Article by George Norman

On 11 Dec 2009

World of Goo is a very popular physics-based construction game developed by 2D Boy. Back in ‘08 it won the Design Innovation and Technical Excellence Award at the Independent Games Festival and it won the Best Independent Game award at the Video Games Awards (VGA). Early this year Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, the two ex-EA Arts developers behind 2D Boy and World of Goo, announced the release of a Linux version of the game.

“We knew from the beginning that we wanted to make our game available to everyone, regardless of platform,” commented Kyle Gabler at the time. “We've also always had a secret desire to see the open ideas behind Linux take over. We met the guy who did our Linux port because he was a fan who created an open wiki for translating our game into a bunch of other languages. We were surprised - the language contributions from our community were of much higher quality than the translations we received from a paid translation service.”


Lead Linux Mint Developer Clem Lefebvre has now announced that World of Goo has been added to the Linux Mint operating system. It is only a demo version, but it is enough to keep you entertained for a while.

“This is the demo version which lets you play the first “World” of levels in the game. It’s quite a lot for a demo and you’re guaranteed to get addicted. The full version of the game is about $20. I was very impressed with the quality of this game and with the fact that it was made available to Linux by its editors, so with their consent it’s now added to the pool of applications available to Linux Mint (repositories, portal, software manager),” explained Lefebvre.

To install World of Goo refresh your cache (“apt update”) and install the package named “worldofgoodemo.” Or you could use the Update Manager to update the package “mintinstall-data” and then run the Software Manager.

In related news, the Main and Universal Editions of Linux Mint 8 Helena have been released a short while ago. Linux Mint 8 comes with the following enhancements and changes:
- Based on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic koala
- Linux 2.6.31 kernel, Gnome 2.28 and Xorg 7.4
- The user can define his own Places in Menu Preferences
- Enable/disable any button for the System and Places section in Menu Preferences
- The user interface has been enhanced. It is now easier to use and it displays more content.
- The Update Manager will automatically inform the user when a new version of mintInstall-data is available. This way the user does not have to manually refresh the Software Manager.
- Software Manager is ware of the APT status of each application.
- The user can mark several applications for installation/removal.
- The looks of the Update Manager have been improved.
- Update Manager now uses Synaptic to refresh the list of update. When Update Manager is visible, the user will see progress information on the screen.
- If a problem occurs, Update Manager displays an error message in the main window (previously the error message was displayed only in the logs).
- Software Sources tool can be accessed in the Edit menu (this is another Update Manager improvement).
- The user can define a list of packages for which updates will not be received. Wildcard characters can be used to define groups of package updates the user wants to ignore.
- Faster and more reliable update detection.
- Brand new Upload Manager (mintUpload has been split into Upload Manager and File Uploader).
- Gnome Colors icon theme and the Shiki gtk theme.
- Firefox comes bundled with the Stylish add-on.
- Removed branding from Mint tools
- OEM installation can be launched from the LiveCD boot menu.
- Community editions use their own repositories
- Community editions can pin packages to from the main edition
- Mint tools are more modular
- Added Inxi buttons to xchat

If you would like to get Linux Mint 8 Helena, you can download the Main Edition here and the Universal Edition here.

The differences are:
- The Universal Edition has no codecs, no support for restricted formats and no proprietary components.
- The Universal Edition comes as a liveDVD, not a liveCD.
- There’s an extra item in the Sound & Video menu that lets you launch the installation of all missing codecs via a built-in .mint file
- The Universal edition comes with built-in support for the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese/Br, Portuguese/Pt, Arabic, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Galician, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Norwegian, Japanese, Ukrainian, Romanian, Slovenian, Catalan, Greek, Czech, Slovak, Marathi, Norwegian [nynorsk], Croatian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Hindi, Finnish, Hebrew, Serbian, Belarussian, Basque and Bosnian.

As Clem Lefebvre explained, the purpose of Linux Mint 8 Universal Edition is to “bring a localized live system to non-English speaking users of Linux Mint and to facilitate the distribution of Linux Mint in countries where software patents are enforceable.”



Tags: Linux, Linux Mint, World of Goo

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