Fuduntu Gaming: The Humble Botanicula Debut Bundle

April 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Today on Fuduntu Gaming we bring you the Humble Bundle‘s newest time sink, the Humble Botanicula Debut Bundle. Truth be told this bundle doesn’t offer as much in terms of variety like previous ones did, while all games offered have something to make them unique, they all fall in the “artsy” adventure/puzzle category, which may deter those gamers who don’t particularly enjoy that side of the spectrum. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great games and ideas for games coming out of that niche but, it is still a niche market.

In any case, this Bundle was set up to help the World Land Trust which is an international conservation charity, devoted to protecting “the world’s most biologically important and threatened habitats acre by acre“- in their own words. Having been born in the country side myself I can relate and in that spirit I present to you:

This time around the Humble Bundle team, which was originally spun off from Wolfire Games, presents us with three base games: Botanicula, in which you must guide a “motley band of tree creatures in a journey to save their home from brooding, spider-like invaders” and it lends its name to the bundle; Machinarium, a game that has been featured in quite a few Bundles, it is a point and click adventure game set in a dystopian future where robots rule the world; and Samorost 2, another “repeat offender” in the Humble Bundles in which you guide a tiny gnome in search of his dog. For those who don’t mind forking over some extra dough, the HB team has a nice indie movie, Kooky, made by Czech picture studio BIOGRAF, which tells the tale of a stuffed bear on a quest to return home, and Windosill another puzzle, point and click adventure game built around odd looking visuals.

If this post hasn’t convinced you to loosen the grip you have on your wallet, let me remind you that all these come with Mac, Linux and Windows native versions, Steam keys included for those who pay more than $5. No Desura keys this time either, if any of our readers knows why leave us a comment! ^.^

Word of Caution: It seems as though Botanicula relies on Adobe Air to work and, since Adobe has long since dropped support for Air on Linux, there may be issues to get the game to work. I haven’t had the time to test it myself, but I’ll update this post and the one on the forums when I do. If nothing else this is a Bundle worth supporting, just to get Kooky!

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The Problem with N00bs

April 15, 2012 by 4 Comments

Lately, I’ve been talking to a lot of newbies who have yet to develop anything for the open source community about how to start out. I churn out the old recommendations – make a tool you find useful, make a game, improve something that already exists, reinvent the wheel, etc. They reply “but how to I design it? Where do I start? What do I do?”

Fuck designing it. It’s not a critical tool nor your paying work (or at least not yet); it’s something to help you learn.  Even if you’ve been developing, you can still learn. And will you make the mistakes you need to if you hang around designing a spec all day long? Unlikely, you’ll be bored stiff and not actually get anything interesting done. Jumping straight in will make you a better programmer as you learn to live and fix mistakes that you’ve made.

Where do you start? In your head. Start with whatever comes first in your head. You might realise later you were wrong, but who cares? You got the job done, didn’t you? That’s better than sitting around all day, delaying because you don’t know what to do first.

What do you do? You develop, bro. You develop because developing things is awesome. It’s powerful, and it’s fun, and you need to learn to love it or you’ll be a shit developer all your life.

A good spec is vital for big, important tools and jobs. Open source projects are rarely big or important – once they are, then you should seriously consider putting time into documenting everything up and redesigning weak parts of your project.

If it wasn’t for jumping straight in, Fuduntu and the in-house tools we’ve made wouldn’t exist. Now that we’ve got a pretty big user base,we’re working on writing things up that we hadn’t before.

tl;dr – Jump straight into developing and make something awesome.

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Fuduntu 2012.2 Release

April 1, 2012 by 36 Comments

The second Fuduntu quarterly ISO, Fuduntu 2012.2 is now available for immediate download. As with all Fuduntu releases, this release continues our tradition of small incremental improvements. It is important to note that existing Fuduntu users have already rolled up to this version through the normal update process, and do not need to download or reinstall from this media to benefit from this release.

