HOWTO install HedgeWars (Worms clone) in an EEE PC

HedgeWars is a "Worms" clone and a pretty cool game. They put it this way:

Hedgewars, it's a Blast! This is the funniest and most addictive game you'll ever play - hilarious fun that you can enjoy anywhere, anytime. Hedgewars is a turn based strategy game but the real buzz is from watching the devastation caused by those pesky hedgehogs with those fantastic weapons - sneaky little blighters with a bad attitude!

By popular demand, here's a (quick and simple) HOW TO of how to install this game on an EEE PC (where it runs awesomely):

• Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list, and add this line in that file:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main contrib non-free

• In a terminal (CTRL+ALT+T to open it) write:sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install hedgewars
• Edit once again the /etc/apt/sources.list file and remove the new entry, so your system ends up as it was before
• in the terminal write sudo apt-get update to make your changes in the sources list being in effect.
• Now you have the game installed. To run it, in a terminal write hedgewars. To play it well, you'll have to set it up to fullscreen mode.

There you go: have a nice gaming!

Open Letter To NVIDIA

I'm all for Openess. In my last blog post I talked a little about Open Documents, this time I'm going to talk about something different: hardware. While it doesn't shock me that hardware plans are kept close and secret, I think that hardware specs should be allways open. Hardware specs is what will enable anyone to interact with the hardware you make and using all its features. A great example of why this is needed is NVIDIA: their graphics hardware don't have their specs open, and so the experience of using their hardware in systems like GNU/Linux are far from perfect. To convince NVIDIA to change their policy, there's an Open Letter to NVIDIA, saying:

We the GNU/Linux community and the undersigned, kindly request that you, NVIDIA Corporation, increase your efforts in better enabling the open-source community to develop free software drivers for your graphics hardware. Your major competitors in this market, AMD/ATI and Intel, have not only supported the community in open-source driver development efforts but they are now openly releasing hardware programming documentation.

While we are grateful that your company provides one of the best closed-source graphics drivers for Linux, it is not without its problems and prevents many users from having a truly free software platform. You have shown an open-source passion in the past when dropping the nforce-net binary blob in favor of the community-spawned forcedeth driver for Ethernet support on your motherboard chipsets. There has been a rumor that you may be developing an open-source strategy for your graphics products, so if that is the case please let us know your true intentions. Even if you were only able to open a subset of your Linux driver, this still would show a sign of solidarity to the free software world.

We stand united under the name OpenTheBlob.com, but realize that legally it may be next to impossible to open-source the binary portion of your graphics driver due to patents and preserving some intellectual property in this competitive market. What we are, however, asking you for is to support the open-source community to the fullest extent possible. The open-source "nv" driver that you provide for X is an abhorrent disaster that is limited to 2D acceleration and doesn't come without its share of limitations and shrouded code. We look to NVIDIA for providing concise programming documentation to willing open-source developers that is not encumbered by Non-Disclosure Agreements or other legal restrictions.

There is an interested group of developers at hand that are willing to contribute towards an open 3D NVIDIA driver. The Nouveau developers are committed to these free software ideals to the extent that they have spent years reverse engineering your hardware without ever receiving any funds for this immense work, but rely upon community donations. An official open-source driver could complement your binary driver, in order to provide a better "out of the box" experience on many Linux distributions and satisfying the customers -- including corporate clients -- who mandate open-source software.

In a steadfast manner, we request knowing your true commitment to the GNU/Linux and open-source communities. For everyday that you stand by idle, your competitors are continuing to refine their open-source drivers and pushing out more documentation that is better enabling the open-source community. Please let us know what is going on and join the open-source community in this effort.

If you agree with this text, please consider signing this open letter.

Microsoft going Open Source? Nah...

All over the news today is the word that Microsoft is turning from evil to good, hell is freezing and they're really adopt Open Source and trying to contribute to its world.

Let me give you some ice:

• The whole stuff is incompatible with GPLv2 and GPLv3.
• All this is full of patents and patent promises. For instance, while there's a promise to not sue voluntary non-paid developers, using the code covered by patents for commercial purposes is only permited “for the right fee”.

This news is bringing more harm than good to the open source and the free software world. Which is not that a big deal of news, considering it comes from Microsoft...

Masters in OpenSource Software in Portugal?

I've just read [1] that there's an attempt to create in Portugal a Masters course in OpenSource Software! The attempt is from DCTI - ISCTE. WOW!

