From a press release at LinuxPR: “Mission Critical Linux, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of Convolo Cluster Version 1.2, the only Linux cluster solution on the market that fully supports Network File System (NFS) failover.”

Trolltech has released version 2.2.3 of Qt, the cross-platform C++ Graphical User Interface application framework.

From LWN.net: “Papers are invited for presentation during the Conference, which will be held on Thursday, 22nd, and Friday, 23rd March. Following last year’s success, there will be two tracks, “Business” and “Technical.””

“We have just released KDE 2.1 beta1, the first beta version of the second major release of the KDE 2 series. KDE 2.1-beta1 offers a number of additions, enhancements and fixes over KDE 2.0.1, the last stable KDE release which shipped on December 5, 2000.” Full details at LWN.net.

– By Grant Gross –

Are you waiting for your favorite desktop game to come to Linux? Although there’s a handful of big-name games available, people who are both gaming enthusiasts and Linux fans say parity in the gaming desktop is still years away.

“The question here is a chicken and egg one,” says Volker Wiegand, president of SuSE Linux’s U.S. operations. “Do the games make Linux mainstream on the desktop, or do the games come when Linux is mainstream?”

Wiegand and others say it’s hard to predict when and if Linux will catch up to Windows on the gaming desktop. “It’s probably far in the future, farther than I’d want to predict,” says Jeb Bolding, a senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates in Colorado and a Linux user for five years.

Bolding says the cost of porting a game from Windows to Linux is still prohibitive, and game companies don’t see a big enough market of Linux users. Just recently, Slashdot linked to posts from id Software’s Todd Hollenshead, saying the company had no plans to distribute the highly anticipated Quake 3 Team Arena on disk for Linux. “No offense, but it’s a support nightmare due to the multiple flavors of popular versions and ever-changing kernel, retailers don’t want it, and the Linux Q3A sales were disappointing,” he posted on Quake3World.com in late November. “So the commercial reality is that the Windows version will go to retail and Linux will be available via a binary download pretty soon thereafter.” (id Software people weren’t available to comment on this story.)

Hollenshead did say that there will be a binary Linux version, but it probably would be unsupported. “Going forward, I fully anticipate that we will continue to push the platform in the hopes that one day soon Linux will be a viable platform for retail commercial entertainment software distribution.”

Bolding believes that “code-to-code,” Linux is a better platform to develop games on than Windows, “but there’s not a concerted effort by anybody.” Bolding sees more potential for a Linux console, such as Indrema, which recently invited developers to get involved in creating games. “It seems that Linux has a possibility there, building a console for an operating system, instead of building an operating system for a console.”

In the meantime, Linux gamers are likely to see more role-play and strategy games ported to the desktop, Bolding says, because they tend to have longer shelf lives than shoot-’em-ups.

More optimistic about gaming on the Linux desktop are people like Scott Draeker, president of Loki Software, which has ported about a dozen popular gaming titles to Linux, including Sim City 3000, Heavy Gear II, Quake 3 Arena, and Descent 3. Available next is the strategy game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri with Alien Crossfire, which was available for Windows early this year.

Draeker says the Linux gaming market can get a lot bigger, but the key may be to encourage game development specifically for Linux. “Keep in mind that we are focused on Loki’s role in a Linux game market, not a Linux porting market,” he says. “There’s a difference. There are plenty of ports on the Mac, but almost no game development. Linux needs the latter if it’s going to
stand on its own two feet. We’re not in this so that we can forever be a distant second to Windows. And we’re not limited to games on PCs. Where Linux goes, so goes Loki.”

Draeker promises that Loki will continue to release a “steady stream” of Linux games. “We’ll
keep building out the open source multimedia infrastructure on Linux so that Linux games will continue to meet or exceed their Windows counterparts, feature for feature and frame for frame,” he says. “And, as we enter our third year of operations, we’ll be addressing more of the challenges in our market. We want to see a thriving Linux gaming industry, and we’re doing the
work to make it happen.”

Edward Bender, a Linux user, game player, and chief content officer of the Speakeasy.net DSL service, also sees
potential for gaming on the Linux desktop. His company caters to Linux users, many of whom play games online against other players. The market shows promise, he says, because of “the general adaptation of Linux so far, and because the majority of Linux users are interested in games.”

