In today's open source roundup: Google may be preparing to release Drive for Linux. Plus: Q*bert rebooted for Android, and will Blizzard finally support Linux users? Google Drive for Linux screenshots Google Drive has unofficial clients available for Linux, but there hasn’t been an official one released by Google. That may be about to change as a couple of screenshots have leaked, according to WebUpd8. Andrew at WebUpd8 reports: The screenshots above are bundled with the official Google Drive Mac client and they first appeared with version 1.18.7821.2489 (I checked the previous version and some random old versions and none contained these screenshots), released on October 30, 2014, which isn’t long ago and it most probably means that Google is testing Drive for Linux internally. So we might actually see an official release pretty soon. Those who want to see this for themselves can download the latest Google Drive for Mac, mount it and look under Google Drive.app/Contents/Resources/lib/python2.7/resources/images/ More at WebUpd8 News of the leaked screenshots got redditors talking about Google Drive for Linux: Tomun: “Coincidentally, today I just started using this: https://github.com/odeke-em/drive[1] and it works quite nicely.” Badwhetter: “Cool, been using Grive, but patiently waiting for an official client.” LubricatorHex: “I doubt the Linux client will ever be released publicly.” Spacerats: “3 years!? they must be going through interns like no other.” God_farts_too: “A little late for me. By the time they’ve made a client for Linux, Google has lost my trust and I feel safer using my own server on a VPS.” More at Reddit Q*bert rebooted for Android Q*bert is one of those classic arcade games that lives on forever. Now a developer has updated it with modern graphics and game play for Android devices. Ida Torres reports for Android Community: Q*bert was named one of the top 3 most successful arcade games of all time (together with Pac-Man and Donkey Kong). The 2015 version is still in its 2D pixel format but now it has “state of the art 3D game-play and graphics” in keeping with the feel of playing the game on mobile devices. It is also optimized for Android TV with gamepad controls, if you feel like playing it on a bigger screen. If you’ve forgotten what Q*bert is about, the titular character jumps on an isometric cube pyramid to convert the color of each block. But now instead of the old squares, you now have hexagonal blocks. But the old adversaries are still there, trying to prevent our hero from fulfilling his mission. There’s Coily, Ugg, Slick, Sam, Wrong Way, and Red Ball, and now they have 3 more joining them to foil Q*bert: Homer, Uppercut, and Treasure Chest. More at Android Community Will Blizzard ever release native Linux clients for its games? Blizzard has made it a point to release native versions of its games for OS X, as well as Windows. But Linux has been left out in the cold. A petition has been set up at Change.org to encourage Blizzard to release native Linux clients. From the petition for Blizzard to support Linux: For almost a decade now, the Linux gaming community have been requesting and requesting and requesting for you to show some love towards us. Sadly you have constantly ignored our requests. Although it is understood why you would want to ignore Linux 10 years ago, it does not make sense today. The Linux desktop operating system has advanced so far over the years to where even the ATI graphic drivers have become quite good. Many times in your forums, your moderators will state that Blizzard will support Linux when the demand is there but you never done any survey’s to verify if the demand is present or not. Valve came to Linux and have never regretted it so come on Blizzard, show that you do care and bring your games to the fast growing Linux desktop. More at Change.org Redditors were excited about the possibility of running native Blizzard games in Linux: Beerw0lf: “Signed. Linux gaming community needs to make more noise.” Mishugashu: “I haven’t played any Blizzard games lately… admittedly probably due to them not developing native Linux clients, and there’s plenty of fun games that do… but, definitely signed. I’m always for the native porting to Linux, regardless if I’m planning on playing the games or not!” Maokei: “I think blizzard have been put on the pedestal way too long, it took em like what more than a year to release a unity engine powered game on android? They managed to screw up diablo 3 spectacularly etc. They way I see it blizzard gets way to much credit.” Espionage724: “Will it improve their revenue significantly, or even enough to make it worthwhile? That’s the main question that needs answering, and I’m assuming since there is yet to be any native Linux clients; the answer is no. Just remember; it’s Activision-Blizzard we’d have to deal with, and not just Blizzard. And Activision will easily not consider Linux a worthwhile platform just because of the reason above. Don’t get me wrong though; I’d love to see native Linux clients of Blizzard’s games (I also signed the petition). But I highly doubt it’ll happen anytime soon if at all.” Pacifica333: “I’ll probably get flamed for saying this, but this is stupid. How does it make any sense that we can require a private company to allocate development resources towards a project that likely won’t see a viable return on investment for them? And even if it would – that is their decision to make, not the public’s. It’s simply asinine. Next thing will be a petition to get Canonical to drop Unity. From a community that is all about freedom, this certainly seems pretty fascist.” Danukeru: “Because simply put, they already build for OSX, atop LLVM. From that perspective, the problem is no longer having a Linux targeted build. The pipelines have considerably converged in the past 5 years. More so thanks to Steam on Linux. It’s simply that providing the same level of customer support would be impossible. And you’d be right. The open-source community, as more and more non-programmers have started using these tools, has become even MORE entitled. In this case, I’m actually paying for a product, so making them aware that they have such market share for my preferences is important. Hell, they patched Warden to be able to avoid getting WINE users B&, so they care for their user base enough.” More at Reddit Did you miss a roundup? Check the Eye On Open home page to get caught up with the latest news about open source and Linux. Technology IndustryOpen SourceSoftware Development