Development
The state of Linux gaming
All work and no play makes for unhappy users. For Linux users, finding satisfying games to play can be a challenge, though not an insurmountable one.
History and Failed Attempts
Many have hoped to replace Windows and other proprietary desktop systems with Linux, so it has naturally been a focus of many commercial and community efforts over the years to target Linux as a gaming platform. Many, if not most, of these efforts have failed or have only enjoyed a modest amount of success.
Consider, for instance, Loki, which struggled and ultimately failed in its bid to port Windows games to Linux. The company landed several major publishing deals to port major (at the time) games to Linux. It brought very popular games to Linux, including Unreal Tournament, Sid Meyers Civilization, and (this author's favorite) Quake III Arena. Despite providing a decent selection of popular and current games for Linux, the existing Linux desktop market in 2000 and 2001 was simply too small to support the company — and the existence of a selection of popular games was not enough to drive adoption of Linux.
One of Mandrake's (eventually Mandriva) unsuccessful products was a Gaming Edition based on Mandrake 8.1. The Gaming Edition added TransGaming's WineX to help install Windows-based games, and a copy of The Sims. Despite being only slightly more expensive than buying The Sims standalone, the Gaming Edition didn't merit a repeat and Mandrake never released a second attempt.
WineX was a customized version of Wine optimized to play Windows games. Eventually that became Cedega, which is still in active development and competes with the, similarly Wine-based, CodeWeavers CrossOver Games.
All of these efforts were or are proprietary in whole or part, and derivative of existing efforts. They were either porting proprietary games to Linux, or enabling proprietary Windows-based games to run on Linux. But several projects are also trying to bring quality, native, open source games to Linux.
Going Concerns and Native Efforts
Finding games for Linux is not difficult, particularly if one seeks only simple puzzle, card, or board game analogs on the computer. For example, GNOME and KDE each ship a handful of simple games that provide ample amusement during conference calls or to while away a few minutes between more productive tasks. Users who enjoy card games, Mahjong, Sudoku, Chess, and other similar games will find the selection much to their satisfaction.
But users looking for games that are competitive with more complex, immersive, arcade-style games that one can find easily on Windows will come up with just a handful. For example, Armagetron is a multiplatform game that takes its cue from the lightcycles in Tron. Several games have been developed based on the GPLed engine released by id Software from Quake III Arena, like OpenArena, Nexuiz/Xonotic, World of Padman, Tremulous, and ioquake3.
Players who enjoy role playing games and multiplayer action have found Battle for Wesnoth to be particularly satisfying. Other players prefer old DOS games reimagined, such as Scorched 3D, or clones of Super NES games like the addictive Crack Attack! Aspiring air guitarists might enjoy the Rock Band clone Frets on Fire, which lets players test their virtual guitar skills via the keyboard.
Ryzom was a popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that went through a long journey before being released as open source. After various campaigns starting back in 2006, it was finally released as free software in May. Ryzom looks to be under active development and if you poke around long enough on the developer site you can find the install instructions for getting it running on Linux.
Another MMORPG is WorldForge, which has been under development since 1997. It seems to be a fairly active community with plenty of development going on. It's no substitute for World of Warcraft, as it is under active development, but it does look like something that will provide a rich environment for many styles of MMORPGs down the road.
Bundling Linux games
Still, Linux doesn't quite match Windows for games in terms of variety or quality. One can find a handful of quality games for Linux if you are willing to look, and certainly enough to while away a few weekends or evenings in front of the computer, but hard-core gamers are going to be dissatisfied. The latest and greatest blockbuster games usually don't run on Linux.
Casual gamers will fare better if they can find Linux games. Users who are new to Linux and searching for games can have a hard time discovering suitable games for their tastes without guidance. It helps to have a unifying project that pulls together a selection of games, such as the Fedora Games Live DVD, a "spin" of Fedora that focuses on Linux gamers.
The Fedora Games Spin serves several purposes. First, it's good test disc to see whether hardware is suitable for 3D gaming on Linux. It also, of course, bundles many native Linux games that are fully free software. Not only the standard-issue arcade and FPS-type games are included, but games suited for kids, and flight simulators as well.
The full list of games is available on the Fedora Wiki. The current release is based on Fedora 13, and it is the third release since the project started with a spin based on Fedora 11. The DVD doesn't actually contain all games that are packaged for Fedora, but a selection that the spin team feels is most representative of the best gaming on Linux.
Another showcase effort is produced by Linux-Gamers.net. Like the Fedora spin, live.linux-gamers.net (the name of the distribution) is a live image that can be booted from CD, DVD, or USB key. Based on Arch Linux, the live CD contains fewer games than the Fedora spin, and focuses primarily on action games, rather than also including educational content.
There's a new site for Ubuntu users called Ubuntu Gamer that provides tips and news about Linux-based games. The site has only been up for a bit over a week, but it's off to a strong start.
What seems lacking is any concerted effort to encourage more game development on Linux and open source platforms. While you can find plenty of games on Linux, they do lag significantly behind offerings for Windows and the popular gaming consoles in terms of production values, and maturity of the gaming engines. Developers can find resources via pygame if they're interested in writing games in Python, but there's little specifically encouraging game development on Linux.
Mozilla Gaming
As users turn to Web-based applications in larger numbers, it seems natural that they would look to Web-based games as well. In fact, many already do in the form of (annoying) Facebook games like Farmville, Flash-based games, and multiplatform plugins like Quake Live. Linux users are on equal footing here, since these browser-based options are all supported on Linux as well as Windows and Mac OS X. Linux users on non-x86 platforms, however, are left behind because the games are tied to proprietary pieces that run only on x86/x86-64 Linux systems.
