So! exciting times here at the Blender Institute, today is our very-really-thistimeforsure last rendering day, next to some color grade we need to do still, but then is time to grab those big .EXR files and convert them into friendly DPX’s for the guys at Cineco to do magic with it and turn them into 21312 stills of 35mm chemical glory.

That means we’re getting close to our (real!) Premiere, so in order to help us make some noise, 3D World is widely covering Blender topics on October’s issue, Sintel will be on cover + interview time with Ton (Producer), Colin (Director), and William (Animator), and even BBB got a column in “A list of the all the Best CG shorts out there”

In addition to this, I decided to make some unofficial wallpapers for all of you to enjoy – just click on the links below.

Sorry for the long delay in posting. Been quite busy lately (real life and trying to make ends meet – poor developer here ). Anyways, there’s a new WIP render of the Sintel Open Movie by the Blender Foundation. Remember it’s a work in progress (some bugs in blender build causing some problems in the render).

Anyways, here’s a youtube video of the wip:

Also, two weeks ago, a trailer of the Sintel movie came out:

All in all, it’s an impressive feat for the Blender team considering they are both working on the movie, plus working on improving blender as well!

And here is what you windows guys are waiting for – an installer for the blender 2.5 alpha 2 svn build date 5-28-2010.

Get your windows blender installer build at the ostalks ibiblio mirror now.

So what’s a developer got to do on the lean months?

Accepting odd programming jobs for friends is one way to keep the old noggin active. Learning new skillsets is another thing that you can do as well.

One thing which always helps a lot is coding for open source projects. Why is that?

1. It helps you learn new technologies along the way.
2. Gets you to meet new people and friends.
3. You can add these experiences to your resume

Since many companies are leveraging open source technologies and the demand for these products are increasing, you can have the advantage of being adept and knowledgeable in these departments.

Day One has arrived, and both intel and nokia have released sources and is opening up Meego for development. What is now available? Everything from the kernel to the middleware stack was released today.

The UI Experience Framework will be released later in May; this is when Meego actually goes for it’s first release.

Also, for downloads (images of the base system, terminal only) of Meego for N900, Intel Atom Netbooks and the Intel Atom Handset (Moorestown), they are now available at http://meego.com/downloads

Full details are here.

Presenting arora 0.10.2 rpms on moblin. Fast, lightweight and excellent flash support too (flash seems to play faster in moblin than on firefox).

Get it from the ibiblio moblin repository now.

This will definitely make the news!

Interestingly, The embedded videos which still ran properly, a while ago, now do crash (flash app is still loading though):

I have compiled openssl 0.9.8n dlls on windows, and used them for the arora 0.10.2 stable build. With these in mind, arora 0.10.2 is running as sweet as ever.

You may download the stable binary for windows installer at the ostalks ibiblio mirror

The current version of the windows build of arora (0.10.0) is not the latest version.

Presenting the windows build of arora 0.10.2 – git build version as of march 24, 2010. I myself have compiled it under Qt 4.6.1

Get the installer at the ostalks ibiblio site

Anyways, initial writeup for the draft of mission and scope of the team will be presented to the TSG the meeting after the TSG’s meeting on Wednesday.

I’m still getting the hang of how things are done in meego, but I’m sure I’ll get there soon enough.

Just to let you know what was discussed (at least some of it – had a flakey connection and got cut off on some portions):
1. All apps in Meego repository makes use of official or community provided APIs.
2. If a proprietary vendor has proprietary APIs it will have a proprietary store.
3. Some suggestions were made about splitting libraries into Stable and Experimental/Unstable. Stable is where official APIs and few well supported community APIs are placed. The experimental/unstable stuff is where not well maintained but useful libraries are placed.
4. Apps should avoid forking at all costs. External dependencies on the apps should mostly be Qt based.
5. A possible problem seen would be on how to deal with vendor APIs.
6. lbt (coming from the maemo side, .deb) and th0br0 (Fedora packager, rpm) will be the coordinators/representatives to the TSG for now.

There are other stuff mentioned, but basically all draft – all have to be presented to TSG. Since there is so little info yet on the Build System, all these things will most probably be subject to change in once TSG guidelines for meego emerges.

For those who don’t know, manga is the Japanese equivalent of comics; anime is animation, heavilly influenced by manga styles and typically includes characters with large eyes, big hair and elongated limbs, among other things. What I find amazing with these forms of art is that they compass all subjects, from typical romance, sports, drama, comedy, and other things as well!

If you have some friends that like these kinds of art (I’m pretty sure a lot of people nowadays like anime and manga), and would like to introduce linux to them, why not give them a manga-styled comic that teaches them linux?

Introducing Ubunchu!

This manga is all about the adventures of three school students in a system-admin club learning ubuntu. All the chapters of this manga are presented in a fun way, that any manga lover would appreciate.

The neat thing is, the one promoting linux (or ubuntu) is a girl! Not the guy – he’s a PC user (weird guy, weird guy, boo!)

Don’t worry though, he gets it more or less as the series progresses.

There are currently 5 chapters to this manga. In the spirit of open-source collaboration, these are translated into different languages by volunteers.

Each manga chapter introduces different topics; the first chapter for example, we see how linux has come a long way from it’s command prompt days, to a point where it is now easy to install. Moving forward to chapter 4, we are introduced to licenses. All of it is done in a funny and light way too.

Got you interested? Head to http://www.ubunchu.net/ now and download these chapters for free!