Dota 2 in-game tournament support coming this week, more features to follow

 

Valve have revealed their plans to support full tournaments within the Dota 2 client. In a post on the Dota 2 blog, the team describe how players will be able to pay for access to live matches and replays that run in-engine. The money raised will be split between Valve and the tournament organiser in a similar manner to the Steam Workshop. This functionality is due to launch later in the week.
The Defence tournament will be the first to use the system, which Valve say is just the beginning of the game’s support for competitive play. “This won’t be the end of our features for tournaments, or players, but we think it’s the right first step – helping tournaments become more financially stable helps all the players participating in them.”
Valve aren’t trying to force out traditional stream-based casting, stating that “[they'll] continue to do the best we can to support them. Some customers will always prefer to use their web browser to watch matches.” They’re paying particular attention to the needs of tournament sponsors, who need a way to declare their support and display advertising.
The other major new feature will be Teams, which allows a group of players to declare their affiliation formally within the game. Dota 2 will detect when two teams are playing and make appropriate changes, such as displaying team logos and banners. Ultimately, this will be expanded to include Team vs. Team matchmaking.
Earlier in the week we rounded up a number of the Workshop items that we’d like to see added to Dota 2. Do you think Valve’s support for in-game tournaments and player-made add-ons has what it takes to give Dota 2 the advantage?

Oz Unity Black Opal 64

Oz Unity BlackOpal64 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 64Bit LTS.
It contains 4 main environments namely Unity (Ubuntu), GNOME (Gnome-Shell), GNOME Classic and XBMC. It also contains Unity 2D (Ubuntu 2D) and GNOME Classic (No effects).
All of these environments are accessible via a Live session on the proviso your hardware can handle it (Ram, Vid Card etc..).
The majority of work has been focused on the Unity environment because that is where we believe the future lies. I do understand that Unity may not be your preferred environment so yes, we did a fair bit with GNOME and GNOME Classic as well. We deliberately chose to avoid 'end of life' projects like Gnome 2.x and it's forks as well as Emerald. It's time to move on.

BlackOpal64 comes with all your favourite Apps, drivers flash, java, music and video codecs, compiz special effects already installed and ready to rock n roll, straight out of the box.
Burn it to DVD or use Unetbootin to create a live USB
This iso comes in at 3.1Gb

Downloading Oz Unity Black Opal 64

Ubuntu 12.04 Firmware for SmartQ T20 Tablet

Smartdevices Inc. announced the immediate availability for download of a firmware for its SmartQ T20 tablet device.

The SmartQ T20 tablet comes with the Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) mobile operating system by default. It boasts the following hardware specifications: dual-core 1.5 Ghz ARM Cortex A9 CPU, full HD playback through PowerVR SGX 540 GPU, 1 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage, 1280x800 10.1″ capacitive multi-touch screen, built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, USB ports, HDMI port, headphone jack, 2MP front-facing camera, 5MP rear facing camera and accelerometer.

With the newly released firmware, users of the SmartQ T20 tablet can officially download and install the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

Detailed installation instruction (in Chinese), as well as known issues, can be found on the official announcement.

Download the Ubuntu 12.04 firmware for the SmartQ T20 tablet right now from here.

Snowlinux 2 "KDE"

Lars Torben Kremer has announced the release of Snowlinux 2 "KDE" edition, a Debian-based distribution showcasing the KDE 4.4.5 desktop: "The team is proud to announce the release of Snowlinux 2 'Ice' KDE. It comes with the Qt 4 theme Fushigi Plasma, the Icon set was set to Snowlinux Metal and the system font is Ubuntu by default. Also present in this edition is an improved live installer which detects country, offers keyboard variants and uses UUID in fstab. It has installed a firewall called gufw. To improve the difference between user and root terminal the terminal colors were introduced. To be more out-of-the-box OpenJDK 6 Java has been made available in the default installation. Snowlinux 2 'Ice' KDE comes with the Chromium browser, Icedove, Banshee, Shotwell." Here is the brief release announcement with a screenshot. Download (SHA256): snowlinux-2-kde-i386.iso (841MB), snowlinux-2-kde-amd64.iso (908MB).

Download Redmine 1.4.4

 

Redmine, Flexible project management web application.

Redmine is an open source project management web application. Written using the Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.

Download Redmine 1.4.4

Clutter 1.10.8 Officially Released

Clutter, a GObject-based library for creating fast, visually rich, graphical user interfaces, which works by manipulating a scene-graph of 2D surfaces, or 'actors', inside a 3D space, is now at version 1.10.8.

