Excitement!

Following a "birds of a feather" meetup during last month's linux.conf.au, several enthusiastic people are looking to resume regular TasLUG meetings in Hobart (which, according to old news items, haven't been regular since 2006).

The agenda for this meeting is:
* Bring people together and put some faces to names
* Work out what format Hobart meetings should take and when they should happen
* Discuss a possible state-wide gathering in March/April
* Discuss anything else that comes up

6:00pm
Wednesday 15th February
57F Brisbane St
Hobart

Yay!

Google Maps Link

G'day everyone!

Welcome to 2012! This month, we will be looking at SQLite, a public domain serverless transactional database. Mike will be taking us through examples of both command line and graphical SQLite management tools, and touch on language bindings for C, Python, etc.

2:00pm
Saturday 28th January (the last Saturday of the month)
Royal Oak
Launceston

As usual, some of us will be gathering at 1:00pm for a bite to eat before the 2:00pm start.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Google Maps Link
SQLite Website

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Following up in February, Phil (forum user pstevens) will be talking about TiddlyWiki.

I haven't really posted Humble Bundle news here before, but since the current bundle has more first-time-on-Linux games than ever before, I thought it'd be worth a mention.

For anybody who doesn't know, the Humble Bundle promotions package together independently developed games for Linux, MacOS and Windows, all DRM-free, and sell them under a pay-what-you-want model, with a customisable portion of payments going to charities.

To date, these bundles have helped promote 37 native Linux games (many of which have been developed for the bundle they were featured in), and have challenged a lot of assumptions about whether or not Linux users are willing to pay for commercial software. With Linux users traditionally paying more on average than any other platform, and contributing a roughly equal share of combined revenue compared to MacOS users.

In addition to encouraging the development of native Linux games, most of the bundles have also been accompanied by the open sourcing of an existing game or engine.

If you care about platform equality or the promotion of Linux, take a look at what these guys are doing. You can pay whatever you want (as little as one cent), but think about where your money goes and what it means.

The games featured in the current bundle (which has just passed US$1.3M and will be available for the next 11 days) are NightSky (a 2D physics puzzle platformer), Shank (a 2D beat-em-up), Super Meat Boy (a tricky 3D side scrolling platformer), Bit.Trip Runner (a "retro-styled music-platformer") and Jamestown (a top scrolling arcade shooter). If you pay more than the average purchase price, you also get Cave Story+ (a revamped version of a popular free platformer), and Gratuitous Space Battles (a turn based-ish sci-fi strategy).

Humble Bundle Website

Update: I've just been given the goahead to publish some statistics that expand upon and compare the stats currently available via the Humble Bundle website. For anybody who's interested, the URL is below.

The Humble Visualisations

Christian McGee from UTas attended the Open Source Developers Conference in Canberra earlier this month and will be giving a talk about the sessions he attended as well as the knowledge and experiences he gained.

This talk will be presented at the University's Newnham Campus in Launceston and video conferenced to the Sandy Bay Campus in Hobart.

1:00pm to 2:00pm
Friday 2nd December

Launceston (map)
V173, CIS Building, Newnham UTas Campus

Hobart (map)
473, Centenary Building, Sandy Bay UTas Campus



http://www.osdc.com.au

G'day everyone!

Two early meeting announcements in a row! If I keep this up, it'll soon start to look like we're actually organised. For November, Henry (forum user Attitude) and myself will be doing a demonstration install of the Linux distribution Fedora 16, which is expected to be released on the 9th.

2:00pm
Saturday 26th November (the last Saturday of the month)
Royal Oak
Launceston

As usual, some of us will be gathering at 1:00pm for a bite to eat before the 2:00pm start.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Google Maps Link
Fedora Website