Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Just as a reminder for myself, as I'll probably need this more often in the future (and maybe it's helpful for others):

Per default, if you use a big xterm (232x74 in my case) where you start minicom, the $COLUMNS and $LINES environment variables will be 80x24 nevertheless, and those applications which honor them (vim, for example) will be too small and not use the full xterm size of 232x74.

  $ minicom
  $ echo $COLUMNS; echo $LINES
  80
  24

You can fix that like this:

  $ eval `resize`
  $ echo $COLUMNS; echo $LINES
  232
  74

After you do eval `resize` the variables are updated and vim will use the full xterm size. That's all.

I have no idea how such a great open-source game as Teeworlds has been able to exist without me hearing about it until recently.

Teeworlds is a fast-paced realtime multiplayer shooter. You control a small "Tee" which can hold various weapons (hammer, gun, shotgun, laser-rifle, rocket launcher, ninja-sword) while running and jumping around frantically on the map, trying to frag as many other Tees as you can before you're killed by some other guy. Easy, eh?

There's are many game servers to choose from, as well as various game modes (death match, team death match, capfure the flag and some unofficial "mods"). You can join servers on the Internet, or create your own server, be it a public one or a LAN server.

Installation

Usually I would suggest apt-get install teeworlds, but for now the packages in unstable are an older 0.4.x version, whereas upstream released a much-improved 0.5.1 version. I have already filed a bug and I'm optimistic there'll be a new version in unstable soon.

In the mean-time however, you can manually build the game from source via:

 $ apt-get install zlib-dev libsdl1.2-dev
   (maybe also libgl, libglu, and python, if not already installed)
 $ wget 'http://teeworlds.com/trac/bam/browser/releases/bam-0.2.0.zip?format=raw' -O bam-0.2.0.zip
 $ wget http://teeworlds.com/files/teeworlds-0.5.1-src.zip
 $ unzip bam-0.2.0.zip
 $ unzip teeworlds-0.5.1-src.zip
 $ cd bam-0.2.0
 $ ./make_unix.sh
 $ cd ../teeworlds-0.5.1-src
 $ ../bam-0.2.0/src/bam release

Running the game

 $ ./teeworlds

You'll obviously need a working OpenGL/DRI setup (check if "glxinfo | grep direct" says "Yes"), otherwise the game will be way too slow. In case you experience graphics glitches and distortions, first exit the game, then:

 $ vi ~/.teeworlds/settings.cfg

Change the "gfx_noclip 0" option there to "gfx_noclip 1" and restart the game.

Firewalls

If you use a local firewall as I do, you need to open at least ports 8300-8303 (UDP), even better 8300-8310 for more choice in game servers:

 $ iptables -A OUTPUT -m state --state NEW -p udp --dport 8300:8310 -j ACCEPT

Further resources

• Official website
• Forums (yuck)
• For developers: trac, bugs, wiki, mailing list
• Code repository: svn co svn://svn.teeworlds.com/teeworlds/trunk
• Unofficial "Teewiki"
• Lots more useful links

Have fun!

Stuff I didn't expect I'd had to type today:

  $ dpkg-repack dpkg-repack

Seriously.

Yes, just when you thought the spamming of Planet Debian with "Lenny released" blog posts had finally stopped, here comes another one :-)

Let me join the crowd by saying a great "thank you!" to all the people who made this release possible, especially so the release team who organized everything, as well as the thousands of contributors (in one form or another) who helped shape the new release!

Personally, I'm eager to try out the new Linux 2.6.28 kernel package in unstable now (which have been uploaded today or so, but haven't yet reached my mirror), since they contain mainline wireless drivers for my One A110 netbook, among many other things.

Also, in the next few days I'll probably re-install my NSLU2 ARM box using the latest Lenny installer, following the HOWTOs by Martin Michlmayr (I'll probably write about the experience later). This re-install is long overdue, as I'm currently running the box from an 1GB thumb drive, which works ok, but I'm slowly running out of space. So I'll re-install on a 4 GB (or bigger) thumb drive.

It's been announced at quite a few places, so you probably already heard about it: Miro 2.0, the new major release of the cross-platform Internet RSS audio/video aggregator and player has been released.

Miro is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, the new release on Linux now features a "native" GTK+ widgets UI (instead of the Mozilla-based HTML widgets of earlier versions) and supports both a xine, as well as gstreamer renderer (for audio and video).

I won't even attempt to list all the improvements and new features, please check the release notes and the feature list for details. Overall more than 670 issues have been fixed since the last 1.2.x series release.

You can also watch this video (Ogg Theora, 10 MB) for a short introduction in Miro 2.0.

Together with the software release, the getmiro.com website, as well as the online Miro Guide have been competely rewritten and are a lot more usable and better-looking than before.

Finally, I have uploaded a new Miro 2.0 Debian package to unstable yesterday, by now it should be available from most mirrors. For Debian we're defaulting to xine at the moment, but please consult README.Debian if you want to switch to the gstreamer backend.

Please test the new release extensively so the few remaining issues (if any) can be ironed out soon...