Still, Bender guesses Linux won’t catch up to Windows for at least a couple of years.

SuSE’s Wiegand believes that if hardware companies like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway will start to sell computers with Linux installed, that’d spur Linux game development. He says it’s important for Linux to have more games, and titles released at the same time as other platforms. “If Linux wants to be the dominating operating system on the desktop, it needs games,” he says. “Hard-core gamers don’t want to wait for titles.”

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

“Eazel Inc., the developer of software and services to make computers easier to use, today announced that Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq:SUNW) will distribute Eazel’s Nautilus software on the upcoming GNOME 2.0 desktop user environment for the Solaris(TM) operating environment. The combination of GNOME and Nautilus will provide Linux and Solaris users with the same, easy-to-use user environment across both platforms.” Press release at Business Wire.

Newsforge reader keskoy writes: “David Cantrell is a core team member for the Slackware Linux Project. In this interview
you will learn how David got his start working on Slackware linux, what his
role as a Slackware developer is, he will explain to us about his two
new applications protopkg and autoslack, plus other various topics of interest are touched on.”

A Reuters report at ZDNET says “Microsoft senior vice president Joachim Kempin is stepping down
from his high-profile job managing Microsoft’s relations with
computer makers, the Wall Street Journal reported in its
electronic edition Monday.”

Newsforge reader Heather Araskiewicz sent in this press release: “Mission Critical Linux, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of Convolo Cluster Version 1.2, which fully supports Network File System (NFS) failover.”A prominent innovator in Linux cluster technology, Mission Critical Linux, Inc. launched the first Linux-specific cluster solution that provided high availability while guaranteeing data integrity. Convolo Version 1.2 is being released on the heels of the first version, and signals the continued strong commitment the company is making to high availability Linux solutions for the enterprise. Full NFS failover support, including support for NFS locking protocols and the complete set of authentication and privileges, addresses the stringent requirements of Linux deployments, which require continuous network filesystem access.

The Convolo cluster is built from the ground up on Linux, and is certified on all major Linux distributions. The shared storage architecture supports SCSI and Fibre Channel, complete Quorum-based data integrity, active-passive and active-active failover configurations, highly available NFS and Apache services and out of the box database applications such as Oracle, DB2, MySQL, and NFS. In addition, Mission Critical Linux, Inc. has qualified their cluster on the IA-32 and IA-64 architectures.
— more–

“The demand for NFS support has been quite overwhelming, and it has been an exciting challenge,” said Brian Stevens, Chief Strategy Officer at Mission Critical Linux, Inc. “We are extremely pleased to be able to deliver a fast response to our customers, thus enabling them to fully deploy high-availability NFS solutions in their large scale networked infrastructure. This continues with our vision of moving Linux to the enterprise.”

Availability

Convolo Cluster Software Version 1.2 is available now from Mission Critical Linux, Inc., and is priced at $ 1,990 for a two-node cluster. Existing customers will receive Version 1.2 under their 90-warranty. Online ordering is available at www.missioncriticallinux.com/products/convolo. The software is delivered in RPM and DEB formats, ready for fast and easy installation or upgrade on any supported Linux distribution. A graphical, browser-based management interface for day-to-day operations and a command-line management interface for scripting of regular operations is included with the package. A 30-day evaluation CD is available through sales@missioncriticallinux.com.
About Mission Critical Linux, Inc.

Mission Critical Linux, Inc. offers enterprise-ready Linux professional services to help plan and deploy efficient and highly available Linux systems; custom engineering for specific development needs; and 24/7 support to ensure maximum systems availability and performance. By combining these services with ground-breaking Linux technologies such as Secure Service Technology and Convolo Cluster Software, the Company provides commercial Linux users with the tools needed to maximize the performance of their IT infrastructure. Headquartered in Lowell, Massachusetts, with offices in Santa Clara, California and Europe, Mission Critical Linux, Inc. can be reached at www.missioncriticallinux.com or at +1 877.625.4689 toll free or +1 978.606.0200.
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“The GNU General Public License typically does not apply to web applications because they are not actually distributed. We need a
new license to ensure our code remains truly free in the face of server-based applications.” From Advogato.org.