Semantics is Restricting Linux Desktop Adaptation

Taken from Merriam-Websters Online Dictionary.

Semantics:

The meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs; especially : connotative meaning b : the language used (as in advertising or political propaganda) to achieve a desired effect on an audience especially through the use of words with novel or dual meanings (emphasis mine).

This has been gestating within me for over a year.  An incident yesterday brought it to full term and I thought I would share some thoughts on this topic with you...maybe to complete derision...

Maybe not.

Regardless, I am going to broach the subject here.

Her name is Margie and she is the Grandmother to three small boys, ages 7, 9 and 11.  I went there yesterday as part of our Twenty Computers in Twenty Days project and installed a desktop computer for these kids.  The mother and father of these boys haven't been seen since mom dropped the kids off three years ago.  She was "going out for the evening" and Grandma agreed to babysit.

It appears that her evening isn't over yet...She wrote once from Los Angeles and said that she was going to be sending for the boys as soon as she got her first paycheck.  That was in 2008.

The boys are well-adapted though...outwardly you wouldn't know that the most important person in their world had betrayed them in the most insidious of ways.  Their grades are good and they are all bilingual between Spanish and English.

Outwardly you wouldn't know...

They were thrilled that they were getting a computer.  It took me only a few minutes to set it up and get it going.  Margie had arranged for internet service prior to my arrival so when the machine came on, it was fully connected to the internet.

That's when the questions started.

Shortly after the Desktop was established, the obligatory popup appeared, stating that "Restricted Drivers" were available for installation.

Margie asked me then:  "What does that mean?"

This has happened easily over 100 times in the five years we've been doing this.  Most people never notice it but some do, and some are disturbed by it.

Margie was.

Even after I took the time to fully explain the whole proprietary driver thing to her, that word still lingered.

Restricted.

See, most people to my experience take words literally.  When someone is faced with the term "Restricted" it forms in their mind that they are not to use whatever is deemed "Restricted".  Even after my lengthy explanation and after telling her that some desktop functionality and most of the games wouldn't work right without the "Restricted" drivers, she still insisted that she did not want them installed.

Again, from Merriam-Webster:


Restricted
c : not intended for general circulation or release
And from Thesaurus.com - restricted:

Definition:

confine, limit situation or ability to participate

Synonyms:

bind, bottle up, bound, chain, check, circumscribe, come down on, constrict, contain, contract, cool down, cramp, curb, decrease, define, delimit, delimitate, demarcate, demark, diminish, encircle, enclose, hamper, handicap, hang up, hem in, hold back, hold down, impede, inclose, inhibit, keep within bounds, keep within limits, moderate, modify, narrow, pin down, prelimit, put away, put on ice, qualify, reduce, regulate, restrain, send up, shorten, shrink, shut in, surround, temper, tether, tie

To Margie, Restricted translated simply to illegal or forbidden.  To her mind, if the system was telling her that something is "Restricted" then it should not be used.  End of discussion.

Again, this isn't the first time this has happened.  I personally do not see the harm in framing the popup in this manner.

Look...there are a number of reasons that Linux as a Desktop alternative hasn't gained more popularity...but to bottle ourselves off from mainstream use over a badly chosen word is goofy.

Yeah, and I know..."but that's the way it's done"... and "The majority of people understand"..."It's not that big of deal...blah blah blah.

To just over 10 percent of the people I've installed for, it is a big deal.


Think for a minute...think about how outsiders perceive the Linux infrastructure.  It is foreign enough with the file system, not to mention the application names....to associate any application or data in Linux as "Restricted" isn't helping our cause.  Of course, some of you could not care less.

Oh yeah...applications...let's get into that for a minute.

About six months ago, we did a long distance deal where CPS (Child Protective Services) asked us to provide a laptop to a 17 year old girl in San Antonio who needed one badly.  I explained that these things never worked well as I could not physically go to San Antonio for the setup and familiarization session.  Against my better judgment, I FEDEX'ed the laptop there.  I was assured that this would not be a problem as someone there would be available to help her with a Linux Desktop.

Obviously there wasn't.

