The download is available both source and binary, 32 or 64bit from the official website. Most of you, by the way,will Download Teeworlds binary/32bit.

Try it, and spread the news !

Thank you Hicham !

Install Solang on the last Fedora with the following command.

su -c ‘yum –enablerepo=updates-testing install solang’

Enjoy !

For this week end only, you can purchase the complete trilogy by Penumbra for just 5 dollars.

• Overture
• Black Plague
• Requiem

All the games have been ported to Linux (so no Wine or anything) and feature a -- reportedly -- advanced physic engine. You can read a review of the Windows version here.

So, if you’re a gamer and want to support the cause of Linux gaming, other than having 3 more high level games to play on your Linux workstation, consider buying a copy. It’s 5 dollars / 3.78 euros.

More info and source here.

_Hicham_ put it on his repository. Fedora users, for further informations, check out this page:

http://hicham.iblogger.org/?q=node/1

UPDATE: You can now install it from the Fedora’s repository.

Ironic announcement from Luca Falavigna to announce that Solang is now included in Ubuntu Karmic Koala repositories.

Ho deciso di scendere in campo…

Per partecipare alla crociata contro Mono. Il primo passo è fatto !

Translation:

I decided to step on the battlefield (cit. expression used by Silvio Berlusconi to announce his involvement in politics 15 years ago)

…to partecipate to the crusade against Mono. The first step is done !

This is (probably) a pretty ironic reference to the fact that Solang got misunderstood as a f-spot port by a leading italian blogger. But it’s not.

By the way, it’s a great news! The screenshots look promising !

In 2 words, that means that highly graphical Windows applications will be able to run and display properly inside a virtual machine. One example ? Games.

Sure enough, you’ll need a Windows license anyway, but that would save you from dual booting and may be the last thing needed to strip the windows partition altogether from your hard-drive.

Even as exciting as it is, the feature is still experimental, so don’t expect it to work properly or at all for the moment. Still, I see a bright future, if they’ll be able to implement it properly. Also, despite me using the DirectX 10 logo in the picture above, the support is limited to Direct3D 8/9 for now. But I like to hope .

Further reading: the register.

I didn’t had the chance to try it Solang. If you want to try yourself to compile and install it on Ubuntu, here’s a (not tested) tutorial I found here:

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall libgdl-1-dev \
libexiv2-dev libgdamm3.0-dev libgda3-sqlite libcairomm-1.0-dev libglade2-dev \
libgtkimageview-dev libgphoto2-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libmagick++-dev
git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/solang.git
mv solang solang-0.1+git
cd solang-0.1+git
./autogen.sh  --prefix=/usr/ --sysconfdir=/etc/
make
sudo checkinstall

It won’t create a desktop file, you’ll have to create a launcher yourself or make it run from the shell

solang

To update the source code (you’ll then have to compile and install it again):

git pull

To remove it:

sudo apt-get --purge remove solang

Other stuff

A kind request from the Solang staff:

A request to all users, please file bugs at Solang Project Page (needs login). Also, we are available at sane indian working hours (and sometimes even the insane ones) on the #solang room on irc.freenode.net. Feel free to drop in to let us know of feature requests, any required build assistance, rants and whatever you feel like (we discuss movies also on the room .. )

A bunch of remarks from the developer, (I was right it’s not a f-spot port):

1) Solang is NOT an f-spot “clone”. It contains / will contain features that f-spot may or may not ever have. (Searching using multiple dates, searching using photo-property, paginated browsing etc). It also lacks a lot of features that f-spot even currently provides (A plethora of editing options and filters etc)
2) Jaunty compilation issue: The git version of solang should be compilable. Exiv version 0.18 has been supported. The author of this article has been kind enough to test it out.
3) In-photo tagging: We are NOT planning to do this. Instead we plan to do something better… we plan to port solang to windows in the near future. The back end database path will be made configurable, so that the database may be placed in some shared user area visible to all OS installations on a host.
4) Import from f-spot: We are planning to do this probably in the next release. If this is an immediate requirement, please let us know on solang-users mailing list and we will try to make a patch release for this after the 0.2 release.
5) Exif-IPTC editing… we haven’t decided yet .. but maybe soon enough ..

More stuff and the current feature list in the original blog post.

Packaging efforts are already ongoing. If you’re somewhat skilled at basic packaging yourself this bzr branch contains a work in progress /debian directory. Probably you can already get a working deb using it. If so, please share !

Update: If you’re the type of guy who likes potentially unstable .debs, you can find the packaging efforts of Luca Falavigna in his PPA.

Here’s the first version of the deb he’s building for Solang: 32bit, 64bit. I encourage you not to install other software by his ppa, as it’s something he use for unstable or work in progress packages.

