Open Recall: Linux Mint control centre, Dagon and IPFire 2.13

Away messages are coming to the screensaver in Linux Mint 15
Source: The Linux Mint project

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition: Linux Mint gets its own control centre, IPFire gets an ARM port, an open source game development kit and an open source adventure game engine, Tails 0.17 and identifying document authors with open source software.

• Linux Mint gets its own control centre – The upcoming release of Linux Mint, version 15 ("Olivia"), will get its own control centre application in the distribution's Cinnamon user interface. A new screensaver application is also planned which allows users to leave messages on their locked screens while they are away from their computer. A firm release date for Linux Mint 15 has not been set yet.

• IPFire 2.13 – The latest major version of the open source firewall distribution IPFire is based on the Linux 3.2 kernel and includes a new Quality of Service (QoS) algorithm that helps utilise restricted bandwidth efficiently. With IPFire 2.13, the distribution's developers have also added an ARM port which enables it to run on Marvell Kirkwood and Texas Instruments OMAP4-based systems as well as the Raspberry Pi. 5GHz Wi-Fi is also supported completely with this version. IPFire 2.13 can be downloaded from the project's web site.

• Open source mobile game development – The Game Closure DevKit allows developers to create games with HTML 5 and JavaScript that run on "literally hundreds of mobile devices". The DevKit is open source and its developers laud it as "the best 2D mobile game engine in the world". The software can be downloaded from Game Closure's GitHub page and is dual licensed under the GPLv3 and the Game Closure Free License (GCFL).

• Open source adventure game engine – Dagon is an open source engine for adventure games featuring its own scripting language. The engine is supported under Windows and Mac OS X and a Linux port is under development. Dagon is released by Senscape under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Senscape's horror adventure Asylum was written using the engine.

• Tails 0.17 – Version 0.17 of The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) now includes the KeePassX password manager and several upgrades to the Iceweasel browser. Additionally, the distribution's installer is now available with updated translations for Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Polish and Spanish. A detailed listing of all updates is available in the change log and Tails 0.17 can be downloaded from the distribution's web site.

• Identifying authors with open source software – A group of researchers have published a paper analysing several historical documents (such as The Federalist Papers and parts of the New Testament) and determining the authorship of passages of the texts. The accompanying open source tool can statistically identify the author of a particular passage of text by comparing it to a training set. The software is released under the GPLv2.

(fab)