I started getting emails from her, complaining that she couldn't "download" anything.  Remember that to the Windows user, "download" and "Install" have some definite blurred lines.  The "run" option once the download is completed usually keeps the user in the dark as to where the actual download landed.  They most times don't touch the EXE file...Windows does that for them.

Bless their hearts.

Hide the most basic of functions from your users in the name of convenience.  That pretty much insures you propagate the Stupid User Syndrome.  Can't see any obvious motive for that anywhere around...

So I explained to her that Linux handled the installation of software differently.  I took over an hour to "familiarize" her with her desktop and the functions therein.  

By the end of the call, I wanted to run red-hot knitting needles through my eyes. 

Multiple times.

Chewing a rounded cup of shattered windshield glass was my second choice, given the scarcity of knitting needles.

To be fair, I have to admit that I suspect this child couldn't run her Windows computer with much more skill than a Linux machine.  She is not a "computer user".  She is what I describe as a "task-set mouse clicker".  She's learned to do a limited set of tasks such as Facebook, MySpace, email and Pogo.com.  Everything else pretty much mystifies her.  Anything after that is mostly Voodoo.

But still...we could do better and we could start at the beginning.

Synaptic.  What in the hell is "Synaptic"?  Aside from a term used in describing or talking about the nervous system.

Sure...we know what it is, but what in the actual word "Synaptic" tells us that it is the system's primary software management system.  Agreed, it is sometimes listed that way in the menu but to the uninitiated, the word "synaptic" has no mental match with "software installation".

Look, I am far from the first to bring this up.  We've been talking about it since the early to mid 2000's and still not much has been done about it.

Gimp?

Wengo?

Kopete?

I'll leave the rest for comments.  I could click my gnome menu and list a dozen cryptic application names but ya'll know them as well as I do.  Again in the name of fairness, my distro of choice as well as Ubuntu has went a long way in putting side-tags on these names to better describe them.

But still "We" could do better.  It's obvious that most Linux application authors don't put a lot of thought into their app naming or if they do, they do so to amuse their peers. 

Whaddaya say we take the New Linux User into consideration.

They are your future and I have enough field experience with this to confidently tell you that they are confused.  Sometimes to the point of shrugging off Linux and becoming just one more of the "Linux Sucks" crowd.

Again, some of you don't particualarly care about new users...I mean, you already know what you need to know about running your system.  You rest assured of your geek superiority and glance over your glasses in condescending glances.   To you, all is right with the world and the rest of them can eat cake.

All-Righty Then.

Get Your Shirt Together With The HeliOS Project

Finally...

Thanks to Skip Guenter, we have HeliOS Project T shirts.

Not many, but enough to let you know we have them.

For those of you who do not recognize our T shirt model, you might be surprised.  Beth Lynn Eicher of Ohio Linux Fest fame recently visited Austin on business and was kind enough to spend the evening with Skip and me at our Ultra Secret Testing Facility in Hutto Texas.  After taking her on the Grand Tour of our main facility in Lakeway Texas, we made the 1 hour trip all the way out to Hutto to just kick it and talk Linux stuff.

Beth Lynn has forgotten more about Linux than I will ever learn.  One does not get hired by Carnegie Mellon University with less than a stellar resume.

...and a crazy-mad set of skills...I mean CMU  IS one of the top Schools of Computer Science in the world.

We thought of it as a fitting gesture (I am so sorry...) that Beth Lynn try on one of our shirts and  model them for The Blog of helios.

Again, these T shirts are available thanks to Skip Guenter, our Director of System Engineering.  Skip paid for the shirts and printing out of his own pocket to make this possible.  Skip will be handling your order via his Paypal account (sorry... I know they suck but they are all we have right now).  We will work out a more permanent way of doing this if the need dictates.

This is a trial run for us so we have simply set it up as a first-come, first-served sort of thing.  Due to initial inventory and setup costs, we've only ordered a small number to get us started.  The shirts come in ash and sand colors.  They are Haynes no-tag shirts and stand up well to washing.  All of them have "The HeliOS Project" on the back with our distinctive tag line underneath it:

"A child's exposure to technology should never be predicated on an ability to afford it."

It is also in Spanish under the English phrase.

As you will see, some of the T shirts have "HeliOS Project Crew" on the front and some of them simply state " HeliOS Project".  Please make sure you specify which one you want along with your mailing address in the order.  Skip is handling the shipping himself so they will be shipped quickly.