[1] - http://smallr.net/master-OSS

Links for today

http://advice.cio.com/why-cios-dont-care-about-open-source
Why CIO's don't care about Open Source?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1bec8a08-96cd-11dc-b2da-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
DRM causes sales losses

http://remix.nin.com/
Major Labels still making copyright claims that hurts artists

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Ejure/blogs/blogs-uc-pa.html
If you had to choose 100 blogs which ones should you choose to be best informed?

http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/en/h_ip01456e.html
File sharing boosts CD sales, not the inverse

http://www.ananke.com.pt/
New Portuguese music venue... on Second Life

The wonders of Open Source

Saturday I met some friends, and one of them was saying that she bought a new laptop but she couldn't run Second Life in it because it had an Intel graphics card. First I went into "WTF mode": after all I have an Intel graphics card and I run Second Life in my laptop without any problem. But then I remembered: I'm using Second Life's open source client in GNU/Linux, while she was running the Linden Labs' binary for Windows... Which made me write this just to make three quick remarks:

• Open Source is great. Linden Labs open sourced its "Second Life viewer" and in a snap of fingers the Open Source community made it work with Intel graphic cards.
• Linden Labs isn't using the fact that they Open Sourced its client as they could/should. Since that the limitation isn't there in the Open Source client, why is it still there in the "official" one?
• If you have an Intel card you can use Second Life. Either run it on GNU/Linux, or - if you really want to use it on Windows (blergh!), you can try to compile the Open Source client yourself...

Good news to Portugal

Good news to Portugal: next 4th of October, around 15:00, the Portuguese Parliament is going to debate and vote two iniciatives presented by PCP:

• Aproove an iniciative called "Free Software in the Parliament";
• Create the National Council for Information and Comunication Technologies.
  

If this is aprooved, then we will finally have some good news from the "Technological Plan" our government is pulling out...

LaunchALabel, $100 Label, Open Source and A Swarm of Angels

So, I've heard about LauchALabel [1], a web community somewhat simmilar to SellABand [2] that intends to coordinate people to create a label, instead of coordinate people to fund an album. The thing is, those 50.000 people that will pay $25 to create the label (against the 5.000 $10 parts needed to launch a bands' record on SellABand) will have a little few to have with the label itself: there's no plan of ROI for those "shareholders", those people can only decide five bands to release (heck, with that money you release 25 albums via SellABand), and they don't really have a stake on the labels management. The core idea was good, but with half the money it would be really easy to do a lot more...

Virgil from IndieHQ had a Simmilar idea some time ago [3]: create a record label with 1,000 investors (and equal participants), where each investor had to put $100 in. This idea (raising the money that could release two CD's on SellABand) is quite better, specially if you take into consideration that every "shareholder" would have an equal vote to someone else, and so it would really be an "Open Label". There are several issues to be considered tho, and if you read the comments made on his idea (same link) you'll see that there are a lot of concerns on how to please everyone, how to do the voting scheme, how to rely on other's works (and how to distribute work) and so on...

...which reminded me Open Source and how things just work in the Open Source world. As a matter of fact, this didn't came to me as "this reminds me of Open Source" but in a radical point of view: "this would only work in an Open Source like model".
Let me explain, giving the example of Debian. First of all, Debian does not have a fixed number of "contributors" or "staff" - it's a hive mind, a colective management, where you don't really have to rely on anyone specificly but in the community as a whole. See, you can be an excellent hacker and give lot's of coding hours to developing Debian, and yet do not care (or not have the profile) to do management stuff, deal with conflicts, take resolutions or doing every other thing needed to make things happen. Thus, Debian has an organizatinal structure [4], elected, that simply lets people contribute as much as they want to, in the issues they prefer to.

And yet another thing: in Debian you don't need a fixed number of people, like in Virgil's idea. You can explore more this issue if you compare this idea to one other project, but this time to make a movie. A Swarm of Angels [5] is a project to make a movie release happen. A director, several "business angels" and several phases will be used to create a movie from scratch, where those "angels" will make a part of all the process: from writting and choosing the plot or the wardrobe, to choosing (or creating) its soundtrack, everything is decided by the community. You didn't need a fixed number of people to start: as a matter of fact you have a limit number of people who can participate: taking core decisions with lots of people was avoided this way. The first phase was open for 100 people (£2,500), and the second for 1000 people (£25,000). When the tasks are complete for this phase, and since more money will be needed, the next phase starts and "buying a stake" is again possible, until there are 5000 people.

