Open Source Pixels

Forget the One Laptop Per Child project hyperbole, there seems to be another contender emerging which is deserving of the title ‘cheapest Linux laptop on the planet’ despite having very little in the way of publicity when compared to the OLPC machine.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (or ET for short) is a FPS (First Person Shooter) game, native for Linux, which borrows concepts from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and uses the Quake 3 engine. The idea initially was to develop it as a new commercial RtCW mod, but, ultimately, it was released as a free standalone, multiplayer game, after the developers abandoned the development of the single player part of the game.

The first webpage was served off a NeXTcube at CERN, Switzerland, developed by Tim Berners-Lee. He also wrote the first web browser, confusingly named WorldWideWeb - the world of web browsers has come a long way since then, more or less turning into a platform of their own. This puts increasing pressure on web browsers to be really really good pieces of software, and as such, ZDnet has a 7-page comparison of the world’s major web browsers, comparing Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

Thomas Thurman of Metacity fame has written a lengthy blog post on how Metacity themes work. “This is an article about how to theme Metacity. It is a work in progress, and I have had to dig deeply to find some answers. GNOME lets you theme a bunch of different things, but we’re only talking about window border themes here, which some people call Metacity themes.”

At BrainShare 2008 in March, Novell introduced a set of Linux certifications for administrators. Rather than being directed at higher-end Linux managers, like the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) or Novell’s own Novell Linux Certified Engineer (NLCE), the new certifications are meant for entry-level Linux administrators, one step above the Linux Professional Institute’s entry-level LPIC-1.

As OpenSuse 11 has gone through its various betas, the screenshots, particularly of the installer, have continually been impressive and the RC screenshots are certainly cool, too.

Here is PlayOnLinux version 3.0 as announced, the release of your favorite front-end to Wine, PlayOnLinux.

It’s nice — really nice — to see via Distrowatch that development is continuing on low-spec favorite DeLi Linux.

Adding photos to Flickr using web browser can be a very annoying procedure. Thus, the better solution is to use tools, which enable us to maintain our Flickr account directly from the file manager or desktop application. Linux users may choose several solutions.

H2 is an SQL database engine written in Java that
implements the JDBC API. Embedded, server, and
clustering modes are available. A browser based
console application is included. The database has
strong security features. Disk based and in-memory databases and tables are supported.