us with Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor two excellent third person action shooter games from Frozenbyte. There is a small problem if you are running Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal (this probably applies to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat). There are no sounds in the game.

The problem lies in the libasound which is bundled with the game. The solution is pretty much trivial, just get rid of those libraries. If you installed the game as root for all users then do this for Shadowgrounds:

# cd /usr/local/games/shadowgrounds/lib32/
# rm libasound*

And this for Shadowgrounds: Survivor:

# cd /usr/local/games/survivor/lib32/
# rm libasound*

Or if you are afraid that you’ll break something, move libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so and libasound.so.2 out of the lib32 directory.

Run the game, enjoy the sound. :)

Volley Brawl is a silly, but fun, game that will help you kill your time while you are compiling a new version of vanilla kernel or while you are waiting for some download to finish. If there is something missing in Linux then games are one of the first things on the list. Right behind a good graphics card driver and a working desktop environment, right? Let’s face it, games on Linux mostly suck. There are NO big titles available for Linux. There are some that used to be sort of big, but who will play ten year old games?

Ubuntu Global Jam is a world wide even that happens when new Ubuntu Beta is released. Everyone can participate and everyone is encouraged to organise local Jams. Here we have a Translation Jam, currently twelve people are translating away, postponing lunch until further notice. As of now, more than 2200 messages were translated and checked.

Ubuntu Global Jam in Slovenia

More content will follow.

Unity is a new replacement for Gnome shell in Ubuntu. Canonical started working on it some time ago and Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu 11.04, will be the first to use it by default. I decided that Alpha 3 release after feature freeze is a good time to run things for the first time and give them a little bit of testing. Alpha 3 release is far from being stable environment and there will be feature freeze exceptions for Unity and few other applications and things will still change.

Let’s get something clear, from my point of view and my experience, if the product needs feature freeze exceptions, then most of the testing will be done after the final release. Which means that the product wasn’t really ready for a release. So, in my opinion, six months release cycle is not so bad, but Unity should be included as an option and not as a primary environment.