But the big question here remains: what's the really good way of doing this? How to create the "Record Label 2.0"? Every one of the three concepts for music have problems (SellABand, Launch A Label and the $100 label), and while ideas can and should be taken from stuff like Open Source or examples like Swarm of Angels, there's still no idea of how to create the "killer record label", that which is fair to everyone (from the artist to the public). I wrote my ideas of how to create the perfect record label [6] in the past, even if it was just a collection of loose thoughts in a way that seemed to make sense. There's no answer yet, but it's definitively something interesting enough to make me think.

[1] - http://www.launchalabel.com/
[2] - http://www.sellaband.com
[3] - http://tinyurl.com/yvhzvs
[4] - http://www.us.debian.org/intro/organization
[5] - http://aswarmofangels.com/
[6] - http://tinyurl.com/38a28v

Frets On Fire

Once in a while I read something about Guitar Hero, in the lines of "this is so cool!" and "I wish I could do this or that with it"... So I assume that most people don't know about Frets On Fire: an Open Source clone of Guitar Hero, made in Python, and available for Linux, Mac OS or Windows. Since it is Open Source, you can do with it all those things you wanted to in Guitar Hero. Enjoy!

Links for today

Here's a couple of links...

About OpenMoko, the free cellphone framework, did you know that OpenMoko is now a company? Also, their first phone, Neo 1973, is going to be released next July 9th! YAY!

Moving to music-related links, seems that Belgium ISP's have to block their users from downloading illegal stuff, since it seems that "P2P experts" told in court that that's feasable, which obviously isn't. I wonder when a counter-process will start, with ISP's there saying in court that it's just impossible to do what they want. In the business area, seems that EMI stockholders might not being interested on selling out to Terra Firma. Last but not least, Mako wrote a piece on DRM.

Finaly, on tech, ASUS is going to split into three different companies. These guys make the best motherboards and laptops I know of.

Advantages of Open Source

Thinking retrospectively, I think I missed two things really important on my latest post, so this one is meant to fill the gap.

The good thing from the "bug hunt"

While I didn't like the bug hunt and even criticized it, there's a really good side on this, thanks to the Portuguese Ministry of Justice.

• They're trying to make their best, or at least it seems so. They didn't just spit out some silly website (I was tempted to have links for "silly website", but we had enough examples from Portugal in the last few weeks, so they're really not needed) that only works on IE or something like that. Even this issue - the site works on Mozilla browsers (SeaMonkey and Firefox) but those browsers aren't able to see the security certificate as a valid one, and they're trying to fix that. While this could be qualified as "just doing their job", unfortunately this care isn't common, so they' deserve some kudos from that.


• They're avoiding one slow bureocratic process of opening a public request, having people/companies wanting to do the job, choosing "the right one" and so on. Instead, they've seen an easier and better opportunity: since anyone can fiddle with the (open) code, they're just saying "Hey, there's this thing over here that would be really cool if someone did it. Why don't you have a try? If you make it we'll give you 1000 €!".

An advantage of Open Source

And the latest point leads me to another, perheaps the most important lesson to take out of this example: this is only possible because Mozilla's browsers are Open Source. See, since the code is open and freely available, anyone (at all!) is elegible to do the job - and that's great for every side: the Ministry of Justice can have their problem solved without having to contact some vendor and convince them that their piece of software does something that they don't like and have a virtually unlimited number of possible coders (if this was IE, for instance, do you think that anyone but Microsoft employees were to do the job?). Even Mozilla ends winning, because they don't have to do anything but reviewing a patch when the fix is done. Awsome, right?

It's scary the number of times I still get to hear stuff like "but are there any real companies betting/using Open Source software?"... It's not only a number that is rising, but finaly companies are starting to see the real power behind Open Source. Also, I remember talking with some Siemens' workers that said stuff like "yeah, we use Open Source stuff internally, but why do you think that they would let us contribute with bug fixes or enhancements? That would be giving our work to the other companies in the field!" What is missing here is that, even if you don't care a little bit about Open Source, there are lot's of advantages on contributing, and giving back. Let's get real - forking software is a pain in the ass. If you keep changing the original code and never merge stuff with the original branch, you'll end loosing endless hours of porting changes from the original branch into yourse, or, even worse, you'll stop looking into the original branch, which includes loosing lots of security or bug fixes, enhancements and new features. If you give back your changes, they're automaticly maintained - by the community. In other scenario, if you contribute fresh code (a new project, a new functionality, whatever) by releasing it in an Open Source model, you'll eventually get more users testing, helping, and enhancing your code. For free.