Cost per shirt is 12.00.  Please add a dollar for XXXL  as that's the cost passed along to us for larger sizes.  We will be shipping in USPS flat envelopes, priority mail.  Shipping costs are as follows:

1 shirt - 5.00

2 shirts - 7.50

3 shirts- 10.20




Currently we have 1 XXXL in the regular Helios Project in sand and 1 XXXL in ash (gray) with HeliOS Project Crew.

13 XXL regular HeliOS Project in Sand and  12 XXL in ash with HeliOS Project Crew

 In XL we only have 9 in ash and they are the ones with HeliOS Project Crew.

You can send payment via Paypal to skip@skipsjunk.net. Again, make sure you specify shirt type, color  size and shipping address in the comments bracket of the Paypal page.  Should we run out of inventory by the time we order, your payment will be refunded promptly and we will post if we order more.

 I apologize for the PayPal-only option. I know they stink and I know you know they stink.  We will amputate them from our business practices as soon as possible.  We will offer other payment options should these T shirts sell well for us.  Our profit margin here is pretty slim because we want everyone to be able to have one. 

Of course, those profits will go to fund The HeliOS Project.

I've always thanked you for being part of what we do.

Now you can proudly wear that fact.

All-Righty Then

Linux Users Speak...., Devs Open Source Their Games...

Now this is simply amazing.

Nils Grotnes emailed me about 20 minutes ago with some pretty cool news.

Aquaria by Bit Blot ,Gish Published by Chronic Logic, Lugaru HD by Wolfire, and Penumbra Overture of course by Frictional Games have pledged to go open source.

Free as in speech open source...not necessarily free as in beer.  Devs need to make a living to0.

Regardless, this opens the source up to the community.  Problems like audio conflicts that have been "fixed" in these games can be seen, learned from and implemented.

If you seem to recognize these games, it's because we mentioned the Humble Indie Bundle when we talked with Dave Burke of Hemisphere games.

To quote the Humble Indie Bundle website:

"The Humble Indie Bundle experiment has been a massive success beyond our craziest expectations. So far, in just over 7 days, 114,049 generous contributors have put down an incredible $1,032,684. Of this, contributors chose to allocate 31.02% to charity: $320,343 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play Charity. I have made a page for the full breakdown including credit card fees in a JSON format here (json)."  


I am just now starting to make contact with the Devs of these games to get their input, however the news should go forward.  Regardless of motive, these games are now being open sourced to the betterment of an entire community. From what I have gathered so far, the folks from Wolfire came up with the idea to open source their Luguru code and approached the other companies and developers within the Humble Indie Bundle group.   So far Wolfire's Lugaru and the three other Indie houses mentioned above have pledged to open their code or engines.

Frictional Game Penumbra should be of particular interest due to their surprisingly agile engine.  The razor-edged engine for Penumbra was greeted with acclaim due to the new levels it allowed players to manipulate the game field.  Frictional had this to say about open sourcing Penumbra.

We have been thinking for quite some time to release Penumbra as open source but never gotten to it. When we where approached by Wolfire regarding the Humble Indie Pack, there was some talk about releasing the games as open source too. This sounded very interesting to us and we felt that it was the right time for it as well. Even though the source contains a lot of useful base code (several years of work), the engine itself is not something that we used and where just rotting on our hard drives. Because of this we felt that it would be better to release it to the public and hopefully someone will have use of it. We are extremely interested in seeing what people can do with it and are hoping to see some cool stuff pop up in the future!



Stay tooned for further news

All-Righty Then

.

Why Games don't get ported to Linux...A game dev speaks.

Blog of helios isn't a game review blog...it's a blog to discuss Linux-related stuff and to keep you posted on The HeliOS Project goings-on.  Some have asked why we cover games as much as we do.  Some have complained loudly.

It's simple.  When a game developer ports their work to Linux, it's news.  At least in the Linux World.  Linux users are hungry for games. The slashdotting of our coverage of the Linux port of World of Goo and Penumbra should be an indication of the importance placed on Linux ports.

Or not...slow news days happen.

