Starcraft 2 [runs] under my Linux install with no issues. Since the game’s official release a few days ago I have been getting a good bit of traffic on those two pages – so I figured I would put together a quick HOWTO for getting Starcraft 2 working on your Linux distro of choice. The game runs under Wine 1.2 and/or CrossoverGames 9.1.

Crossover 9.1 Starcraft 2 is listed as “officially support” and as such you will find that it has an entry in the automated games installer. The only issue is that after the game has actually finished installing the StarCraft 2 process hangs around – meaning Crossover never actually knows that the game has finished installing and thusly never creates menu entries for it. Thank fully there is a simple fix for this – after Starcraft 2 has finished installing, open up your system monitor and look for any rogue Starcraft 2 processes and kill them off. After you have done this the CXGames installer will know that it has finished installing and will create the menu entries as it should.

[...]

It worked out of the box with my current WINE install (1.2)

via Thoughts on Technology: HOWTO: Starcraft 2 on Linux with Wine.

This is a pretty good tip. The default style irritates me to no end. Check out the full post, there are some great tips, especially if you’re new to Nautilus like me.

Ever since some distros started their attempt to become more “user-friendly” and gaining the nice looks, some default features got changed.

In this case, it’s the location bar. Instead of it they got some buttons that shows the location and let you navigate through the directories! So, if you’re using one of these distros and want to pop up the location bar, all you have to do is to hit Ctrl+L. However, if you’re like me and like to have it always there, each time you fire it up, you canchange the default value of it in gconf-editor, or alternatively use this following command in the terminal

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/start_with_location_bar --type bool 1

via anxiousnut’s playground

Ext2Read is a Free & Open Source Software which allows you to browse your Linux partitions in a very Windows Explorer-esque interface. Unlike other tools Ext2Read also supports ext4 filesystem, even if extents feature is enabled. Like the name suggests – Ext2Read can only read, not write to the partitions – so in case you are paranoid about the tool causing data corruption to your Linux partitions, you can drop those fears.

via techie-buzz

Here are our key findings:

GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC

• While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors
• Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.
• A number of top company contributors are consultancy/services companies specialising in the GNOME platform – Collabora, CodeThink, Openismus, Lanedo and Fluendo are in the top 20 companies. As many of these companies grew initially through work on Maemo, this is a sign of the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.

Company	Commits	Percentage
Volunteer	101823	23.45
Unknown	73558	16.94
Red Hat	70790	16.30
Novell	45349	10.44
Collabora	21684	4.99
Intel	11160	2.57
Fluendo	10218	2.35
Lanedo	10090	2.32
Independent	8922	2.05
Sun	8862	2.04
Nokia	6183	1.42

via Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » GNOME Census.

Notice a missing company ?

It seems Oracle is hellbent on destroying whatever good Sun had done to the Open Source Ecosystem. The latest product to get the axe seems to be none other than the Flagship Virtualization program xVM VirtualBox.

[....]

All tests show that VirtualBox 3.2 lacks any semblance of stability, crashing any operating system running on it randomly. VirtualBox 3.1.8, using the binary-only release for Linux, works like a charm. It is also apparent that VirtualBox 3.2.6 is a lot slower and sometimes unresponsive, as compared to version 3.1.8.

A fresh install of VirtualBox 3.2.0 on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition even managed to completely crash the Windows Networking Subsystem, necessitating the uninstallation of VirtualBox

via Is Oracle trying to kill VirtualBox? | Muktware.

The article is either a bunch of baloney or the test system as got some serious hardware/software compatibility problems. Oracle VirtualBox 3.2 has been absolutely rock solid, smoother than ever before. Seamless mode is awesome, and I managed to resurrect my dead Windows installation by installing a Windows 7 VM using Oracle VirtualBox and then making a bootable Windows 7 USB pen drive (long story worth a blog post, will do soon!). The article doesn’t mention how many test systems were used to test the software – if its a single box then drawing a conclusion that Oracle is killing VirtualBox based in just one system is pretty stupid.

And heh, the author calls himself “BaloneyGeek“. Go figure.

If you check the latest versions of IronRuby, IronPython or the Dynamic Language Runtime you will see that Microsoft has now relicensed the code from the Microsoft Permissive License to the Apache 2 License

via Microsoft Licensing Changes for IronRuby and IronPython – Miguel de Icaza.

Couple of days ago, there was a huge debate (argument ?)  between Matt Mullenweg  - developer of WordPress and Chris Pearson – developer of Thesis premium theme over twitter which then extended to Mixergy.

Crux of the argument is the disagreement amognst the two over the licensing terms. Matt believes that Thesis should adopt GPL which as Wikipedia states:

The GPL is an example of a powerful copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft.

Chris, on the otherhand disagrees with this. The full transcript of their discussion is available on Mixergy, here are some quotes which I found interesting:

[...]

openSUSE 11.3 is based on Linux kernel 2.6.34 and has KDE Software Compilation 4.4.4 as the default desktop environment. A GNOME version is also available and it uses GNOME 2.30.1. In terms of the default applications, it comes with Thunderbird 3.0.5, Firefox 3.6.4 and OpenOffice 3.2.1 to name a few. openSUSE 11.3 also gives the user the choice of using Btrfs during installation.

You can view the complete changelog here or read the release note. A screenshot tour of openSUSE 11.3 have also been put up.

via openSUSE 11.3 Released – Download Now.

My favourite distro gets an update.

Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we’ll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP. Despite this issue being known about for a long time, basic Linux tools for partitioning and formatting drives have not caught up.

The problem most likely to hit you with one of these drives is very slow write performance. This is caused by improper logical-to-physical sector alignment.

via Linux Not Fully Prepared for 4096-Byte Sector Hard Drives | OS News.

If you’re going to grab some new hard drives, the above article is worth reading. The article dates to Feb, 2010 – so I’m not sure if this situation still exists. Further more,

These drives are on the market now. We’ve known about this issue for a LONG time, and now it’s here, and we haven’t fully prepared. Some distros, like Ubuntu, use “parted”, which has a very nice “–align optimal” option that will do the right thing. But parted is incomplete, and we must rely on tools like fdisk for everything else. But anyone manually formatting drives based on popular how-tos that pop up at the top of Google searches is going to cause themselves a major performance hit, because mention of this alignment issue and how to fix it is conspicuously absent.

A lot of our developers are using Linux, obviously they want to listen to music while they’re coding away and looking at the feedback we get it appears that they’re not the only ones. So today we’re pretty happy to present a preview version of Spotify for Linux.

Built by our brilliant developers during hack days and late nights, it shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. Unfortunately, there are issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform so we haven’t included support for local files in this version.

via Spotify for Linux – Spotify.

Nice! Now if only they’d allow us poor mortals(read: those living outside Europe) to use Spotify