New year of 2007 is almost here and you can be sure that there will be plenty of astronomical phenomenon to wonder at in the coming year. Whether you use a telescope, binoculars or even the naked eye, many celestial objects are worth to gaze at. To help you explore the night sky there is an excellent book, that is prepared just for the year 2007. It title is What’s Up 2007 - 365 Days of Skywatching and was written by Tammy Plotner. The best part about this book is that it is available for free download. A perfect gift for any amateur astronomer, beginner or experienced one. If you like the book, you can also buy it in printed form and by doing so also support the author. He deserves it. Thanks to Wil Wheaton for the post with a pointer to this book.

Tags: astronomy, space, science, books, education

Just in time for Christmas holidays the community of developers, artists and translators released a new major version of free and open source turn-based strategy game The Battle for Wesnoth. In version 1.2 single-player mode has a new tutorial and three new campaigns: Two Brothers, The South Guard, and Under the Burning Suns. The existing campaigns include new scenarios, dialogue, items, and optional bonus victory objectives. Multi-player mode also has new features. There are new units, new terrain types and artwork has also improved much. Translators have worked hard to update the translations and I’m proud to say that my cousin Matej also did a great work helping with Slovenian translation. For more info about the new version check out the release notes, where you can also find download links for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Now let’s get playing!

Tags: games, strategy, strategies, turn-based, tbs, fantasy, linux, free software, open source, mac os x, windows

A few minutes ago a postman brought me a package. This time it wasn’t as unexpected as the last time and I immediately knew that it should be a free retail box of openSUSE 10.2 Linux distribution (you can buy it for around €45/$60). And sure it was. In case you don’t know yet, Novell sends you a free retail box of the latest version of openSUSE Linux, if you help with beta testing and report bugs you find into their Bugzilla database. I guess that you get a free box even if you only report a bug or two. So make sure you don’t miss this opportunity when the work on the next version of openSUSE starts.

Some of the highlights of the new version 10.2 include the new Kickoff menu for the KDE desktop. A lot of usability research went into this one and I liked it a lot. There are also a lot of improvements in power management features. A new software management tool has been added to make software management easy for people who don’t need advanced features. They also didn’t forget about desktop eyecandy so they have now integrated Compiz and Xgl, which enable 3D desktop effects that take advantage of hardware accelerated OpenGL. You can also install Beryl which makes Aero technology in Windows Vista look just plain old and boring. Not to mention 3D desktop on Linux works faster at the same time and even works well on older hardware.

The openSUSE 10.2 box came just in time for Christmas holidays. So I will give it away as a Christmas present to my cousin Gašper. His family is still running version 10.1 so I think this, together with the upgrade work, will be a perfect gift for this holiday season.

Tags: linux, suse, opensuse, novell, os, operating systems, distributions, free software, open source, desktop

About 11 years ago we were using OS/2 Warp as our main operating system on our first family PC. I was 15 years old back then and it is only natural I liked playing games a lot. By far the largest chunk of my computer time was spent playing a 4X (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate) strategy game Galactic Civilizations developed by Stardock. I just loved researching new technologies, using planet resources to build fleets of spaceships and conquering more planets.

After a year or so we had to switch to Windows and since I couldn’t live without a healthy dose of 4X I had to find a game similar to GalCiv. Luckily I found the game of Stars! which was developed by Jeff McBride and Jeff Johnson who were at the time employed at Microsoft (at least something good came from them :)). Even today I think Stars! is the best 4X game ever. Very complex and deep and a lot of fun. Later I also played Galactic Civilizations for Windows, but that didn’t last long since I started to switch to Linux and I spent less of my free time on games and more on other things.

Let’s fast forward to present. I’m a full time Linux user now and some time ago I was in a little bit of a nostalgic mood. So I started looking for free and open source Linux games similar to Stars! and Galactic Civilizations. I found a project called FreeStars, but its website didn’t show much promise, especially since it stated that it doesn’t yet compile on Linux. So the search continued and I came across a project named Thousand Parsec. The website was looking very nice, there was a lot of information, and there were screen shots of working clients.

Thousand Parsec project doesn’t try to be just a clone of Stars!. They are creating a general framework for making 4X space empire building games, that can be very long, have a huge universe and can be played online. Although the game is not yet at the same level as Stars!, I see a lot of potential in it. Noticing that there is a C++ protocol library (libtpproto-cpp) available, I’ve decided that I could also help with the development. But more details about this later…

Anyway, if you are like me and love playing games like Stars!, Galactic Civilizations, VGA Planets and Master of Orion, then be sure to check out the Thousand Parsec project. A major new version 0.2.0 of Python/wxWidgets based client has just been released and in addition to Linux it also works on Mac OS X and Windows.

Tags: games, 4x, strategy, turn-based, strategies, tbs, stars!, galactic civilizations, vga planets, master of orion, linux, mac os x, windows