Major package updates this release:

  • Kernel 3.2.13
  • Chromium 17
  • Firefox 11
  • Thunderbird 11
  • Pidgin 2.10.2
  • LibreOffice 3.5.1.2

Platform Changes, Mirror Infrastructure:
During this cycle, the Fuduntu team has made many changes to improve the overall experience with the distribution. The largest, and most welcomed change is the shift from SourceForge as our package host to a new mirrorable infrastructure.

In addition to building and enabling the new infrastructure we are pleased to announce that several open source mirror providers have begun replicating our repositories. This change improves speed and availability of software available for installation, as well as package updates.

If you are responsible for hosting an open source mirror, and would like to help the project by hosting Fuduntu it couldn’t be simpler to get started. We expose the entire repository via public read only rsync which is available at rsync://packages.fuduntu.org/repo. If you do want to mirror; do a full sync, schedule an ongoing sync, and then contact the Fuduntu team at team at fuduntu dot org or visit us in #fuduntu on Freenode.

Our new package repository utilizes a virtual dedicated server (vds). In order to fund hosting this new platform Fuduntu held a donation drive in February securing funding for the first full year of service within just a few days. We would like to thank the entire community for stepping up doing what was needed to improve this service critical to the project. Remember, this service must be renewed yearly so keep those donations flowing.

To help make sure users are optimized to use the mirror closest to them, the YUM fastest mirror plugin is now enabled by default on all new installations. This plugin walks through the mirror list seeking the fastest mirror available and then uses it.

For those of you that do not have it installed, the mirror list is spooled rotating every 15 minutes. This ensures that users connecting to the repository via mirror list without the plugin enabled are not flooding a single mirror.

Default IM Client:
Another welcome change this cycle is the shift from Empathy to Pidgin. Pidgin is a much more feature rich IM client and is now installed by default, replacing Empathy.

Firmware:
Beginning with Fuduntu 2012.2, all available firmwares are installed by default. This small change improves the odds that your WIFI adapter is detected and ready to use out of the box. This helps reduce the amount of work necessary to configure your computer while using Fuduntu as a Live CD or after installing.

Driver Support:
Fuduntu hosts multiple kmod packages in the repository. These packages make it simple to enable a proprietary video driver, or WIFI adapter.

Included in the repository:

  • NVidia display driver 290.10 (nvidia-kmod)
  • ATI Catalyst display driver 12.1 (catalyst-kmod)
  • Broadcom WIFI Adapter driver 5.100.82.112 (wl-kmod)

An additional staging kmod pack is available (kmod-staging) containing drivers for many devices not supported by default.

Wiki:
We now have a Wiki! An icon has been placed into your panel under System > Online Help. This link requires external connectivity, and will take you to our new Wiki. The Wiki is a community supported help platform, editable by all community members. If you have a few minutes and an idea or recently solved problem, please take a moment to add it to the Wiki so your knowledge will be available to everyone else who may need it.

Community:
Our community is growing at an astounding pace, with an average visible growth rate of hundreds of new installations per week. As we grow, we are starting to see many in the community become actively involved helping out in the forum / IRC channel and contributing to the Wiki. We would like to personally thank everyone in the community, you all are doing a wonderful job, keep up the great work!

In addition I would like to announce that the Fuduntu team has two new team members on board with a primary focus on software packaging. Please welcome Fufu, and Dinivan to the team! With their help, we should be able to process packaging requests much more quickly.

Lastly, we would like to thank you all for a great first quarter of 2012, and we sincerely hope that you continue to use and enjoy Fuduntu.

Fuduntu Website – Fuduntu.org
Fuduntu Community – Fuduntu Forum
Distrowatch – Fuduntu
IRC: #fuduntu @ Freenode

Download: 2012.2 – 32Bit: [ Download | Torrent ] 64Bit: [ Download | Torrent ]

SHA1 sums:

32bit: e7205556760a59071ae03cfdb80f49777b86cf15
64bit: ffcbbba48bf2bdd36aee721f49eb3956f270ba39

Filed under Fuduntu, Releases

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