As a heads up to all the UK folks, if you are on one of the big uk ISP’s (which I am sure most of us are) you will now have to start logging onto wikipedia via secure.wikipedia.org, logging on via another route will likly lead to you being banned from editing.
This set of curcumstances has come about because of the big six isps deciding to filter wikipedia’s content, to remove child pornography, sensible enough i guess, but have done it in such a horrible way, all the UK traffic is being proxies though just a few ip addresses - thus if one person vandalises wikipedia the entire country pretty much gets banned from editing.
The only workaround at the moment is to either log in via the secure server or use this greasemonkey script, it will change your edit links to the secure version of wikipedia. the downside to this is that if everyone starts using the secure version wikipedia could slow down to a crawl.
Well its time for my half-yearly plee for help with support requests, for those not in the know there are four main avenues of getting support with ubuntu and ubuntu related software, #ubuntu on freenode, the ubuntu forums, the various mailing lists and finally the launchpad answer support tracker. On the support tracker post ’support tickets’, in that they detail their problem and helpful people like you and me get to sit there and figure out whats wrong.
the beauty of this system is that you can ‘pick and choose’ what you want to answer, just stick to your knowledge base so to speak, kind of like a mailing list in that regard (but a bunch more useful for support). unfortunately there are not that many of us that really deal with the support tracker and that means that around release day we get utterly swamped and most of the support requests remain ‘open’. Obviously this isn’t a great way to get in new users.
If you want to help out with these support requests (which we could really use your help on, especially for the next week or three) you’ll need to go to http://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu - there you will find a list of support requests, all you have to do is click on one that interests you and muck in :) you can also go to your user page (for example, for me that’s https://launchpad.net/~gordallott) and click on the ‘answers’ tab at the top to get a list of support requests that you have asked / replied to, that way you can keep track of the people you are helping. (just check that page once in a while)
I find its best to check the main support request page maybe three times a day and answer a few, its only fifteen minutes out of my day and it helps people out immensely (you know how much you needed someones help once :P)
Every answer you give contributes to your launchpad karma as well which is nice :)
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
