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Announcing the Sound Update of the deceptively simple strategy game that puts you in the role of the evil villain. "Stop That Hero!" now features more minions to summon, more heroes to fight off, and more levels to challenge your ability to be an evil ruler. Available for GNU/Linux.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m proud to announce the playable alpha release of the first major game for GBGames: “Stop That Hero!”, a deceptively simple strategy game that puts you in the role of the evil villain. Available for GNU/Linux.

Last week, I wrote about the `GLIBC_2.4′ not found errors your game might get when an application built on a new distribution is run on an older distribution, such as Debian Stable and Slackware 11. Judging from my search logs, this problem seems to be common enough to warrant a follow-up post. I have since solved the problem and have not added new dependencies, and it does not involve using strange, mysterious scripts or older compilers.

A few weeks ago, one person informed me that my game blew up on his older distro with an error "version `GLIBC_2.4' not found". Most of the dependency issues I’ve encountered involved changing flags used in my libraries, such as libSDL. Unfortunately, this issue was different. It was strange because I was not sure why my game was depending on GLIBC_2.4 since I was not explicitly linking to it. This article explains what the problem is and how I went about trying to solve it.

People everywhere love Flash. It has become the Web’s de facto standard for all manner of interfaces. From simple menus to full-blown games, you can bet that Flash is there. It has been called one of the best prototyping tools available, and game designers love it because they don’t need to be computer science graduates to use it. Most people browsing the web today have a Flash plugin installed, making it a fairly ubiquitous platform. With all of these things going for it, why won’t I use it? Because if I can’t even watch YouTube videos without it crashing Firefox on my Ubuntu system, then it can’t be that ubiquitous.

RMS is known for his promotion of Free Software, or maybe more so for his disdain of non-Free, proprietary software. So it came as a surprise to many visitors to the GNU home page to see an announcement not asking for a call to arms against software patents or so-called DRM, but to say that he was getting married. What makes the news surprising? He found his soon-to-be wife by playing World of Warcraft.

Major game publishers and indie game developers alike seem to ignore Linux customers, or if they do provide a port of a game, it is usually weeks, months, or even years in coming. Is it due to a lack of Linux-using gamers? Why aren't there more of them?

We all benefit from Open Source and/or Free Software. Everyone. Even if you're reading this blog from Internet Explorer on a Windows XP box, you benefit in some way from Open Source. There's probably at least one open source program that you use on a regular basis on your system, and if not then somewhere down the line your ISP, your coworker, or some other point in the process is relying on open source. While many would argue that fame is more important than money to open source volunteers, I've yet to meet one that didn't like money as well as fame. The goal of Project of the Month is to provide a little of each to open source developers, whether they're already getting revenue from their work or not.

I have long wanted to make a MythTV box instead of paying a monthly fee for something like TiVo. I figured that if I made my own machine, I would be in control of my time shifting. I wouldn’t have to worry about some media company telling me what I can do, nor would I pay a monthly fee for the “privilege”. Also, the Broadcast Flag is apparently very hard to kill, and the media companies seem intent on getting it out there. I wanted to build my own digital video recorder sooner rather than later. This article documents my experience.