Regardless, one of those game companies had to resort to bit torrent downloads due to their servers cratering under the assault of downloads from the /. article.

No market for Linux games....yeah right.

But to quote Yoda, "Short of native game choices we are."

There's a reason for that...I mean aside from the myth that the Linux market is too small to support game development.

We've spent some time talking with Dave Burke.  Dave is the originating author of Osmos.  As we announced albeit a bit late  Osmos is now ported to Linux and it's quite an entertaining game.  Dave speaks with us about some of his history in gaming and why he ported it to Linux.

And possibly why others do or will not.

First we asked Dave about his initial foray into making a Linux port for Osmos:

The Linux support burden has been particularly heavy as compared to our other platforms -- fortunately, mind you, not because of  any bugs in Osmos.   Not that I've discovered, anyway, although this is due in part to the fact that the game has already been out for over half a year, and so the major kinks we knocked out in our first patch last fall.  The problem is that there are such a wide variety of Linux distros, audio and video driver versions, unique window manager interactions with X11, etc., that it's quite hard to build a game that works flawlessly on everyone's machine.  So it's been lots of time spent helping folks track down what's wrong with their drivers, try out different audio devices, etc.

This has all been a particular challenge because I'm essentially a rank beginner in the Linux world, and so that standard wisdom one builds up over the years is of little use on a new operating system.  I used Linux a bit back in grad school, but only in a very end-user kind of way.  Back then, I learned enough about the basics of emacs and gmake to get my code compiling.  There was also the occasional Nethack diversion... but certainly as far as installing and maintaining Linux on a machine goes, my experience with porting Osmos to Linux has had me venturing into entirely new territory.  And of course to do any kind of decent QA on Linux, you need to  install and run multiple distros, WMs, 32bit vs 64bit, etc -- and so when each of these has unique problems with this hardware driver or that audio device, the whole process becomes quite a slog.

Audio device discussion will follow shortly.  Helmets may be required.

But before it get's to that level, we asked Dave Burke about how he got into gaming...what were his influences and motivations:

I've been making games since I was a kid.  With friends, we'd reinvent rules for crappy boardgames to make them more interesting.  The earliest game that stands out in my memory is a space battle game using chess pieces on a board as ships (pawns for space mines, bishops for homing missiles, etc).  We did a great version of Battleship, reworked on graph paper to have islands, movable units, different kinds of weapons, radar, recon... did you know Battleship started as a popular pencil-and-paper game, until Milton Bradley packaged it up in the 1960s, called it their own and started selling it?

The game programming started in BASIC on the XT.  The first games were text-adventure; "You're in a room with an angry-looking ogre; he's eyeing you hungrily."  Once I learned the PSET command, the games became more arcade-like with pixel graphics... one that stands out was a Pong clone with lasers and some interesting ball-paddle physics.  Over time the games and the tech became more sophisticated; I started doing games with animated sprite libraries.  One game in particular that I wish I still had on diskette was a 2D space battle game called 'Fighters' with rotating ships, special abilities, and between-round visits to the shops to spend your hard-earned cash to rearm.  At the time, it was by best and most-polished multiplayer computer game (two players on one keyboard, mind you -- no internet in those days).

I became big into hand-made middleware for my games; their in-game level editors, sprite editors, resource loaders, ... For awhile, I'd spend more time designing the tools to make games than I'd spend designing the games themselves.  I did a turn-based hotseat-multiplayer strategy game called 'Tanks' that looked and felt alot like the original Civ1 on the Amiga, and another BASIC game that was a splitscreen RTS/arcade hybrid with mechs. 

I also did alot of pseudo-3D games with line art (think Tron, or Doom in wireframe with no textures).  They were all a bit odd because I was in grade school at the time, and the maths were all hand-derived and therefore not quite right.  This was before I knew anything about vector algebra or matrices.  Then I pretty much hit the wall with what BASIC could do, and my game programming took a break until after highschool, when I learned C and the proper 3D maths in university.  I did an undergrad in physics, a Master's in computer science, then went off to work at Epic Games for a few years.

You worked for a corporate gaming company and left.  Why?


I left the games business in 2007, about a year before I first started working on Osmos. My reasons for leaving the biz had nothing to do with Osmos or starting a new project or studio. Rather, I left for personal reasons, during what can best be described as a sort of quarter-life crisis. I needed a break from sitting in front of a computer for 10-12 hours a day, and I needed some time and space to re-evaluate what I valued in life and what I wanted to spend my time and energy on. I figured some things out during my year away from the screen, and Osmos was a great project to come back to because it's something of a counter-cultural game. It's a game that promotes relaxation and thoughtfulness rather than aggression and violence, and I really love that.

 
Eddy Boxedrman and Aaron Barsky are the other full-timers at Hemisphere right now. Osmos is Eddy's baby; he's been working on the game on-and-off for about four years now.  Most of that work has part-time hours on the side of other full-time work. In April ’09, however, Eddy left his job at an animation software company and moved from urban Montreal to a town called Nelson in the mountains of British Columbia where he now works on Osmos full-time.  Likewise, Aaron left behind the stuffy environments of business and biotech software, packed up from Vancouver and moved up to Nelson to grow the Hemisphere Hive and work on the Mac, iPhone and iPad versions of the game (which we'll have lots of news about shortly!)


So, what are the real barriers to porting games to Linux...I mean from a dev's perspective?

The major problem with audio in Linux is, well,... audio in Linux!. It's 2010, and yet it's shocking how messy the whole affair is -- you can't even count on something as simple as simple non-streaming playback, never mind any kind of processing.  There are a variety of standards (ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio, etc -- which does a developer choose?) which is another of saying this: effectively, there are no standards.  Furthermore, for a given standard, some drivers are buggy and poorly configured by default, while others do horrible thinks like block on open when another process has opened the device.  It's true that OpenAL hides all the audio mess behind a single stable API, but the fact of the matter is that the mess is still there.  You can't count on anything runtime-behavior-wise as a developer; and so the situation is horrible.


Common wisdom in the games industry is that you can't make money making games for Linux simply because the market isn't big enough.  That's why AAA shops don't do Linux ports any more.  As an indie studio, however, we don't have as many mouths to feed, so for us it isn't as obvious that this is true.  So, porting Osmos to Linux has been an experiment for us as a studio.  Is it worth porting games to Linux?  We sure hope so, but we'll have to see!  In a few weeks we're going to publish sales stats and share some analysis on the prospects for the various platforms from the perspective of game development.

Regarding the trouble with Linux audio: I'm going to be writing a post-mortem on my experiences with the Linux port in about a week or so, from the perspective of a seasoned engine developer who's new to Linux.  Keep you eye on our blog.

This isn't news to most people who write game code for a living.  The 2d boy folks lamented the fact that the latency problems in Pulse Audio was a bugger to work around.  Even desktop users who enjoy Linux have had to throw cold water on two audio devices fighting different audio modes .

I don't have the answers...I'm a hack blogger...

Maybe you do.

All-Righty Then...

Osmos for Linux...prepare to be assimilated

Sure I play a few games...ones I can win, ones I can employ cheats so that I don't get blown to bloody chunks the second my character pops into the game field.  That happens a lot with me.

A "gamer" I am not.

So when Dave Burke from Hemisphere games emailed me to let me know that his game "Osmos" had been ported to Linux, it got my attention.  As requested, he sent me a link to download it and give it a try.  And as most always with Indie guys, it comes with no form of DRM.

That's a prerequisite for me to even mention it.

I fire off an email to our resident game reviewer, Mark Montgomery and give him a link to get the game from my server then on a whim, I decided to play it myself.

I mean...a game called "Osmos"...how hard can it be?

That question persisted in my head as the game field materialized in front of me and as I ran through the tutorial.  Here was my initial take on the game.  This isn't a shoot-em-up that pits you against armed badguys...It's an "absorption" game...a game of one thing assimilating another thing.

So..... you have games for the A-type personalities then you have games for those who might...ahem...

Prefer herbal sedation...

A game to be played in a nice hazy, mellow frame of mind  Yeah, that's how I would have described it...

Had I not played it I would still think of it that way.

This game will challenge you.  It's soothing electro-drowse music will lull you into thinking you are the the Master of all you survey...

Until it kicks your a$$.