The developers have stated that Clutter 1.10.8 is now the newest stable version available. Users who want a more advanced version, but unstable, should try the 1.11.4 release.

Highlights of Clutter 1.10.8:

· Touch events were not delivered to the correct actors, so touch event delivery and implementation has been fixed;
· An interactive test is now available to verify the implementation of Touch events;
· Some additional annotations were necessary to generate the Vala bindings from the introspection data;
· link test-conformance against libm has been fixed;
· Assorted introspection fixes from Vala have been implemented.


Download Clutter 1.10.8

Canonical and Zentyal to Provide a Small Business Server

Zentyal has announced a worldwide agreement with Canonical to offer an alternative to proprietary IT infrastructure for SMBs (Small Business Servers).

This means that Zentyal's operating system, which is based on Ubuntu, will become supported by Canonical, with all which entails from this agreement, such as support for small and medium businesses who already use Zentyal's OS.

“This agreement allows Zentyal and Authorized Zentyal Partners to provide complete Linux infrastructure solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises” said Ignacio Correas, CEO of Zentyal, and continued “although Linux in the enterprise is nothing new, comparable fully vendor-backed infrastructure solutions for SMBs did not exist until this agreement.”

This agreement between the two companies aims to cover an important niche in the market by satisfying the growing IT needs of the SMB sector.

Valve Hired Battle for Wesnoth Developer

Valve is getting serious about a Linux version for their game distribution platform, especially after they've hired a well-known Linux developer.

Valve is rumored to work on Steam for Linux, and it seems that their intentions are getting more serious by day.

According to Michael Larabel from phoronix.com, who broke the story about the Valve and Linux love affair, the company has just hired David White, the creator of the acclaimed Battle for Wesnoth game.

Valve is in the process of hiring Linux developers and it's our hope that the Steam platform, and maybe a few games, will be available by the end of this year.

What's more important is the fact that other companies and game publishers are seeing this move from Valve as a signal to start their own development for their game distribution platform, which means the Linux community can only win from a serious competition.

What's new in SolusOS 2

SolusOS is currently the fastest-growing Linux distro. Just right after the release of its first version, Eveline, SolusOS has jumped from nowhere into the middle of the distro ranking chart on Distrowatch . And the SolusOS team didnt stop there, they have already worked on the next release of SolusOS. Last week, the team has released the Alpha 3 version of SolusOS 2 with many new things. If you are interested in SolusOS, here is a quick list of new features in SolusOS 2 that I found

New kernel

LinuxKernel 3.3.6 is used in SolusOS 2. Although it is still not the newest kernel but comparing the 3.0.0 kernel in SolusOS 1, this is really a big improvement.

Gnome 3.4

SolusOS 2 uses GNOME 3.4, which in its current state features a largely unusable fallback mode. However, the SolusOS team has patched various parts of GNOME to make Gnome 3.4 look and act identically to the Gnome 2 setup seen in SolusOS 1, Eveline. However, even with Gnome 3.4 being used, SolusOS 2 is still very light and fast, at idle SolusOS 2 consumes only around 160MB of RAM
  

This is absolutely fantastic because comparing to the MATE edition of Linux Mint 13, which has the same aim to bring back the Gnome 2 experience, SolusOS 2 is a clear winner in term of resource consuming. ( At idle, Linux Mint MATE uses more than 350 MB of RAM)

The overall look of the desktop in SolusOS 2 is slightly different from that in SolusOS 1. The notification area on the right of the Gnome panel has a new look and settings, the envelope icon has been removed and the clock uses the 24 hours settings instead of AM/PM like in SolusOS 1:

A new notification area in SolusOS 2

The Cardapio menu also performs better in SolusOS 2, no more freezing. Besides, it now has another option on the right pane for "Help and Support":

The Help and Support idea is quite similar to the F1 button in Ubuntu, when you click on it a help window will appear. However, since SolusOS 2 is still in Alpha version, this help and support feature is not completed yet. It still shows an image of Gnome Shell instead of the desktop of SolusOS 2, besides there is something wrong with the font color and the background in the help and support window:

With the use of Gnome 3.4, gconf-editor is no longer available in SolusOS 2, however to change system settings, you can just use the Control Center in the Cardapio menu:

New way to change themes and icons

Changing themes and icons in SolusOS 2 is different from SolusOS 1. When you right click on the desktop to and select the change desktop background option, all you can do literally is to change the desktop wallpaper:

Instead, to change themes and icons in SolusOS 2, you need to open the Cardapio Menu, go to System Tools and select the Desktop Settings option. And the SolusOS Appearance preferences window will appear, on which you can change themes, icons and customize several other things too:

As far as I noticed, Zuki blues theme is no longer preinstalled in SolusOS 2. Faenza icon theme and two of its variants, Faenza dark and Faenza Cupertino, are removed too.