Notice: I didn’t tried the .deb myself and, if you do, you’ll be on your own. It’s also worth saying it’s targeted to Karmic, so it may just don’t work.  Use at your risk. This is not the preferred method of installing. Using the tutorial above it’s a better way for now.

Funnily enough, being the Mono war so intense these days, it has been immediately marked as a C++ port of F-Spot (a nice linkbait these days, I’d say), which is not.

This drew my interest, but – as far as I can see – there’s very little that Solang shares with F-Spot. Namely, the authors just grabbed (with permission) some of the F-Spot’s artwork.

The rationale behind the project is what follows:

Why solang? Well, I have a busted old laptop (a worn out HP NX6115 with 512 MB RAM) that aches and burns to manage my photo collection using the so called state-of-the-art foo written in the state-of-the-art bar language. So we thought, maybe re-inventing some wheels are not totally misplaced excursions of the mind. Besides I need to get something that runs on my ol’ buddy.

Also the README reads as follows:

Motivation for the project
————————–
The idea is to develop a free photo manager that will act as a front-end for
directory based local storage as well as remote photo-storage systems, as can
be said, on the “Cloud”. Basic editing support is also planned as well as a
small pipelaine for RAW processing. Please check the TODO file for more
details.

Another motivation for this project is to break the performance charecteristics
of current popular photo management softwares and provide a fast and reliable
alternative that does not place humongous demands on user’s hardware resources
even to meet basic functionality.

Here are the current features

• Import and view photos from different directories
• Import photos from camera (PTP mode)
• Apply tag to photos during import
• Multiple tags can be applied during import or later on
• Drag drop searching using multiple tags, photo properties and/or dates
• Fast and efficient operation

Also, here’s the TODO file, which provides a basic roadmap:

Importers

* Create importers from web-services such as Flickr and Picasaweb

Storage

* Create front-ends for Web-Based photo storage systems such as
Flickr / Picasa
* Create storage systems that store and retrive data on removable
storage such as DVDs
* Improve directory storage to support configurable photo storage
path
* Modify importer dialog to allow for selection of storage system
as well as storage specific options

Exporter

* Exporter to directory
* Exporter to web-archive
* Exporter to Flickr
* Exporter to PicasaWeb etc.

Application/Engine

* Add support for basic editing
- Resize
- Rotate
- Crop
* Improve the browser
- Add icon zoom in/out
- Add paginated view
* Add content type specific context menu
* Full non-searchable file details (Exif/XMP/ICMP) view
* Support for nested tags
* Support for map based tags

Does it run on Ubuntu ?

Not yet. It currently runs on a up-to-date Fedora 10+ installation and Debian Sid (with Gdl patch applied).

Conclusions

I didn’t had the chance to try it, but seems to me it can fill the gap for a fast photo management tool. And also providing a Mono-free alternative for Mono haters and Fedoras and alikes is pretty nice.

Further resources:

• Original announcement along with more screenshots.
• Project Homepage
• Download the tarball

Update: How to install Solang in Ubuntu.

Not Chromium which is the open source project Chrome is based on, but Google Chrome itself.

I’m not copy pasting the install instruction. Find out about the debs and ppas at Ubuntu Blog, and thank the author for the news !

If you’ve ever tried to write some sample application with Visual Studio you surely already know that creating an installer for you Window application is pretty trivial. You follow the wizard, click here and there, et-voila ! You have a nice installer ready to be shipped wherever you want.

Linux makes not that easier, though. Debian packaging, although tremendously powerful and flexible, has never had any GUI tool to help with packaging.

As far as I know, there has been 2 attempts, but neither really took off.

When Vadim told me he was working on a packaging tool, that made pretty happy as well as wondering about if and when I could see anything working.

Introducing GiftWrap 0.1

GiftWrap is a GTK based tool that helps you creating Debian packages from scratch, born as a fork of the dead Deb Creator project. Don’t expect too much right now, as we’re just at the 0.1 version, but still, it seems to be able to accomplish basic tasks yet.

Look at the video below to get a better idea about how it works:

Download:

If you want to try it yourself download it your best bet is using the official Launchpad PPA: https://launchpad.net/~giftwrap/+archive/ppa

For standalone packages and source, look here: download it from this page.

Further resources:

• Project home page and  Original announcement
• RSS feed for keeping track of new releases
• Read the roadmap
• Do you feel like contributing ? Look here.
• Ask or propose help on the irc channel: #giftwrap on freenode.net

About the author of GiftWrap

Vadim Peretokin is co-creator of Shutter and also the mantainer of the Gnote PPA. Should you want to know more about him, check out his blog.

Thoughts ?

Feel free to express them in the comments. Look, I know perfectly the hype or the concerns such a tool will raise. Please be constructive

As for what I think, I’m all for it !