Month: September 2007

Extreme Tux Racer: tuxracer is back!

Aaah tuxracer… This game was a fine example of what linux could do in 3D gaming for some time (and one of the reasons I struggled some years ago to get 3d acceleration on my linux box). For those who never tried it, it’s a 3d race game, where you control Tux as he slides down a course of snow and ice, while collecting herring. Read more about it and the game history at wikipedia: in short, the first game changed from GPL to closed-source, a fork was launched from the last GPL code, another one (ppracer) was started when the first died,…

ppracer is still in portage, but sadly it is also a dead project now. Luckily, some people have picked it up (again), and have released their first version! 🙂 This new tuxracer is called “Extreme Tux Racer”

Their homepage is here, and they even kindly provide ebuilds for their first release! For now it’s not that different from ppracer, but let’s wish them luck and lots of new features 😉 (hum… multiplayer tuxracer…)

NX servers 3.0 going security stable, removing old versions

NX 2.1 libraries (based on X libraries and Xnest server) are derived from an old XFree release, and are not maintained anymore upstream, in favor of the 3.0 version (based on X.org, 64bit-clean, …). As pointed out by our nice security people, the code base in NX 2.1 is not patched against all vulnerabilities reported in XFree recently.

So, what will this change for Gentoo users? The free edition server 3.0 has been in the tree for some time and will be going stable shortly (and 2.1 packages removed). The bugs reported when 3.0 got out are all fixed now, so this is the best working version anyway!

For Freenx users, I am preparing a version bump that will work with 3.0 libraries (and will also work on no-multilib amd64 systems too). Upstream is working on a new version, with complete 3.0 support, but as it will be a complete rewrite, expect it “when i’s done” 😉

Just in case, I’ll move the 2.1 nx libs ebuild in the NX overlay (package.masked of course), if people really need it for their freenx setup (and know what they are doing)

When these updates are done, next big task will be to finally write some nice documentation on NX servers in Gentoo (what’s NX, pros/cons of the different servers, how to set up advanced features, troubleshooting guide, …)

Updating GNUstep packages in portage

As a follow-up to my previous post, as gnustep base packages are marked ~ppc again, I have started to move the other packages from the overlay 🙂

Visible results? Well, we have a cleaned-up windowmaker (still my favourite window manager after all these years), closing a few bugs, the return of gworkspace (temporarily package.masked because of vulnerable code in pdfkit), updated (and working with latest gnustep packages) gnumail, …

And now back to moving ebuilds in CVS, cleaning up old ones, and closing bugs (while my desktop gets an overdue “emerge -auDNt world”).

Oh, by the way, I won’t add Etoile itself in this batch, as it still needs some changes in the way the ebuilds handle the bundles defaults (which you definitly want OK, if you want to have a desktop “as-in-the-screenshot” 😉 )

Virtualbox 1.5.0: great release

I had previously blogged about virtualbox, which replaced vmware on my desktop.

The new version 1.5.0 was released yesterday, and the Changelog has some nice entries, like virtual serial ports, …

A new feature I love is “seamless windows” (vmware and parallels had this on Mac, now we have that on linux 🙂 ): that means windows programs in their windows on your desktop (and not anymore in a big “windows desktop” window)

Another great “new” feature is shared folders support: this was in 1.4.0, but not in the GPL edition… Here it is in 1.5.0, and working great: all the shared folders you set up appear (and appear quickly) in your “network neighborhood”.

There is also an option now to activate/deactivate VT-x/AMD-V support, but they say it’s slower than their own implementation. I’ll have to test that on minesweeper 😉

ps: and of course it’s available in Gentoo portage