Monthly Archives: December 2010

The aMSN team donates to the EFF

Posted on by

Thanks to the ads that we have displayed on the aMSN website, the aMSN Team was able to gain a bit of money and we decided to donate part of that revenue to the EFF.

The EFF is a donation-funded nonprofit organization that defends our digital rights, helps promote net neutrality and raises questions about our privacy and our rights as consumers of the Internet. It fights for us in court and helps protect the digital world from big corporations who do not care about their consumers. The EFF also has a “Coder’s Rights project”  that defend developers like us.

The aMSN Team has  just donated 2500$ to the EFF and we are glad to help them in their fight. We encourage everyone to help this cause, since we are all benefiting from their hard work and maybe it’s time for us, as Internet consumers, to give back to them.

We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The aMSN Team.

Second Humble Indie Bundle + Braid Linux release!

Posted on by

Hi all,

After the huge success of the Humble Indie Bundle from last May, which I absolutely loved, the group of Indie developers decided to release a second Humble Indie Bundle with five other games, one of which is Braid, my favorite Independent game.

I suggest everyone goes over to http://humblebundle.com and buys those games, you name your price and you get five great games with no DRM and with Linux, Mac and Windows binaries available for you to install on any and all of your PCs. you can also decide how to share that money you just spent, how much you want to send to the developers, or to the EFF or Child’s Play charities. Don’t waste any time and go show your appreciation of good games and your support to the open spirit of writing multiplatofrm, non-DRM games. Maybe this time again, like in the first bundle, the developers will decide to release their games to an open source license (I wish:)).

In the last bundle, I was a bit sad that Braid wasn’t included, but it was because it wasn’t available for Linux yet. I had previously discussed with Jonathan Blow (the author of Braid) about Linux support and he said that it would eventually be available, and he indeed delivered! Although there has been no news about this and no release of Braid for Linux so far, the Humble Indie Bundle also marks the release of the Linux version of Braid. Get the bundle and you will be able to download a native version of Braid for Linux (although it’s been reported that the Windows version worked under Wine).

I’ve tried running Braid on my  Linux system and had the horrible issue of the ‘missing GL extension’ that so many people are having. I checked the game’s bugzilla on icculus and found the related bug report in which Scott Mansell found the solution : The missing extension is “GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc” which is disabled on the open source drivers because it is covered by a patent and requires a licence.
If you live in a country where the patent doesn’t apply, you can enable it using driconf. Simply install it (“sudo apt-get install driconf” or “sudo yum install driconf”) then run ‘driconf’ and enable the S3TC extension in the “Image quality” tab of driconf.

Thank you Scott Mansell! 🙂

I hope this helps a few of you, enjoy!

KaKaRoTo