Codeweavers announced they were going to support Left 4 Dead 2 in their next release. I hemmed, I hawed, and I folded, on the rationale that supporting Codeweavers was good enough to qualify this purchase for the Twenty Bucks program. (For those who don’t know, Codeweavers is pretty much the commercial side of Wine, employing most of the key programmers.) I bought CrossOver Games, installed Steam, and bought the combo pack of L4D and L4D2. Then I anxiously awaited the demo and the CrossOver Games release that would support L4D2. When it arrived, the demo ran almost perfectly in regular Wine, after some initial installation issues. I played a bit with my son and was living the good life.

Like many others, I couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy of the new killer OS from Google. I wanted to try it out. Kick the tires. Take it for a spin. That sort of thing.

Chrome has recently been open sourced by Google as a developer preview. Its very young, clearly has some issues and needs serious work, however it is usable and lots of people have managed to get it running in a virtual machine or via a USB key.

There is a very simple command that reinstalls all the distribution packages and reconfigures them automatically. This is particularly helpful when you have done a partial upgrade and eventually have broken the system dependencies tree.

Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought. Rather than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu, libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for chromium to use.

Performous is a karaoke game for Linux that brings the popular past time to the operating system in a unique and entertaining way. Performous has recently seen an update with the release of version 0.4.0.

Wine Technology advances at a rapid rate, in the last month we have seen two updates to Wine 1.1.33 and 1.1.34. Many of us like to stay using the latest and greatest Wine software with good reason each new version typically fixes issues and improves performance however on occasion a new Wine release will suffer from some regressions...