Linuxo Planet

Free and Open Source RTS Game 0 A.D. Alpha 10 'Jhelum' has been released. This alpha features Hellenic factions such as Athens, Macedonia and Sparta; technologies, civilization phases, click-and-drag walls, healing and more.

Florian Echtler has developed an open-source driver for the Microsoft Surface 2.0 touch screen.

Microsoft Surface is a commercial surface computing platform from Microsoft that enables people to use and touch real world objects to share digital content at the same time. The Surface platform consists of software and hardware products that combine vision based multitouch PC hardware, 360-degree multiuser application design, and Windows software to create a natural user interface (NUI).

Few days back we wrote about Liberated pixel cup, a game development competition by Creative Commons, OpenGameArt and the Free Software Foundation.

Now, Mozilla has also joined the project as a sponsor. Mozilla is coming in with a lot of contributions to Liberated Pixel Cup, including a large financial contribution, expressed interest in providing assistance to the development portion (particularly in HTML5 games), and several other areas.

UFO: Alien Invasion is a free and open source strategy game featuring turn-based tactical combat against hostile alien forces (human or computer controlled) which are infiltrating earth at this very moment. The game is heavily influenced by the X-COM series (mostly by UFO: Enemy Unknown).

You are in command of a small special unit which has been founded to face the alien strike force. To be successful in the long run, you must research the alien technology in order to build bigger and better weapons against your foes.

OpenMW is a free and open source engine for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. It aims to be a fully playable and improved implementation of the game's engine and functionality.

OpenMW is released under the GNU General Public License version 3, and all source code has been written completely from scratch. It also builds on various other open source tools, most notably OGRE for graphics, and Bullet for collision (and possibly physics).

OpenMW developers are doing great job as the engine is looking more and more polished with every new release and it works quite nicely on Linux. You will need the original game data to play OpenMW. OpenMW runs on Windows, Mac OS X as well.

Speed Dreams is a fork of the famous open racing car simulator Torcs, aiming to implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.

Speed Dreams is completely free and open source and is available for Windows and Linux. A new version has been released recently.

Linus Torvalds will be receiving Millennium Technology Award, one of the highest Technology Honors for his exceptional contribution to Linux kernel and open source.

The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded ever two years for a technological innovation by Technology Academy Finland. This year, Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, maker of a new way to create stem cells without the use of embryonic stem cells, are both laureates for the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize. The two innovators will share over a million Euros and the final winner will be announced by the President of the Republic of Finland in a special ceremony on June 13, 2012.

Few days back we wrote about Arx Libertatis, a free and open source project that ports popular first person 3D RPG Arx Fatalis to Linux.

Lots of great work has been done since then and a new stable version of Arx Libertatis has been released. Plus there is PPA for Ubuntu, portable binaries and packages for your favorite Linux distributions, so installation is simpler than ever and no need to compile.

0 A.D. is a free and open-source real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. In short, it is a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, focusing on the years between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D.

The project is highly ambitious, involving state-of-the-art 3D graphics, detailed artwork, sound, and a flexible and powerful custom-built game engine.

0 A.D. is available by default in official repositories in Ubuntu 12.04. So if you haven't tried the game, give it a shot now as it is one of the best open source gaming projects.

Check out latest video:

Phase one (from June 1st to June 30th) of the competition is to build a set of artwork that's dual licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and GPLv3. The team behind LPC is working on a style guide.

A preview of art style: