Top 10 commercial apps

1. TRAUMA

TRAUMA is a game that tells a story of a young woman who survives a car accident. Recovering at the hospital, she has dreams that shed light on different aspects of her identity – such as the way she deals with the loss of her parents. TRAUMA lets you experience those dreams in an interactive way, reminiscent of Point-and-Click Adventure Games.

2. Oil Rush

Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. It combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS with the sheer fun of Tower Defence. Fight the naval war between furious armies across the boundless waters of the post-apocalyptic world.

3. Fluendo DVD Player

Fluendo DVD Player is a software application specially designed to reproduce DVD on Linux/Unix platforms, which provides end users with high quality standards.

4. Family Farm

Work the farm in this game of 19th century farmsteading and build a home for your families. Clicking cows won’t earn you any cash. This is a simulation of a farmstead experienced in stories which span a generation. Keep them fed, develop their skills, and grow their land in to a Family Farm!

5. Steel Storm: Burning Retribution

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution marks the return of top-down shooters with new twists. The game has score oriented competitive gameplay, and is designed for people who like fast paced action, hordes of smart enemies, destructible worlds and ground shaking explosions.

6. Braid

Braid is a platform game in painterly style where you manipulate the flow of time to solve puzzles. Every puzzle in Braid is unique; there is no filler. Braid treats your time and attention as precious, and it does everything it can to give you a mind-expanding experience.

7. Monster RPG 2

Monster RPG 2 is a fantasy quest that spans continents and worlds and lets you take a simple villager and develop her into a hero with the power to save her world. The next instalment in the classic Monster RPG series, Monster RPG 2 is a turn-based role-playing game with great variety of plot twists, secrets, and scenery.

8. World of Goo

Drag and drop living, squirming, talking globs of goo to build structures, bridges, cannonballs, zeppelins, and giant tongues. The millions of innocent goo balls that live in the beautiful World of Goo are curious to explore. But they don’t know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious. The most addicting and awe-inspiring puzzle game will set you on an adventure that you’ll never forget!

9. The Clockwork Man: The Hidden World

Explore a Victorian era filled with wondrous contraptions and fascinating machinery. Embark on a steam-powered, rollercoaster journey through land, air, and water in this unique Hidden Object Adventure! Miranda and Sprocket are back! Join them in their new adventures and discover the Hidden World, a land lost in time and glimpsed through legends.

10. Uplink

You play an Uplink Agent who makes a living by performing jobs for major corporations. Your tasks involve hacking into rival computer systems, stealing research data, sabotaging other companies, laundering money, erasing evidence, or framing innocent people. You use the money you earn to upgrade your computer systems, and to buy new software and tools. As your experience level increases you find more dangerous and profitable missions become available.

Top 10 free apps

1. Marble Arena 2

Free, physics based, 3D marble game, featuring vibrant HD graphics, fun and addictive star zapping gameplay, and an easy to use built-in editor for creating custom levels.

2. Ryzom

Ryzom, one of the best role playing Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the moment (MMORPG), is set more than 2000 years in the future, on a living, evolving world: beautiful Atys!

3. Crossover Games

Play Windows games like World of Warcraft on Ubuntu! CrossOver Games (Ubuntu Edition) makes it possible to play Windows games such as World of Warcraft and many others. CrossOver Games is built on the latest versions of Wine, based on contributions from both CodeWeavers and the open-source Wine community. CrossOver Games aims to bring you the latest, greatest, bleeding edge improvements in Wine technology.

4. Tribal Trouble 2

Tribal Trouble 2 is a browser-based RTS game that takes place in the zany age of the Vikings. You are the Chief of a Viking tribe and are responsible for making a name for yourself by conquest and skill.

5. CoreBreach Demo

CoreBreach is an anti-gravity racing game with combat-based gameplay. Its unique graphic style, with a cell-shaded look, sets up a very futuristic atmosphere with a wide range of choices for ships, race tracks and powerful weapons.

6. Full Circle Magazine

Full Circle is a free, independent, monthly magazine dedicated to the Ubuntu family of Linux operating systems. Each month, it contains helpful how-to articles and reader submitted stories. Full Circle also features a companion podcast, the Full Circle Podcast, which covers the magazine along with other news of interest.

7. Vendetta Online

Vendetta Online is a 3D space combat MMORPG. This MMO permits thousands of players to interact as the pilots of spaceships in a vast universe. Users may build their characters in any direction they desire, becoming rich captains of industry, military heroes, or outlaws.

8. TreeSheets

The ultimate replacement for spreadsheets, mind mappers, outliners, PIMs, text editors and small databases. Suitable for any kind of data organization, such as Todo lists, calendars, project management, brainstorming, organizing ideas, planning, requirements gathering, presentation of information, etc.

9. CrossOver Pro (Trial)

CrossOver Linux allows you to install many popular Windows productivity applications, plugins and games in Linux. You can think of it as an emulator, but it’s different, because there’s no Windows OS license required. Your applications integrate seamlessly with your GNOME or KDE environment. It’s like running Windows on your Linux machine, but without Windows.

10. Wunderlist

Free cloud-sync task manager, helps sharing your To-Do lists with friends and colleagues. Manage your to-dos and synchronize them with your free Wunderlist account. View and modify your tasks on Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch, Android and the Web. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide use Wunderlist everyday. Wunderlist – your tasks anywhere, anytime.

Notes:

• The lists of top 10 app downloads includes only those applications submitted through My Apps on the Ubuntu App Developer Site. For more information about of usage of other applications in the Ubuntu archive, check out the Ubuntu Popularity Contest statistics.
• The top 10 free apps list contains gratis applications that are distributed under different types of licence, some of which might not be open source. For detailed licence information, please check each application’s description in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

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Development Update

Ubuntu 12.04 is shaping up nicely. Last week Alpha 2 got released, which means you should be testing by now. Next week we will hit Feature Freeze, by which time we “stop introducing new features, packages, and APIs, and concentrate on fixing bugs in the development release”. This also means that new upstream versions (if they are not part of on the release team’s list of exceptions or pure bug fix releases) will need to get a freeze exception from the release team. This is also a reason why Daniel Holbach called for a “Sponsorship Friday”, so the queue of uploads which need code review is emptied again.

Matt Fischer wrote an interesting article about how to write a LightDM greeter. The post is really well done, explaining how LightDM works internally and how to get the greeter done easily.

Events

We are excited to let you know about the Ubuntu Global Jam, an event where Ubuntu LoCo Teams around the world meet, have fun and together make Ubuntu better. Be it through translations, work on bugs, documentation, testing, packaging or whatever else. Check out the list of participating events to find if there is something happening near where you live, or start an event yourself!

Can’t see the video? Click here.

Things which need to get done

If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there are still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

• There are Merges which need to be done (main, restricted, universe, multiverse).
• Also the Ubuntu Mozilla team is looking for help, so if you’re excited about Mozilla and what’s happening there, join IRC, talk to the guys on #ubuntu-mozillateam on irc.freenode.net.
• And then there are Security bugs you can take a look at, the team is a friendly bunch and they’re incredibly helpful in getting your patch reviewed.
• There are bitesize bugs.
• Also did John Lea from the Ubuntu Design team talk to us and mentioned that there are bugs up for grabs, where the design has been decided on and the implementation might need YOUR help. If you want to help improve Ubuntu’s UI, have a look at these!

First timers!

We had a number of folks getting involved last week: Daniel d’Andrada, Nicolas Bonnefon, Kiall Mac Innes and Anton Gladky.

Spotlight: Kubuntu, alive and kicking

Benjamin Kerensa and Daniel Holbach briefly interviewed some of the Kubuntu developers to get an idea where things stand with Kubuntu.

The announcement that Canonical employee Jonathan Riddell would soon focus on goals other than Kubuntu maintenance has been widely discussed in the media, so first we asked the team, if they would like to add anything to these discussions which had been missed. Jonathan Riddell started out by saying that “pulling the plug” as many headlines have put it was too harsh and that Kubuntu will get the community support it always has done. Also he pointed out that Kubuntu did pleasingly well during 11.10 when he also wasn’t working on it. We asked if the lack of you being involved full time would have any noticeable impact. Jonathan responded and said that he does community management, so nudges people towards tasks that they are capable of, and fills in areas of Kubuntu that are sometimes neglected, such as ISO testing and that these tasks will have been done by others.

