Pro Pinball: Revived & Remastered Could Arrive on Linux

It's been years since any serious pinball games have been launched on any platform, and I'm sorry to say there's none for Linux. This situation might change with Pro Pinball: Revived & Remastered .

This amazing looking game, Pro Pinball: Revived & Remastered, is a throwback to the past, 10-15 years ago, when pinball games were all over the place and people were playing them professionally, in tournaments.

The developers from Silverball Studios are trying to revive the glory days of serious Pinball games with the help of a Kickstarter project.

They need $400,000 to make this dream a reality and they have 21 days to gather the money. If you want to make a contribution head over to the official project website. They also have some bonuses for the people who want to get involved.

Super OS 11.10

Joaquim Salvador has announced the release of Super OS 11.10, an Ubuntu-based distribution with extra applications, media codecs, browser plugins and other enhancements: "Super OS 11.10 released. New: improved multi-language support with additional translations and language-specific fonts; improved virtual machine support (VirtualBox and VMware); added programs - Audacity, Blender, OpenShot, PiTiVi, MyPaint, Pinta, Inkscape, Pidgin, GIMP, Synaptic, VirtualBox, Thunderbird, Gdebi, OpenJDK; removed Java (replaced with OpenJDK); Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera, all of them with support for webm and Adobe Flash content. Super OS (formerly Super Ubuntu) is a variant of Ubuntu 11.10 with added software and tools, with the goal of making it more usable, in particular for users without an Internet connection." See the project's release announcement and the features page for further information. Download: Super_OS_11.10_32_bits.iso (1,873MB), Super_OS_11.10_64_bits.iso (2,057MB).

Beautify Your Desktop With 'Conky Clock and Date' Desklet - Ubuntu/Linux Mint

In this tutorial we will help you install the Conky_Clock_and_Date conky gadget on Ubuntu and Linux Mint. This amazing conky script will display on your desktop a clock and current date. The widget will stick to top right corner of your screen. Here is a screenshot of it under Ubuntu 12.04:

Installation

Open the terminal and run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install -y unzip conky conky-all

cd /tmp

wget -O conky-clock-date.zip http://goo.gl/v4XDi

unzip -q conky-clock-date.zip -d  ~/ && cd conky-clock-date

mkdir -p ~/.fonts

cp *.ttf ~/.fonts

cp -r scripts ~/

cp *.lua ~/

Start now the clock with this command:

conky -c ~/conky-clock-date/conkyrc &

To close it, run this command:

killall conky

Script Source: deviantart

Parted Magic 2012.09.12

Patrick Verner has announced the release of Parted Magic 2012_09_12, a specialist live CD providing utilities for disk management and data rescue tasks: "Parted Magic 2012_09_12. GParted LVM support - this is a list of new LVM features: physical volume creation, checking, resizing (no compaction, just adjusting size above highest used block), moving (using GParted's offline move capability), activation and deactivation, deletion. A large number of programs have been updated: Midnight Commander 4.8.4, Firefox 15.0.1, kmod 10, ALSA libraries 1.0.26. OpenSSH 6.1p1, X.Org Server 1.12.4, Linux kernel 3.5.3. The split_initrdimg.sh has been updated so it works with atftpd again. There were actually two issues. The bigger initbase file was 41 MB and atftpd can only handle 32 MB maximum file size." See the project's news page for a complete list of bug fixes. Download (MD5): pmagic_2012_09_12.iso (238MB), pmagic_2012_09_12_i486.iso (237MB), pmagic_2012_09_12_x86_64.iso (239MB).

Qt Creator 2.6 Beta Fixes qmake Bug

Qt Creator, a cross-platform IDE (integrated development environment) tailored to the needs of Qt developers and part of the Qt Project, is now at version 2.6 Beta.

Qt Creator 2.6 Beta comes with a ton of new features and changes, including C++, QML/JS, and GLSL improved support.

Highlights of Qt Creator 2.6 Beta:

• A wizard for creating a temporary text file has been added;
• A menu for showing and hiding the output pane buttons has been added;
• A visual hint for canceled searches has been added;
• A context menu for adding and removing UTF-8 bom has been added;
• State engine has been adjusted to changes in GDB/MI notifications;
• Logging and output pane performance has been improved.

A complete list of change and modifications can be found in the official announcement.

 Download Qt Creator 2.6 Beta

5 New Unity 4 Games Will Come to Linux

We've announced a couple of weeks ago that with the release of the Unity 4.0 game engine more games will be published on Linux, especially on the Ubuntu platform, via Ubuntu Software Center.

In the last days, more game studios have announced that their "still in development" games will have native support for the Linux platform.

Without further ado, here are the five new games announced (you can click on each one to view its homepage):

1. FORCED, a gladiator combat-game based on tactical cooperative 2-4 player gameplay either online or locally (also includes full single-player game), published by Beta Dwarf.

2. Blackreef Pirates, a single-player adventure RPG (role-playing game) set in a unique fantasy world full of treasure maps, wild beasts, and rum, published by Subvert Games.

 

3. Kinetic Void, a SciFi Space Sandbox, which focuses on procedural content, and detailed customization, published by Badland Studio.

4. Folk Tale, a real-time comedy-adventure-strategy game published by Games Foundry.

 

5. Receiver, a game that explores gun handling mechanics, randomized levels, and unordered storytelling, published by Wolfire Games.

 

All these games and hopefully much more will be available for Ubuntu users, via Ubuntu Software Center, as soon as they are finished and the Unity 4.0 engine is out.

Unity 4.0 is developed these days by Unity Technologies, which are getting ready to release the final version of the award-winning game engine, and a collaboration with Canonical will make sure that game developers can publish their games directly into Ubuntu.

And to be honest, I just can't wait for both Unity 4 and Valve's Steam to break the ice, to destroy that giant door that keeps Linux users away from all those nice games we see on our neighbor's computer!

Bring 'em on, guys, I want to buy your games!