ChortleVision

Of late the gaming situation on Linux has been… well, fairly dire. whereas before games were actively getting ports to Linux and there was a genuine interest in porting games to Linux these days we are ‘lucky’ to get a port. epic gaming however, the people behind such diverse titles such as unreal and unreal tournament and unreal tournament 2003 and unreal tournament 2004 and unreal 2 and unreal tournament 3 have always supported linux fairly actively, we got Linux versions of all the unreal games.. apart from unreal tournament 3.

Unfortunately even though the port to linux of unreal tournament 3 was completed weeks after it shipped legal issues regarding a middleware company refusing to licence its code to run on linux have resulted in there being no linux client for almost a year now.

Now i am no lover of the unreal games, i don’t dislike them but i just prefer other types of games these days, however the lack of a linux port does not bode well for future linux ports of games (i don’t care if your not a gamer and go ‘meh’ towards the whole issue, gaming on linux is important for the linux and open source operating systems ecosystem as a whole), but lately, after months and months of no word from epic or the fantastic Ryan C Gordon (who ports a lot of commercial games to windows) we finally get some ‘its nearly here’ and some nice screenshots of ut3 running on ubuntu. sure its late, but at least its delivered.

ryan C gordon’s blog post

unreal tournament 3 running on ubuntu

title says it all folks, from #ubuntu-offtopic

17:06:25 -!- ValveSoft [i=kal@117.192.227.120] has joined #ubuntu-offtopic
17:06:35 < ValveSoft> we’re recruiting programmers at valve software to port the orange box to linux, if anybody is interested please let me know
17:10:50 < ValveSoft> if you are interested in a linux games programming carrier with valve softwares please post your resume here: jobs@valvesoftware.com
17:06:50 < ValveSoft> http://www.valvesoftware.com/job-SenSoftEngineer.html
17:10:51 < ValveSoft> thanks.
17:10:54 -!- ValveSoft [i=kal@117.192.227.120] has quit []

on its own obviously not much but looking at the job description “Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.” its starting to look legit, i doubt a troll would just advertise a valve email and leave as well. here’s hoping!
[digg=http://digg.com/linux_unix/Half_life_orange_box_being_ported_to_Linux]

http://www.informationweek.com/new…879

“Upgrading existing ICT systems to Microsoft Vista or Office 2007 is not recommended,” said the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, also known as Becta, in a report issued this week
“Microsoft should provide native support for the ODF file format increasingly used in competitor products and those that are free to use,” Becta said in its report.

Looks like now is a great time to contact the local schools/education facilities in your area telling them about the wonderful world of ubuntu/floss