New version of Nautilus

A new version of Nautilus file manager is used in SolusOS 2 with several changes, new breadcrumbs and new arrangement of the buttons . Here are 2 screenshots of the old and new Nautilus for you to compare:

Nautilus in SolusOS 1

Nautilus in SolusOS 2

I personally prefer the old Nautilus, not only because I dont like the look of the new Nautilus but also because the new Nautilus lacks the feature to preview audio files, which I like a lot.

Many changes in the pre-installed applications

From what I found, there seemed to be no new pre-installed applications in the new version of SolusOS. On the other hand, several pre-installed apps in SolusOS 1 are removed in Solus OS 2 like Simple Scan, Dropbox, Wine and PlayOnLinux. Some other apps got upgraded like Firefox 13 and NetworkManager.

New Plymouth boot screen

The boring silver plymouth boot screen in SolusOS 1 is now replaced by a modified version of the popular Solar plymouth, which looks really cooler and more eye-catching in my opinion.

Some other minor system changes

- You dont need to enter password to mount extra partitions in SolusOS 2
- Extra partitions and USB icons are auto-hide on the desktop.
- The default folder of screenshots is now ~/Pictures instead of ~/Desktop in SolusOS 1
- System time is local time instead of UTC

Open-Xchange 6.20.5 Has Been Announced

Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software for enterprises and SaaS providers, has announced that Open-Xchange Server 6.20.5 is now available for download.

Open-Xchange 6.20.5 includes important updates for Open-Xchange Server 6 (OX6), OX SE (Server Edition), OX ASE (Advanced Server Edition), OX SE for UCS (Server Edition for Univention Corporate Server), and OXtender 2 for Microsoft Outlook.

Highlights of Open-Xchange 6.20.5:

· Mail module is no longer disabled if user is overquota;
· Default folder check, if an over-quota error is encountered, works properly;
· Facebook oauth always claims the password has changed. This has been fixed;
· Email for Resources are marked as [Resource];
· Users were unable to add Facebook account as a Social Messaging account. This has been repaired;
· Numerous other bugfixes.

A complete changelog can be found in the official announcement.

Download Open-Xchange 6.20.5

ROSA 2012 "LXDE"

Konstantin Kochereshkin has announced the release of ROSA 2012 "LXDE" edition, a Mandriva Linux fork featuring the lightweight LXDE desktop environment: "We are glad to announce the release of our community LXDE edition - ROSA LXDE 2012 LTS. The distro is based on ROSA Marathon packages and is 100% compatible with it. The only and main difference is the default graphic environment which is LXDE - Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. This community release is designed primarily for users with old legacy hardware. Software versions: Linux kernel 3.0.28, LXPanel based on LXPanelx with some improvements from ROSA, PCManFM 0.9.10, LibreOffice, main European locales, Firefox 10, VLC 2, DeaDBeeF 0.5.2, LXDE Control Center, audio and video codecs by default." See the release announcement for system requirements and screenshots. Download: ROSA.2012.LTS.LXDE.i586.iso (791MB, MD5), ROSA.2012.LTS.LXDE.x86_64.iso (831MB, MD5).

Salix OS 13.37 "Live MATE"

George Vlahavas has announced the release of Salix OS 13.37 "Live MATE" edition, a Slackware-based live CD featuring the MATE desktop: "Salix Live MATE 13.37 has been officially released and is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. This is another live release created using SaLT (Salix Live Technology) a new powerful system of live tools for Slackware-based distributions, developed in-house. This is also the first-ever Salix release to incorporate isohybrid technology. The Salix Live MATE 13.37 release, mirrors our previous 'standard installation' MATE release in terms of featured software. The MATE 1.2 desktop environment is included. MATE will be extremely familiar to every previous GNOME 2 user, as it is a direct fork of it, providing the user with all the functionality and work patterns they were accustomed to. All major GNOME 2 desktop applications have been ported and have been renamed." Read the full release announcement for additional details. Download (MD5): salixlive-mate-13.37-32.iso (690MB, torrent), salixlive-mate-13.37-64.iso (719MB, torrent).