The Mozilla Project is attempting to encourage development of Web-based games using "open Web technology." The Mozilla Labs Gaming project was announced in early September, and kicked off with a contest launched on September 30th.
Dubbed "Game On 2010," the contest calls for developers to create a game using open Web technology, which is defined as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side code that can be PHP, Python, Java, and other languages. No plugins are allowed. The games will be judged on six criteria, including the game's polish, aesthetics, how original the game is, and whether it showcases the "power of open Web technologies." Submissions are due by January 11th, 2011, and winners will get a trip to the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco on February 28th.Aside from the contest, though, the Mozilla Labs Gaming project is little more than an idea. Whether it will pick up steam remains to be seen. It should be interesting to see what the contest produces, but it would be nice if the labs project at least had some developer resources or guidance for getting started on developing browser-based games.
For now, Linux remains a poor cousin to Windows when it comes to gaming. While you can find many good games for Linux, the selection and quality are not comparable to the thousands of titles available for Windows and proprietary gaming consoles. If browser-based gaming takes off, it seems likely that Linux users will be on even footing with Windows and Mac users.
Brief items
Firebird 2.5
Version 2.5 of the Firebird relational database manager has been announced; see the release notes for details. "The primary goal for Firebird 2.5 was to establish the basics for a new threading architecture that is almost entirely common to the Superserver, Classic and Embedded models, taking in lower level synchronization and thread safety generally. Although SQL enhancements are not a primary objective of this release, for the first time, user management becomes accessible through SQL CREATE/ALTER/DROP USER statements and syntaxes for ALTER VIEW and CREATE OR ALTER VIEW are implemented. PSQL improvements include the introduction of autonomous transactions and ability to query another database via EXECUTE STATEMENT."
Ganeti 2.2.0 released
Version 2.2.0 of the Ganeti virtualization cluster manager has been released. Major changes include better DRBD support, experimental LXC support, intra-cluster instance moves, and more.LLVM 2.8 is available
The LLVM compiler project has announced the release of version 2.8. "LLVM 2.8 includes broad improvements in the core LLVM project and notably includes major improvements to Clang C++ support (which is now feature complete and quite usable). In addition (and though they are not included as part of the 2.8 release) two major new subprojects have joined the LLVM project: libc++ and LLDB." Click below for the announcement, or see the release notes for the details.
PostgreSQL security update
PostgreSQL versions 9.0.1, 8.4.5, 8.3.12, 8.2.18, 8.1.22, 8.0.26 and 7.4.30 have been released to fix a security issue and a few other serious problems. "The security vulnerability allows any ordinary SQL users with 'trusted' procedural language usage rights to modify the contents of procedural language functions at runtime. As detailed in CVE-2010-3433, an authenticated user can accomplish privilege escalation by hijacking a SECURITY DEFINER function (or some other existing authentication-change operation). The mere presence of the procedural languages does not make your database application vulnerable." One might think that a fairly serious database is needed just to keep up with all of the supported versions, but that situation will now be simplified: this is the final update for versions 7.4.x and 8.0.x, and 8.1.x will go unsupported before the end of the year.
Sawfish 1.7.0 "Frozen Flame" released
Version 1.7.0 of the venerable Sawfish window manager is out. New features include XFCE integration, better GNOME/KDE integration, a new emacs major mode, and more.
Newsletters and articles
Development newsletters from the last week
- Caml Weekly News (October 5)
- PostgreSQL Weekly News (October 3)
Hutterer: Thoughts on Linux multitouch
Peter Hutterer has posted some lengthy thoughts about the current state and future directions for multitouch support on Linux. "Why is it taking us so long when there's plenty of multitouch offerings out there already? The simple answer is: we are not working on the same problem. [...] If we look at commercial products that provide multitouch, Apple's iPhones and iPads are often the first ones that come to mind. These provide multitouch but in a very restrictive setting: one multi-touch aware application running in full-screen. Doing this is [surprisingly] easy from a technical point of view, all you need is a new API that you write all new applications against."
Seigo: on the impending future of ui greatnesses
On his blog, KDE hacker Aaron Seigo disagrees with the idea that the desktop as we know it is likely to disappear. "Now, our way of writing applications for "the desktop" may change over the next decade, but the desktop will still be with us. People will still want a way to launch their apps, manage the shapes they appear in on the screen (aka "windows", since I assume that HTML5CloudAwesomeness doesn't mean "everything is fullscreen with one app at a time" for most people), will want to place these HTML5CloudAwesomenesses around their screen (aka "desktop widgets"), etc. That could, indeed, be written in HTML and [Javascript], but it will still exist. [...] So what appears inside of our windows may change in the form of where some or all of the data being manipulated is stored and/or what language is used to write them .. but it will still be a lot like a laptop computer."
systemd for administrators - script conversion
The third installment of Lennart Poettering's "systemd for administrators" series has been posted; this one focuses on converting SYSV init scripts to systemd. "And that's all there is to it. We have a simple systemd service file now that encodes in 10 lines more information than the original SysV init script encoded in 115. And even now there's a lot of room left for further improvement utilizing more features systemd offers. For example, we could set Restart=restart-always to tell systemd to automatically restart this service when it dies. Or, we could use OOMScoreAdjust=-500 to ask the kernel to please leave this process around when the OOM killer wreaks havoc."
The OpenOffice fork is officially here (Computerworld)
Over at Computerworld, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is reporting that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Oracle does not plan to work with the new Document Foundation and LibreOffice project. "As for The Document Foundation's offer for Oracle to work with them on streamlining and improving the OpenOffice development process, [Oracle public relations said]: 'The beauty of open source is that it can be forked by anyone who chooses, as was done [by The Document Foundation]. Our sincerest goal for OpenOffice is that it becomes more widely used so, if this new foundation will help advance OpenOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF), we wish them the best.'"
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet
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