I can't beat it, Mark Montgomery can't beat it, but what else cannot be beat is the price.  Mark's bullet-note review follows but before you read on, support those who have enough faith in us to port their work to Linux...It's the only way to insure they keep supporting us.  We're only talkin' ten bucks here.

Speaking of supporting the Indie Game folks...You can pick up a series of Linux games for what ever you want to pay.  It's called the Humble Indie Bundle and it includes World of Goo, Penumbra, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, EFF and Childsplay.  This is a pretty sweet deal and again, it helps our Indie Gamers support Linux games. It also support the Childs Play effort...it helps insure that this great suite of games is available free of charge in the future. Only 6 days and counting to get this bundle.


Ok...gameplay on Osmos...

 Whaddaya got Mark?

I played the game on my Phenom II Quad Core running Funtoo 64 bit.

Installation:

I was given the .deb version of the game, which was easy enough for me to extract manually.

The only glitch is that in the deb the symlink pointing to the game binary is in /usr/games/ instead of /usr/games/bin.

This was easy to fix and I assume it is simply a difference in how Debian and Funtoo handle game locations.

This symlink points to a wrapper script in the Osmos program directory that launches the 32 bit or 64 bit version of the game, depending on the system it is running on.

Initial Run:

When I first started the game it launched full screen on my secondary monitor. This was a pleasant surprise as most games tend to load full screen across both monitors. The game did crash once after a little while during the first run, but after I restarted it it never crashed again during the evening.

I played full screen a while and then changed the game to windowed mode.



One thing I really liked is that when your mouse leaves the game, either in full screen mode by moving to the other screen, or in windowed mode by leaving the game window, the game automatically pauses. This is quite nice for people like me who tend to do many things at once.

The one suggestion I would make is for there to be an option to turn this feature on or off (especially when running in windowed mode), as there may be times when you have the game running slow and would like to do something else while you wait.

Graphics:

The graphics are quite nice.

The colors and animations are very interesting and entertaining.

Sound:


-Music

The music is mostly calming, though some pieces are a little upbeat. The sound track consists of songs from a number of musicians. The bottom of the screen gives the song title, album, and artist for the currently playing song.


-Sound Effects

There aren't all that many sound effects, but this is simply due to the nature of the game.

The sound effects that are there fit the actions nicely and are enjoyable.

Controls:

There aren't many controls to learn.

You use the mouse for most movement and there are a few keyboard options for some functions such as speeding up or slowing down the game.

You can also use the mouse to zoom in and out.

Interface:

The interface is simple and easy to use.

It shows the levels you have completed and the related levels you haven't completed yet.

Just click on the level you wish to play.

Storyline:

There isn't much of a storyline here, but there doesn't need to be.

You are a simple organism that needs to absorb smaller organisms to grow while avoiding being absorbed by larger organisms.

Game play:

Game play is simple.

You primarily click to propel yourself by ejecting some of your mass in a direction.

Clicking rapidly will eject more matter and speed you up a bit.

You use your movement to attempt to absorb smaller organisms so you can grow, or to escape other organisms moving toward you.

Strategy:

There is a good bit of strategy involved. You must choose your movements carefully in order to intercept smaller organisms and avoid larger ones. However, since propelling yourself requires you to eject mass, you must be careful to not shrink yourself too much.

Levels:

Each level is a bit different. Some are simply filled with small organisms that start moving and growing once the level starts. Some levels have a sun with a gravity field in the center. Other levels start with you surrounded by huge organisms already. Some levels have various other challenges. Most levels have the goal of either becoming the larges organism or absorbing a certain special object in the level.

You win the level by completing the goal, and lose the level by either getting absorbed by something else or by allowing the other organisms to grow to the point where it is impossible for you to complete the level. In these cases the game shows a message telling you that you should restart.

You can restart a level if you like, and can also tell the game to regenerate a random variation of the level.

One of the nice features of the game is that you can control the speed of the time flow in a level. Sometimes you may want time to run very slowly so you can move very precisely. Other times you may want time to pass very quickly. Time speed is controlled on the fly in the level.

Menu:

The main screen shows the levels you have completed, levels that are available that you have not completed, and sometimes some locked levels.

There is a button in the corner that brings up the game menu where you can change the game options, view your Achievements, etc.

