When I woke up yesterday morning a message from Tim Ansell was waiting for me on Jabber. It was some extremely great news about open source game project Thousand Parsec, which I joined a couple of months ago. Google has just published the list of mentoring organisations for Google Summer of Code 2007. What is so great about it is that Thousand Parsec was one of the selected organisations. This also means that I get to be one of the mentors.

I must say this has surprised me a bit. Thouand Parsec is quite a small project, not that well known and 4X space strategy games are unfortunately not as popular today as they were a few years ago. Who knows, maybe the foundation of existing code base, our plans for the future or some other part from the project description convinced Google to choose Thousand Parsec. Whatever the reason, this is our chance to get some fresh new developers, to get the project to the next level and make it more known and appealing to gamers. We have to make the most out of this chance.

So, if you are a student and would like to work on a task for a vibrant free and open source game project, I encourage you to take a look at Thousand Parsec : Google Summer of Code 2007. Here you will find some instructions and ideas for a project on which you can work during the summer. I’m sure it will be fun, you will learn something new and if you finish your project you will even get 4500$. Our community is waiting for you! And don’t forget that the deadline for submission of student applications is 26^th of March.

Update: The deadline for student applications has been changed to 26^{th of March, So you now have about 4 days left to join the fun.}

Tags: games, 4x, strategy, turn-based, strategies, tbs, stars!, galactic civilizations, programming, google, summer of code, soc, gsoc

When KDE 3.5 was under development in the year of 2005 I’ve written two very popular preview articles about it. Currently the development of an even more exciting version KDE 4 is in full swing. But for now I don’t plan to write any article about it (if I don’t count this one). The reason for this is that there is no need to. Several people have already done the job and written a lot of great material describing new features, new technologies and the process in which they are being developed. In this article I will try to collect and chronologically list all these articles. I will also do my best to keep it updated. If you know about an article that is missing, tell us about it in a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

• [2007-08-28] Touring the KDE 4 Beta
• [2007-06-21] KDE’s Plasma is heating up
• [2007-06-19] The Road to KDE 4: KDE PIM Libraries and Related Technologies
• [2007-06-19] More about Nepomuk-KDE: Soprano and KDE integration
• [2007-05-31] Semantic Desktop and KDE 4 - State and Plans of Nepomuk-KDE
• [2007-05-30] The Road to KDE 4: KWin Composite Brings Bling to KDE
• [2007-05-23] The Road to KDE 4: Konsole Gets an Overhaul
• [2007-05-11] Why Dolphin is a Good Choice for KDE4
• [2007-05-05] KDE Games Taking Shape for KDE 4.0
• [2007-04-23] The Road to KDE 4: Solid Brings Hardware Configuration and Control to KDE
• [2007-04-11] The Road to KDE 4: Strigi and File Information Extraction
• [2007-04-05] A first look at Dolphin, the KDE 4 file manager
• [2007-03-27] KDE 4 gets more Hot New Stuff
• [2007-03-21] The Road to KDE 4: Updates and Addenda
• [2007-03-07] The Road to KDE 4: Oxygen Artwork and Icons
• [2007-02-28] The Road to KDE 4: Dolphin and Konqueror
• [2007-02-27] Faces of KDE4
• [2007-02-26] New KDE 4 preview shows progress
• [2007-02-21] The Road to KDE 4: CMake, a New Build System for KDE
• [2007-02-16] The Pillars of KDE 4: Decibel Definitions and Benefits
• [2007-02-14] The Road to KDE 4: Okular and Ligature Document Viewers
• [2007-02-07] KDE 4’s Sonnet will turbocharge language processing
• [2007-02-07] The Pillars of KDE 4: Decibel
• [2007-02-06] The Road to KDE 4: Phonon Makes Multimedia Easier
• [2007-01-31] The Open Source Hook: Porting KDE to Mac and Windows
• [2007-01-30] From KDE 3 to KDE 4: what we will leave behind
• [2007-01-29] The Road to KDE 4: Kalzium and KmPlot
• [2007-01-23] The Road to KDE 4: Job Progress Reimagined
• [2007-01-15] The Road to KDE 4: Full Mac OS X Support
• [2007-01-08] The Road to KDE 4: New KOffice Technologies
• [2007-01-05] A sneak preview of the expected features in KDE 4.0
• [2007-01-01] The Road to KDE 4: SVG Rendering in Applications
• [2006-12-15] KDE 4: the ultimate business desktop?
• [2006-06-21] Why the KDE project switched to CMake - and how
• [2006-02-15] KDE 4 developers look toward new desktop possibilities
• [2006-01-12] Previewing KDE 4
• [2005-09-26] KDE 4 promises radical changes to the free desktop
• [2005-08-11] KDE4 - understanding the buzz

Another web site worth keeping an eye on if you are interested in development of KDE is KDE Commit Digest. You can find weekly reports about important changes to KDE source code there.

