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In Part 6 of this Gtkmm tutorial series I will show you how to change the color and style of a button by changing the child widget of the button. I will also show you how to show and manage child windows.

We had great fun creating our basic Space Invaders clone, Pivaders. One of the key challenges with the project was keeping it to a manageable size – just 300 lines of Python. Without the use of Pygame’s strong set of features, that goal would likely have been overshot at least twofold. Pygame’s ability to group, manage and detect collisions thanks to the Sprite class really made a great difference to our project, not just in terms of length but in simplicity. If you missed the first part of the project, you can find the v0.1 code listing on GitHub, while you can find version v0.2 of the code, including all the images, music and sound effects in the same repo, as well as on this month’s cover disc.

Three days ago freecode.com abruptly shut down, claiming “low traffic”, but there has been enough public mourning since to make me pretty sure it fills a need that’s still there. There was nowhere else you could go that was quite so good for getting a cross-sectional view of what the open-source world is doing, independently of any given forge site or distro.

In this week's edition of our open source games news roundup, we spend all of our extra cash on the Steam Summer Sale, and then punish ourselves for it by playing the original X-COM with the OpenXcom interface.

Text-based games often receive little coverage in the Linux press. However, there are some real ASCII gems out there waiting to be explored which are immensely addictive and great fun to play.

Find free arcade, casual, shooter, role-playing and strategy games for Linux, Windows, OS X and Android.

A developer of Mount & Blade: Warband has confirmed the port on their Steam forum and confirmed it will be a native port too. This is after the hints from SteamDB pointing towards it being possibly.

As if transforming the global automotive, energy and space industries wasn't enough, Elon Musk has become the latest hero of the open source movement. And like some kind of King Midas, he's made a killing doing it.

Last week, Musk gave away all the patents on Tesla's electric car technology, allowing anyone — including competitors — to use them.

Because Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving With developers still struggling to plug vulnerabilities in the open source OpenSSL crypto library, Google has spun off a new fork of the project based on its own, internal work with the code, dubbed BoringSSL.…

The court ruled unanimously that all of patent-holder Alice Corp.'s claims were invalid, because they simply added computer language to a basic idea: using a financial intermediary to create trust in transactions. The 9-0 opinion [PDF], written by Justice Clarence Thomas, is the clearest statement yet from the Supreme Court that adding technological-sounding language to existing ideas isn't enough to get a patent.

The day has finally come goat fans, as Goat Simulator now has an open beta on Steam for Linux gamers to get in on one of the funniest games around.

Snappy is a minimal application that does one thing — plays videos. Snappy is a super-minimal video player with a neat on-screen display, and that’s about it, here is no other interface in the application.

Puppet is an automation tool which allows you to automate software configurations across multiple servers

Ubisoft says that DRM can't stop piracy, then says that better DRM needs to be put into place. Ubisoft may not have a presence on Linux yet, but do we want or even need a company with such unfriendly policies toward gamers?

The Orange Box really is a cloud-in-a-box. But while the hardware is neat, it's the Juju DevOps software inside that makes it special.

Canonical's Ubuntu Linux-powered Orange Box, with its 10 servers in a single container, is the perfect cloud sampler.

Android fans who are hoping Google will debut a new version of the OS at its annual I/O conference in San Francsico next week might be in for a disappointment ... because the company is rolling out a new version this week.

In today's open source roundup: Do computers help or hurt students? Plus: XCOM: Enemy Unknown released for Linux, and learning Linux through poetry.

There is always a delay between the release of the Linux Mint Cinnamon/MATE distributions and the KDE/Xfce distributions, but for those who have been waiting patiently (or perhaps a bit anxiously), the wait is almost over. The 'Release Candidates' for both KDE and Xfce are avaiable now, so the final releases should be out soon. I decided to take a brief look at each of them, and in the process of doing that I got into the new kernel management system, so I will add a few notes here about that as well.

The mass migration of big-name triple-A games to Linux continues, as publishers rush to have top titles available for the 2015 launch of Valve's SteamOS operating system. On Thursday, Feral Interactive announced that the blockbuster XCOM: Enemy Unknown is now available for Linux, as is all of its add-on content—including the large XCOM: Enemy Within expansion.