As many readers probably don’t know how Kubuntu is put together, we asked how Kubuntu development has worked up until now. Rohan Garg gave us an overview: Basically, the Kubuntu team deals with the KDE and Qt packages in the Ubuntu archive, so whenever a new release is about to be made the team gets the source tarballs a couple of days before release and the team of “Kubuntu ninjas” get cracking. They build, patch, and see to it that everything works as expected before release day, reporting any build issues upstream and getting tarballs respun is part and parcel of the job. Sometimes it happens that everyone is busy which causes delays in the release. Once the Kubuntu release is out, packages are usually backported into the Ubuntu backports repositories for the current stable release. The Kubuntu ninjas are also responsible for other KDE packages such as Amarok which are not part of the standard KDE release and as Jonathan Riddell pointed out that there is Qt and related bits too and added “with luck we can do some feature development (which is mostly specced out at UDS)”.

Testing is important as well. Jonathan mentioned ISO testing and Philip Muškovac explained that before stable release updates are pushed out, testing is done through public PPAs. Rohan and Philip went on and described how most of Kubuntu’s bug work is being done upstream: KDE bugs are directly reported in the KDE bug tracker, as KDE applications have their own bug/crash handling framework. Philip added that it would be great to have more contributions to bugs in Launchpad, so they can be forwarded to Upstream in a more timely fashion

Next we asked what’s in the cards for Kubuntu 12.04. Philip explained that the introduction of KDE 4.8 took a lot of time and that he is still working on supporting the Oxygen theme for GTK3. Rohan mentioned that a new IM client is being packaged right now, using the Telepathy framework. The packaging is almost done and testing will go on for a week before they enter the archive. Also Rohan was proud to admit that he is going to apply for Kubuntu upload rights!

It is interesting to note that Philip and Rohan both mentioned that the withdrawal of “official support” would actually make the development of Kubuntu easier: up until now all packages for the Kubuntu CDs had to be in the main repository, which requires a thorough investigation of the code. From now on Kubuntu bits could come from main and universe.

It is absolutely possible to contribute to Kubuntu and the team has enough tasks lined up, so you can help out. If it is triage of bugs, ISO testing, documentation or packaging: everyone is welcome to contribute and get involved. Jonathan mentioned that it is important that you are a “motivated self starter”, but that the fine people in #kubuntu-devel can help you out if you get stuck. The Kubuntu wiki page has more details.

Get Involved

1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

Find something to work on

Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.

• Help out with fixing packages which don’t build anymore.
• Help out with security bugs.

In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.

• Be interactive and reach us immediately: talk to us in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net.
• Follow mailing lists and get involved in the discussions: ubuntu-devel-announce (announce only, low traffic), ubuntu-devel (high-level discussions), ubuntu-devel-discuss (fairly general developer discussions).
• Stay up to date and follow the ubuntudev account on Facebook, Google+, Identi.ca or Twitter.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #251 for the week January 30 – February 5, 2012, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

• Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 Released!
• Developer Week: Summaries Days 1-3
• The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Needs You!
• Ubuntu 12.04 Development update
• Ubuntu Stats
• LoCo News
• Launchpad News
• Canonical Design Team: Multi-Monitor Update and Greeter Prototype
• Didier Roche: Unity 5.2 is now released!
• Paul Tagliamonte: Mapping the Ubuntu Community
• With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform
• You Don’t Have To Quit Ubuntu!
• Canonical Promotes Standard Ubuntu Branding with New Website
• Other Articles of Interest
• Weekly Official Ubuntu Flavors Team Meetings
• Upcoming Meetings and Events
• Updates and Security
• And much much more

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

• Elizabeth Krumbach
• Chris Druif
• Vikram Dhillon
• Liraz Siri
• And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Welcome to Precise Pangolin Alpha 2, which will in time become Ubuntu 12.04.

Pre-releases of Precise Pangolin are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone images that will be released throughout the Precise development cycle.

This is the first Ubuntu milestone release to include images for the armhf architecture, for the ARM CPUs using the hard-float ABI.

New packages showing up for the first time include:

• Linux Kernel 3.2.2 (3.2.0-12.21)
• Upstart 1.4
• Unity 5.0
• LibreOffice 3.5 beta 2

You can download Alpha 2 images here: