As I’ve written before, Thousand Parsec is a free and open source project aiming to create 4X space empire building strategy games similar to Stars! and Galactic Civilizations. We are currently running an AI programming competition. So, if you know the fine craft of writing code and would like to take a shot at game programming, be sure to check out the official competition page and join us. Who knows, you might even win one of the cool prizes. The preferred source code languages for submissions are C++, Python and Ruby. But you can use any language of your choice. The deadline for submissions is 31^st of March 2007.

Update: The deadline date was wrong. You have one month of extra time than previously reported.

Tags: games, 4x, strategy, turn-based, strategies, tbs, stars!, galactic civilizations, programming, ai, artificial intelligence

A couple of months back we could read a report from a French company called Xiti Monitor, which indicated that here in Slovenia 40.5% people use Mozilla Firefox. This figure is great, but I think it is a little bit too high. Or in other words, the sample might not represent larger population in the best way.

Today a Slovenian company Iprom released their report (in Slovenian language), which should be very accurate. It shows that 29,5% of Slovenians use Firefox to surf the web. Still a very high share of Firefox users. They also indicate how fast the share of Firefox users is increasing. From January 2006 to December 2006 the Firefox share has increased by 64%.

Whatever the completely accurate number is, it is nice to see that Slovenia is the world leader when it comes to use of open source web browser. And it is great to see that so many people are switching to Firefox. Now, if only people at some Slovenian banks, who still force people to use the highly insecure Internet Explorer, would read these reports.

Tags: slovenia, firefox, browsers, web, internet, ie, internet explorer

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

My first experiments with Gentoo started about four years ago when I was working in a video store, which also had a couple of computers running Slackware to provide internet access for visitors. One evening I got bored and together with my friend Boris we decided to try to install Gentoo on one of them. It didn’t go without a problem, but with the help of great Gentoo community and documentation we were successful. In fact, I loved what I saw so much that soon after I bought a new computer with AMD Athlon 64 3000+ I installed Gentoo on it. It was by far the best 64-bit Linux distribution and operating system in general (Windows XP x64 was and still is a big disappointment). Now, after four years, I’m still a happy Gentoo user. I’m also running it on my laptop.

And today the people working hard on Gentoo Linux announced the release of version 2006.1 of my favourite Linux distribution. The default compiler is now GCC 4.1, GNU C library is upgraded to version 2.4 and there are many improvements in the start-up scripts. There are also now separate profiles optimized for desktops and servers. Gentoo Linux installer now also supports installations without internet connection and is easier to use. For more details check out the Gentoo Linux 2006.1 press release. In case you decide to give it a try, you can download Gentoo from a mirror or using BitTorrent. If you like all the power and all the control over it, you will not be disappointed.

Tags: gentoo, linux, distribution, distributions, free software, open source, os, operating system, operating systems

I’m about one day too late with this, but anyway. Happy birthday Linux! It was 25 August 1991 when Linus Torvalds, a student from Finland, announced his small hobby project: making a free operating system similar to minix. And today, 15 years later, the Linux kernel is far from being just a hobby. In fact, together with the free software movement, initiated by Richard Stallman, it started a small revolution in the world of software and computing. Today GNU/Linux is one of the fastest developing platforms and a lot of innovation is happening here. Just one of the latest, more visible, things is a great looking 3D desktop that works nicely together with touch-screens. Can’t wait to see what Linux kernel and other open source projects will bring to the world in the years that are coming.

Tags: linux, kernel, birthday, anniversary, free software, os, operating system, operating systems, linus torvalds, richard stallman

After a couple of weeks of travelling across the Atlantic ocean the book C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 was finally delivered into my hands this morning. Quite a nice timing actually. Today the first development snapshot of KDE4 was released. KDE 4 will be based on Qt 4.2, so this book will also be of great benefit for learning programming for KDE 4. Another nice thing is that authors of the book have added a short chapter about embedded programming with Qtopia (a special version of Qt for embedded devices). This is nice because more and more mobile phones and devices are nowadays running on Linux. A couple of days ago Trolltech introduced the world’s first fully open and programmable mobile development device Qtopia Greenphone. It attracted a lot of interest from developers all over the world. So I guess it will only be beneficial in the future to also have some knowledge about programming in Qtopia. Now I only have to read and learn. When I finish (won’t be that soon) I will write a review of the book.

Tags: book, books, c++, programming, development, gui, trolltech, qt, kde, qtopia, greenphone

While I was reading SUSE Linux Rants blog by Scott Morris (the guy who wrote the free book The Easiest Linux Guide You’ll Ever Read) I’ve come across his post What does Linux and frappr have in common? It turns out that if you are contributing to Linux (by translating, programming, testing, bug reporting, promoting or something similar) you can put yourself on the frappr map and win one of these cool prizes:

• 3x HP laptops loaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (value: $1999)
• 6x EVOLT cameras (value: $800)
• 20x 2 GB iPod Nanos (value: $200)

Don’t miss this great chance and put yourself on the Linux map. You only have time until 14 November. You snooze, you lose

Tags: linux, deal, deals, open source, free software, operating system, operating systems, prize, prizes, frappr

A new crop circle has appeared in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. This time the message from the aliens is quite clear. It could be understood as: “We use Firefox web browser” or “Earthlings, use Firefox web browser.” Since many of us are intelligent enough to know how Firefox is great, we already use it

Of course it should be clear that the crop circle is not from aliens. It was made by 12 people from the Linux Users Group at the Oregon State University who like Firefox a lot. They have documented the whole process. The photos are already available and we can expect videos soon.

Tags: firefox, crop circle, crop circles, web browser, web browsers, fun, funny, entertainment

When I started my career (if you can call it so) as a blogger, my first publishing system of choice was Google’s Blogger. I was happy with it until I published two parts of a very successful article titled JLP’s KDE 3.5 Previews. The story even made it to Slashdot and then the problems started. Blogger, at that time, didn’t have any anti comments spam system in place. All you could do is turn off comments completely. After all the spamming at that time I started to look for alternatives. I’ve checked out many of them and in the end I was by far the most impressed with Wordpress. Very powerful, flexible and lots of great looking themes and plug-ins.

Why am I telling you this? Well, after a promising start, the developers of Blogger more or less stopped working on it. No interesting new features, no new themes and people that stayed with Blogger had to wait quite a long time until they got a half decent anti-spam system. But it finally looks like that the developers are waking up from their sleep as they have just released a new (beta) version of Blogger. There are now new templates, more options to customise your template, support for more writers, more control over who can view posts, more feed options and the publishing is now instant (no more of the stupid “Republish entire blog” thing ). You can read some more in the Blogger new features tour and on the Google Operating System blog.

Will all this make me switch back to Blogger? Off course not. Wordpress is still a whole lot better. I highly recommend it if you are a more serious blogger and have access to a server that runs or can run Wordpress. But these, long overdue, enhancements to Blogger are sure welcome for people who are using it, or for those who are thinking about starting blogging and are looking for a good service. Let’s just hope Google continues working on it more actively in the future.

Tags: blogger, google, blogging, blog, blogs, wordpress, internet

To get the notification about the latest news from European Space Agency I’ve been subscribed to several of their mailing lists. I was extremely happy a couple of days ago when I found out that ESA has added RSS feeds to their web portal. So now I can finally use my favourite feed reader, Akregator, to follow news more conveniently. If you are using Firefox web browser, you can also subscribe to news, simply by adding the feed link as a new live bookmark. Besides feeds for top news, there are also feeds available for specific programmes/projects and for national news. For more information see the list of RSS feeds from ESA.

Tags: esa, european space agency, rss, feed, feeds, news, space, astronautics

This morning I finally got all the components I ordered to repair and upgrade my sister’s computer. It didn’t go without problems though. For starters, I had to wait a week longer until all the components got to the store. It looks like the demand for AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processors is very high. Especially because they now have highly reduced prices. And even when the delivery man was finally at the door step, the problems were not over. When I wanted to pay him for the package, he told me that I have two packages. As it turned out they were identical. I had to call the computer store mimovrste.com and ask them what is going on. They simply made a mistake and instead of sending me only one package they sent two of them. When all was cleared up and I had all the needed components in my hand, I could start to assemble the computer. It took me about three hours to set everything up. And this part did go without any problem. My sister took some photos of the process, so I guess they will soon end up on her Flickr account. All I had to do after starting up Linux (she uses Mandriva 2006) is to install the kernel with SMP support enabled (kernel-smp-2.6.12.24mdk in this case) and reinstall nVidia driver afterwards. The speed-up compared to the old AMD Athlon 1200MHz and 512 MiB of memory (now 1 GiB) is quite big. Especially noticeable when working and rendering in Blender.

Tags: hardware, processor, processors, cpus, cpu, amd, athlon 64 x2, dual core

A couple of hours ago Harish Kukeja submitted quite a lot of new source code for Physiks into SVN repository at KDE. The basic features of the physics simulation framework should mostly be functional now and I’ll have to take some time later to take a look at the new code more closely. Probably I will also have to brush up my knowledge of the C++ that is related to this code. If I’ll have enough free time, I may try to write some simple Qt application to test the current state of physics engine and see how it feels using it. Maybe I could also start working on a web page for the project. It would also be nice to come up with an icon that represents something (someone) that immediately makes you think about physics. But first I have to catch Harish on Jabber so we discuss about this idea.

Tags: physics, engine, simulation, simulations, education, kde, linux, soc, summer of code, programming

Although VIA was the first company (as far as I know) to claim that their drivers for graphic cards are open source, these claims were questioned several times and many still believe that they are far from open source. Anyway, today we were blessed with news that could indicate things in the graphic drivers world are finally moving into the right direction that will benefit people. Intel has just announced they are releasing free and open source drivers for their 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. The drivers support 2D and 3D and are only the beginning. All future development of the drivers will be done openly and in close cooperation with X.org and Mesa communities. To read more about this visit the newly created website Linux Graphics Drivers from Intel. Now we can only hope that AMD (which is the new owner of ATI), nVidia and other companies follow this noble example. There are already some rumors (read the last paragraph) that AMD will follow a similar path with ATI drivers.

Tags: hardware, graphics, drivers, driver, graphic cards, open source, free software, linux, intel, via, amd, ati