There’s an ongoing Kickstarter drive for a small game engine company named Leadwerks to port its development environment to the Linux platform. According to the company, the market for native Linux games is set to increase exponentially over the next few years. With Valve’s digital distribution platform, Steam, Linux gaming finally has some legs under it. More to the point though, the company cites recent listings for Linux developers at major game studios like Crytek as evidence that the Linux platform’s importance is growing.

Read the full thing at http://semiaccurate.com/2013/07/30/leadwerks-is-bringing-game-development-to-linux/

With the rise of widespread government monitoring programs, Tox is an easy to use application that allows you to connect with friends and loved ones without anyone else listening in.

Tox is built with the idea that you can keep up with friends and family without having your privacy violated. While other big-name services require you to pay to unlock features, Tox is free in both price, and in liberty. That is, you’re free to do whatever you wish with Tox.

Read more at http://tox.im/

Bash configurations on Linux and OS X can be confusing for many people, myself included. I've written this short guide to remind you and I both of a reasonable set of conventions you could follow.

Read the full thing at http://dghubble.com/.bashprofile-.profile-and-.bashrc-conventions.html

Left 4 Dead 2, a zombie survival cooperative first-person shooter developed and published by Valve on Steam for Linux, is now free to play, at least until Monday.

The official launch of Left 4 Dead 2 for the Linux platform has prompted Valve to offer all users the possibility to play the game, for free, until Monday 10AM Pacific Time.

“Celebrating Left 4 Dead 2’s official release on Linux and America’s Day of Independence, we’re putting L4D2 on sale for a stunning 75% off and it's free to play all weekend!"

Read the full thing at http://news.softpedia.com/news/Left-4-Dead-2-Is-Now-Free-to-Play-Happy-Zombie-Hunting-Until-Monday-365811.shtml

The next-generation VP9 and HEVC codecs are the latest incremental refinements of a basic codec design that dates back 25 years to h.261. This conservative, linear development strategy evolving a proven design has yielded reliable improvement with relatively low risk, but the law of diminishing returns is setting in. Recent performance increases are coming at exponentially increasing computational cost.

Daala tries for a larger leap forward— by first leaping sideways— to a new codec design and numerous novel coding techniques. In addition to the technical freedom of starting fresh, this new design consciously avoids most of the patent thicket surrounding mainstream block-DCT-based codecs. At its very core, for example, Daala is based on lapped transforms, not the traditional DCT.


Read the full thing at http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml

Despite the care we take to test isos for new versions of Mageia, we missed a potentially huge bug… It concerned the isos using the classical installer. If the user chose to add online media at the beginning of the installation, it would result in the system being updated to Cauldron, the development version of Mageia. This was due to the initial isos including a partial misidentification, referring to the development version (and not the Official one). The update media added pointed to Mageia Cauldron and not to the Mageia 3 repositories. Please note that users who chose to add online media only at the end of the installation would not be affected by this problem.

Read the full thing at http://blog.mageia.org/en/2013/06/09/new-isos-available-for-mageia-3-classical-installer/

Door Kickers is an innovative Real-Time Tactics game that puts you in charge of a SWAT team. We broke the news about it coming to you last month here.

I had a chance to test it before the Linux version went out (thank you developers!) and fell in love with it, good graphics mixed with interesting gameplay. It actually reminded me of Frozen Synapse a little bit.

Read the full thing at http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/door-kickers-is-now-available-on-linux.2045

Linux is the granddaddy of all open source projects, the blueprint for the decentralized development processes. And some of those who use the Linux code, free for the taking, don't give back in equal measure. Still, the time for cajoling those users -- even commercial projects like Ubuntu leader Canonical -- into participating is over, says Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation.

Read the full thing at http://www.pcworld.com/article/239151/linux_foundation_chief_you_are_an_idiot_if_you_dont_give_back_to_open_source.html

To be honest, I have used quite a few KDE distros in last couple of years but never saw a resource efficient distro like Mageia 2. Under similar conditions, Mageia performed better than almost all the KDE distros I have used. Plus, with Mandriva Linux going commercial and PCLinuxOS becoming independent of Mandriva, Mageia and ROSA are perhaps the limited ways to know what's brewing in the Mandriva camp. Incidentally both the Mandriva derivatives present really beautiful KDE distros!

Read the full thing at http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.ch/2013/05/mageia-3-kde-review-simple-refined.html

Before we get to the rest of the information: we dedicate this release to the memory of Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration to those he left behind. We miss his brilliance, his courtesy and his dedication.

Read the full thing at http://blog.mageia.org/en/2013/05/19/all-grown-up-and-ready-to-go-dancing-mageia-3s-out/