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Archives for July 2008

Introducing Xeiso - soon.

3 July 2008 | Planet Ubuntu, Xeiso | 6 Responses

I’m too tired to write a clever opening for this post. There. Now that that’s out of the way, let me introduce Xeiso.

Xeiso is:

Time to elaborate: it will be an Ubuntu-based system with a custom interface with the goal of making a fast-booting, open game console. I’ve been researching solutions for a few months now, and have been testing out various languages and methods, from C++/SDL, to Python/Pygame, and back to C++/OpenGL. But now I think I’ve finally found a compatible, fast development and fast running framework for the user interface: Python and Pyglet. Hey, if it can run an OpenGL ortho projection on a 1680×1050 screen at 60fps with minimal CPU usage, it’s good enough for anything.

I’ll stop blabbing for a few minutes while you watch this video:

Xeiso Early Tech Demo

That’s the basic interface. Keep in mind that that demo is relatively old; the current revision is varied quite a bit. But that’s the gist of how it runs: everything, from games to controller options, is configured and controlled via this “slider” interface. It’s intuitively simple: if an arrow appears on the screen, you can press that arrow on the keyboard to go there. Allows for blind and quick motions. Like it? Cool. Hate it? Great. Suggest an improvement on Launchpad or in the comments.

A lot of the meat is under the screen - there is a rather extensible packaging system that allows for anything to be run from Xeiso. In the latest revision (17) there is a basic Neverball package, though currently Neverball must first be installed. “Hey - if this is to be an APT-based distro/system, why not use dpkg?” Good question. Because in the future I’m hoping to support downloadable content - and remember we’re looking for a fast-booting system - “xpackages” are being used. It’s basically a tarball and module system, meaning that packages can be dynamically loaded into memory at boot from an external device without much delay.

Some planned features:

Working code is available on Launchpad. It’s still under heavy development, so if you make a feature branch expect it to be 99% incompatible within a day. I’m not currently looking for any main developers - as I said it is being worked on at a fast pace and things can’t easily be coordinated. (I’m having trouble keeping up with my own documentation!)
In the future, though, I’ll be looking for:

Again - don’t contact me about getting involved with development yet - you will be able to soon.

Identi.ca?

2 July 2008 | Planet Ubuntu, Random | 3 Responses

I was innocently minding my own business today, when all of a sudden I stared getting notices about identi.ca on Twitter. Judging by the activity over there, it seems there was a mass migration today.

So far, it seems okay in terms of speed (but who knows what will happen once more users find it) and is fairly simple. It is missing SMS, an API, and a bunch of Twitter features, but more important is that Jabber works. To top the whole thing off is that the entire service is released under the AGPL and uses OpenID.

I’m willing to see how long it holds out. Who wants to help break it? I’m at http://identi.ca/jacob (horray for early-adoption usernames). Anyone else out there?