Configuration:

The game has pretty much the standard configuration options.

I did notice that there is no option to specify the resolution to use in windowed mode. You simply resize the window to your liking.

Glitches:

When in windowed mode the Achievement blocks overlap if the window is not large enough.

What I would like to see:

An option to set whether or not the game pauses when it loses focus.

Some details on levels, such as the number of times you've completed the level successfully.

Summary:

While the concept of the game is simple, and the controls are simple, the game can be quite challenging.

I have only moved a few levels past the tutorial levels at this point, due to the difficulty of the currently available levels.

Overall I am quite enjoying the game.

The levels are challenging and the music is enjoyable and calming.

This game could easily be addicting due to the easy play style and challenging levels.

All-Righty then...

Austin Group Prepares for Linux Against Poverty.

Lynn Bender called a meeting Saturday at the Triumph Cafe in Austin to begin organizing the Linux Against Poverty 2010 event.

 I think to Lynn's and my own surprise, the number of people who attended actually exceeded those who signed up to attend.  We had 30 people attend the 2 hour meeting and many stayed as much as 30 minutes afterward to mingle and iron out other details



I believe that speaks volumes to how important the Linux and Tech Community in Austin believe this event to be. They are the backbone of this effort and these volunteers are going to spend June 19th busting their backsides to aid The HeliOS Project.

What amazes me is the number of people we have returning from last year...they know what is in store for them.

Bless their hearts...

For those that do not know, Linux Against Poverty is an annual event organized by Lynn Bender that gathers some of the top tech people in the area and assembles them to evaluate, triage, repair and then install the Linux Operating System on those computers.  The computers are donated by local businesses and individuals.  The repaired and refurbished computers are then given to disadvantaged kids in the Central Texas area via The HeliOS Project.

Last year's efforts netted The HeliOS Project 219 usable machines.  Those machines were received in July of 2009 and were gone by November.  You can see some of the pictures of the 2009 effort by clicking the above link.

Now I am going to be honest with you here...despite Lynn's best efforts, most of the local media fairly ignored us last year.  With the exception of KUT radio and Omar Gallaga, this event was pretty much blacked out.  This year however, there are some publicity possibilities looming that will bode well for us.  While I cannot say until they happen, we have reason to believe that our mostly-unaided success last year will draw some good media interest.

We'll see.

Regardless of that possibility, we expect some great results from this year's event.  People are already talking to their employers about what we are doing and we've caught the attention of two major corporates here in Austin.

Now to the gear and pulley stuff.

Linux Against Poverty 2010 will again be held at Union Park on 6th Street on the 19th of June.  My sincere and humble thanks to Greg Bodle for his generosity.  As Lynn stated on his website, most bar owners would have taken one look at the transformation taking place and slammed on the brakes.  Greg saw the bigger picture, which was properly painted by our volunteers returning his place to its original state when we were done.  We are extremely grateful for his gift to us.

There will be five Team Stations working within LAP this year.  They are:


Intake and Evaluation


Salvage and Parts


Material Handling


Repair


Install 

Building on lessons learned from last year, we used Saturday's meeting to streamline the process and build a workable system.  My further thanks goes to Roy Hall, Alex Thurlow, Andy Krell, Skip Guenter and Tom King for stepping forward and shouldering the responsibility for leading these teams.  We are going to be needing a Team Leader for Material Handling (fancy name for hauling computers and parts on and off of trucks).  You can see how this is being organized here or if you want to take part and join one of our teams.

Our goal this year is to raise 50K in usable computers and components this year.  If you are an employee or work with any business in Austin, please let them know that we can use their decommissioned machines and components.

Because the needs of our kids are the focus of our efforts, we have to turn down some stuff.  We need P4 machines at 2.0 gig processing or better.  Anything less will not allow us to build the machines to do the work these kids are being given today.  You can see specific equipment requirements here.   Of course, any equipment donations are tax deductible.  They can contact me at helios@fixedbylinux.com and we will make the arrangements.

If you care to sponsor Linux Against Poverty on any level, please contact Lynn Bender at Lynnbender at geekaustin dott org

And to those who are taking part in Linux Against Poverty 2010....

You guys Rock.

All-Righty Then...