By the way, you can subscribe to comments to this post (where I will also post new links I add) by using this RSS feed.

Tags: kde, kde4, kde 4, desktop, linux, mac os, mac, windows, open source, free software, software, operating systems

The new year has barely started and good news for Linux and free/open source software just don’t stop coming in. This time story goes something like this. A headmaster of a school in Russia got accused of software piracy. Now Russian schools are so afraid that authorities would find unlicensed software on their computers, that they have started to look at alternative options to overpriced Windows and software for it. And Linux operating system and free and open source software is the perfect choice. Not only will they be able to stop worrying about freely copying the software around, they will also save a lot of money, get safer and more stable platform, which in addition has higher educational values. The philosophy of free access to source code, collaboration and sharing that is behind free and open source software is just a perfect fit for schools. And it is a great way to finally put an end to software piracy. Way to go Russia! More about this on CNews. And to learn more about the use of open source software in education visit K12 Open Source wiki.

Tags: linux, windows, russia, free software, open source, floss, foss, education, school, schools, k12, k-12

Linus Torvalds has just released a new version of the Linux kernel. Version 2.6.20 features new virtualisation options: KVM (which uses hardware capabilities of AMD and Intel processors) and a paravirtualisation implementation (which can be used by hypervisors like Xen and VMware). The new kernel also sports an official support for PlayStation 3 which has been contributed by Sony. It’s still not complete, but it’s a good start. Developers have also added support for UDF-Lite protocol, which brings advantages for transport of multimedia over networks. Support for compilation optimisations for Intel Core 2 was added. There are also many other new features and new drivers in this version. For easy to read information check out Linux 2.6.20 @ Kernel Newbies. For complete list of changes see the Linux 2.6.20 ChangeLog. After reading all this don’t forget to download the full Linux 2.6.20 source code.

Tags: linux, kernel, operating systems, os, virtualisation, playstation, ps3, sony

While we are still eagerly awaiting the release of KDE 4 - on which developers, artists and other contributors are working very hard - here comes a new service release with many bug fixes and translation updates. In addition, KDE 3.5.6 brings a couple of new features:

• Fields for entering passwords show bullets instead of asterisks
• Kicker, the main panel, got support for Compiz window manager
• Akregator, the feed reader, got session management support for tabs
• KMail, the email client, now enables you to create templates for messages
• Kontact, the personal information management (PIM) suite got new Summary menus for appointments and To-Dos

KDE 3.5.6 is also the first version that fully supports Euro as the new national currency here in Slovenia. For more details about the new version you can check out KDE 3.5.6 Release Announcement and KDE 3.5.6 Changelog.

Tags: kde, kde4, kde 4, desktop, linux, kicker, compiz, akregator, kmail, kontact, open source, software, slovenia, euro

If you check the Powered By section in the right sidebar you can see that one component that makes this blog possible is WordPress, an open source personal publishing system. Today a new major version of WordPress was released. In version 2.1 you can find new features like: autosave, tabbed editor, lossless XML import/export, spell checking and search engine privacy option. An expert from MySQL (the database behind WordPress) has also gone through the code and optimized it so it is now faster. You can read more about this release (and the future) in the post WordPress 2.1 “Ella”. The download is available here.

Tags: blog, blogging, internet, wordpress, cms

A couple of days ago the European Commission released results of an extensive study titled Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU (PDF, 1,8 MiB). It’s not only that the title is long, the report itself is 287 pages long.

What this study shows is that free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) is very important for Europe (and the rest of the world). It is also clear from the study that companies can save a lot of money by migrating from proprietary closed source software to open source software. Another benefit of FLOSS is that it encourages creation of small and medium-sized businesses and new jobs. Which is good for increased competition and innovation. An interesting bit of data is that existing base of FLOSS would cost firms almost € 12 billion to reproduce. And this base is doubling every 18-24 months. There are more benefits and details in the full report.

So, this report is in stark contrast with lies and FUD that Microsoft, a convicted monopolist, is trying to spread about FLOSS. Don’t believe them, read the report and get the true facts. Now it is upon our companies and politicians to implement the recommendations from the study and boost our economy.

Tags: software, free software, open source, floss, foss, europe, european union, business, economy, ict

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