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2008 was a big year for indie gaming. With the likes of Braid, Castle Crashers, World of Goo, and a host of other titles raking up big sales numbers, the indie gaming industry is growing right alongside its bigger brother. And, like the indie film industry before it, the smaller, more humble sector of the industry garners a lot of adoration and respect from its faithful followers. But now that the indie sector is growing, how does one stand out from the pack? According to one indie developer, the answer is simple: make games for Mac OS X and Linux.

While you were likely to be opening up Christmas presents, Linus Torvalds was giving Linux users around the world a special present: the release of the next major Linux kernel: Linux 2.6.28. I had some time to tinker with this latest and greatest Linux, and it's my kind of Christmas present: solid improvements to my favorite operating system. Here are the five features that I think most of us will appreciate the most as we move into the New Year.

Given the unintended theme of this week, enjoy some of Larry Wall's Insights.

Ubuntu Podcast Episode #16 has been released. The podcast covers an upcoming interview with Jorge Castro (External Project Developer Relations for Ubuntu), Global Bug Jam, new notifications feature in Ubuntu 9.04, Ubuntu local communities on television, and much more.

Red Hat is following the Second Life path and is set to host an online conference for users and partners of its JBoss Java-based middleware products. The JBoss Virtual Experience is a web-based conference through which JBoss executives and engineers will give the usual keynote speeches and host sessions just as they would at a regular trade show, according to Red Hat. The virtual conference, for which people can register now, also will have booth exhibits from JBoss, Red Hat and other event sponsors.

The gOS (”good OS”) project released SP1 of gOS 3.1 Gadgets. The Linux based gOS is an excellent Operating System for Netbooks & NetTops.

They’re either hapless pests or the very people capable of overthrowing Windows. Take your pick. It feels pretty clear to me that the open process produces better stuff,” says Mark Shuttleworth, whose team at Canonical is leading the Ubuntu project. In December, hundreds of these controversial software developers gathered for one week at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. They came from all over the world, sporting many of the usual signs of software mercenaries: jeans, ponytails, unruly facial hair and bloodshot eyes.

What the open source community needs is a more streamlined way to bring everyone together to collaborate and ensure interoperability, says Gopi Ganapathy, president and CEO of Essentia and the new Community Development Chair of the Open Solutions Alliance.

The Btrfs and Squashfs file systems have been merged into the Linux kernel main development branch and, barring any problems, should appear in the 2.6.29 version of the kernel, currently in development. The two new file systems are good examples of where the Linux kernel developers see the future of Linux; running on both smaller and larger systems.

Hardware provider Hewlett-Packard has released a Linux version for its mini-laptop. HP wants to be clear from the outset that disabling the Linux command line interface in the product is not an act of heresy.

One of the most frustrating problems with setting up any mail server is the configuration required for anti-virus protection and Spam checking. Amavisd-new provides an excellent tool to help in setting that up. This is a step-by-step process in providing your mail server, the example is Ubuntu 8.10, with the ability to scan all incoming mail for viruses and Spam.

The plan: Ring in the new year by switching over to Linux for a week, documenting each day of the transition. Day 7, Final impressions and a stunning conclusion!

My experience with F10 PV DomU installs via profiles,described in details at recent post Xen 3.3.1rc1-pre port to CentOS 5.2 via http://bits.xensource.com mercurial repos and managing PV DomUs in graphical mode was negative, in regards of not providing an option to utilize local HTTP Mirror (NFS Share).Installer above just activated Xen Ethernet Interface at DomU and with no prompts addressed to Fedora's Internet Repositories,

Showing signs that it's working to meet requests for new developments to its Chrome browser, Google on Friday said it hopes to release versions for Mac OS X and Linux by the first half of the year, and it released a new version Wednesday that paves the way for the most requested feature: extensions.

Crowdsourcing and telecommuting are conspiring to reinvent the traditional notion of a job. No longer is the one-employer model the only game in town. Some companies have found that work done by freelancers may be of better quality than what they were used to getting from their in-house employees.

There's nothing quite like command-line tools for handling large batches of tasks, and image manipulation and ImageMagick is no exception.

An increasing number of hardware vendors are adopting practices that benefit the open-source and Linux communities from AMD releasing documentation and code to Creative Labs open-sourcing their X-Fi sound driver. One of the companies holding back on better embracing Linux has been Broadcom with their WiFi adapters being ill supported. However, open-source developers have stepped up to the plate and have improved the situation on their own.

One of the coolest Perl pictures I've seen - with a twist!

It's been an interesting week. My main workstation crashed; it boots to a Busybox prompt, and emits all sorts of interesting "drdy err, unc" errors. whichs sounds like there is a pervert inside my PC who is related to me.

That's the killer lesson of Dave Winer's new apporach to noise-filtered tweeting. "Friends" and "followers" aren't what matter. If you want substance, you need useful inputs. Not volume. Not style. Not popularity. Those have their places, just not in your face when you're looking for useful and interesting stuff.