Open Recall: MIMO, openSUSE milestone, Minecraft Assemble, Cube Slam

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 of the Open Recall, MIMO at TDF, openSUSE 13.1's second milestone, the latest Parted Magic, Minecraft cloned in assembler, LibreOffice's code cleaning, playing Pong with WebRTC and GStreaming on iOS devices.

• France's MIMO joins Document Foundation: Having standardised on LibreOffice, the MIMO working group which represents several French government ministries and administrations, has joined the existing 8 members of the Document Foundation's Advisory Board to represent a large user organisation, 500,000 users, on the board.

• openSUSE 13.1 passes second milestone: The openSUSE developers are continuing their work on the next major release of openSUSE, version 13.1. Still at an early stage of development, the latest release, a second milestone, contains mostly updates to various packages such as LibreOffice and Firefox, and upgrades to PulseAudio 4.0 and Linux kernel 3.10rc4. The early developer release is available to download. The next milestone should see GCC 4.8 and Perl 5.18 included in the release.

• Parted Magic's one step forward: After a month of development, a new desktop wallpaper and an updated, auto-refreshing, device-mapper-compatible Parted Magic Mount, the developers released Parted Magic 2013_06_14. But they re-released it the next day as Parted Magic 2013_06_15, which corrected the removal of a partclone flag that had broken Clonezilla. It is available to download now.

• Assembling Minecraft: Alexander Overvoorde had to build a game in assembler for a university assignment. So he built MineAssemble, a bootable Minecraft clone, partly in x86 assembler (with parts in C due to time constraints). It can be booted in a VM or QEMU or even directly off a USB stick and is MIT licensed.

• A cleaner office: Want to read about how the code of LibreOffice is being polished and cleaned with redundant code being removed and migrating to new build systems? The LibreOffice (and SUSE) developer Michael Meeks has a blog post about just that.

• Get slammed with WebRTC: WebRTC is the latest thing in real time communications on the web and is being developed into a collection of standards. To show what can be done with it, Google has released Cube Slam, an open source pong game which lets you see the person you are playing against. Cube Slam uses the latest version of Chrome, which has WebRTC's PeerConnection and DataChannel support, and shows off WebGL capabilities too. The MIT-licensed source code is available on Google Code.

• GStreamer lands in iPhones: Want a familiar media framework on iOS? Collabra and Fluendo have developed iOS support for GStreamer and incorporated it in the GStreamer SDK. The new support is being previewed at the moment and can be downloaded; a sample app is also available on GitHub. Commercial support will come in the future and a final release is due next month.

(djwm)