Well, this post is getting bigger than I wanted it to, so I'll shut up by now and have some sleep ;-)

Meme

'If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed'

Peter Lee, an executive at Disney

I've talked about memes on this blog before. One of them was about the use of memes on Planet Debian (an usual thing there), and how Planets can help the Open Source world. Another time it was a meme with my top ten unix shell commands. But those were not the only ones... Anyway, some memes are just that "units of information", while others are themed (like the top ten commands one), some are presented (I just write the meme and who wants follows the trend) while others are requested (you're asked to follow a meme chain, and when you do it you nominate others to do the same).

Paula just told me to follow a meme (post in Portuguese), and I decided to reply with that quote of a Disney executive simply claiming that DRM er... sucks. I chose this theme since it is about something I blog a lot about, and I chose this quote since it is not only from a DRM adopter but also telling that DRM is bad. A quote both shocking and amusing, unfortunately not as widespread as it should be. On the choice of people to reply to this post, I'll only choose people that blog in English (so readers of this blog can go fetch the replies) and that the chance of replying is big (I hope).

So, the call goes out to André Ribeirinho, Hugo Silva and Nuno Mariz. The choice was made in a simple way: I fetched three bloggers from this Planet that blog in English and that, while I don't know them IRL, their blogs make me curious about them.

Microsoft threats Open Source

Microsoft SUCKS.

Open Source Cinema

Open Source Cinema is "a collaborative documentary project to create a feature film about copyright in the digital age". Which is great - not only you can have a role into making an actual movie, to be released in 2008, free with a Creative Commons license, but that aims to be in the movie theatres, but also the theme - basicly about the fact that art wants to be free. I could talk a lot about this, like others did, but instead I'll just recommend you to check out their website or at least watch the trailer.

Second Life grid to be Open Sourced

Three months after open sourcing Second Life (the client), Linden Labs are now claiming that they're also going to Open Source their servers.

What the world is asking now is how will Linden Labs keep making money, even if I not only think that this is the only way they had to keep SL a sustainable and profitable product in mid-term, but also that this is their way to fight against possible concurrency (like Entropia).

The announcement was made a couple of days ago, but the most exciting thing in this, IMHO, is that they're going to have open standard API's that will allow to communicate between servers. That way, Second Life is going to become a grid of Virtual Worlds connected by themselves (as Entropia worlds, for instance, can be).

Links

One more round of links:

• Lot's of people ask me what's that about me and having music CD's, Vinyl, Cassetes and such in this digital-era. I always told them it was a kind of fetishism.
• Want to see a great free DVD? On Piracy and the Future of media is a low-budget documentary that manages to give a imparcial view on piracy, as no one else managed to do. As a bonus, the movie download is free.
• People keep asking me about linux on cellphones, claiming that it's too much hype and no goods at hand. They even use it as excuse for buying cellphones to DRM-lovers like Sony or, now, Apple. So, here's a list of eight great linux phones. Choose yourse.
• The official program for Moita Lan Party is already out there, next to it's flyer. For those wanting to attend to my presentation about DRM in the Music Industry, there's a free-entry. The event is from 23 to 25, this month, and my presentation is going to be at the 24th, at 16:00.
• For Portuguese people: TSF's Eureka talked about OSS.
• After last years' Barcamp and SHiFT, it was too good to stop. So, in 2007 we had Tecnonov, and now, inspired in the previous ones take off. Take off is going to be an event directed for those wanting to create its own startup. There are already two presentations scheduled, and I'm already eagering to listen to one of them.
• Did you already sign the Brussels Declaration?
• An "Portuguese Open Source Week" is being scheduled for July. Wanna help?

More links

Sorry, still busy. Here's another set of links, for your weekend:

• Second Life is going to get more ubiquous;
• Want to contribute to Open Source but don't know how?
• How do you define a cultural work?
• More on Steve Jobs and DRM;
• Music execs criticise DRM systems;
• An awsome prediction on the future of Second Life (in Portuguese);

Portugal started the deployment of the "citizen card". Here are some links:

• Concerns;
• Software.

Have a nice weekend :-)