Today, we’re excited to launch the all new Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2 in markets around the world. We’ve seen great momentum already for these products and I can’t wait for our fans to experience them.

When we started on this journey with Surface, we gave people the ability to choose a device that would adapt to their lives and help them accomplish more. As the way we work and live has changed around the world Surface and Microsoft have also evolved. We’ve grown to deliver a full, integrated portfolio of products to help you do more, dream more and achieve more.

We’re a team of passionate product makers, putting our hearts into creating devices, software, apps and features to push you forward. Helping to maximize the ingenuity of our customers, so they can do and create amazing things.

We’re inspired by the artists, scientists, engineers and poets that help to shape our future. Their passion drives us and ultimately leads us to craft the next generation of devices.

Our products, a symphony of technology between Windows, Surface, Office and AI, are designed to amplify your ideas, get you into your flow and let you build what’s in your mind and heart. Like an instrument, our products, our technology fades to the background so you can focus on your craft.

But what does that mean and how does it help you?

When someone asks me that, asks why we would want beautiful devices to fade into the background, I tell them about my daughter Sophia and her piano. How when she plays there is a moment – a moment when she forgets the piano, the pedals under her feet, the bench she sits on, the sheets in front of her – and in this moment of inspiration, of greatness, she’s in her flow. It’s just her and the music. In order for that moment to happen, for her to forget about everything else, the piano must be perfectly tuned, the bench the right height, the music sheets at eye level.

For our customers, Surface, Windows, Office, and the experience they create together is the instrument. An instrument we’ve tuned perfectly to fade to the background, so you don’t have to think about all the little things, you can just get in your flow and capture those moments of greatness, of focus, of inspiration, to make the most of your time.

Get in your flow anytime, anywhere with Surface Pro 6

The first Quad-Core Processor in a Surface Pro comes to life on Surface Pro 6 – an instrument of versatility, portability and power, coming in a gorgeous, all new matte black finish.

We wanted this product to be the device you can bring with you anywhere since you never know when or where your moments of inspiration will strike.

While the refined exterior may look familiar, this is a new generation of Surface Pro, we’ve redesigned the architecture inside the device to deliver astounding power with the 8^th Generation Quad-Core Intel Processor, all while still offering up to 13.5 hours of battery life.

Providing what you need to transition between work life, home life and everything in between no matter where you are. Built with Windows and Office it can handle the powerful desktop apps you need, without compromising the thin and light form factor you love.

Surface Laptop 2 – beauty and power to make the most of your ideas

The blend of beauty and incredible performance on Surface Laptop 2 keeps everything you love about the first-generation form factor with so much more built in to keep you productive and inspired.

With an all new 8th generation Quad-Core processor, Surface Laptop 2 is 85 percent more powerful than Surface Laptop.

Even with all that power Surface Laptop 2 has an incredible 14.5 hours of all-day battery life, incredible display quality, beautiful design and easy portability. The Alcantara® material covering the keyboard draws you in, a perfect tone-on-tone balance with the gorgeous colors. Every detail on this product has been thought through, from the depth of the new matte black finish to the redesign of the thermal system to keep the quiet elegance of the device.

Matte black isn’t the only new finish highlighting the incredible design of Surface Laptop 2. On Monday in Beijing, we also introduced an all new blush finish as an exclusive for the Chinese market.

You bring our products to life

Nothing inspires the team more than seeing the amazing things our customers do with our products. Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2 are available in markets around the world today, and I truly believe that when you have your hands on them, when you experience them for yourself, you will understand what it means to have technology fade to the background, so you can focus on what’s important to you and save time for what really matters.

Availability details:

Available today in Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States.

Updated October 16, 2018 6:36 am

In Part 1 of our series, we got our local Kubernetes cluster up and running with Docker, Minikube, and kubectl. We set up an image repository, and tried building, pushing, and deploying a container image with code changes we made to the Hello-Kenzan app. It’s now time to automate this process.

In Part 2, we’ll set up continuous delivery for our application by running Jenkins in a pod in Kubernetes. We’ll create a pipeline using a Jenkins 2.0 Pipeline script that automates building our Hello-Kenzan image, pushing it to the registry, and deploying it in Kubernetes. That’s right: we are going to deploy pods from a registry pod using a Jenkins pod. While this may sound like a bit of deployment alchemy, once the infrastructure and application components are all running on Kubernetes, it makes the management of these pieces easy since they’re all under one ecosystem.

With Part 2, we’re laying the last bit of infrastructure we need so that we can run our Kr8sswordz Puzzle in Part 3.

Read all the articles in the series:

 

This tutorial only runs locally in Minikube and will not work on the cloud. You’ll need a computer running an up-to-date version of Linux or macOS. Optimally, it should have 16 GB of RAM. Minimally, it should have 8 GB of RAM. For best performance, reboot your computer and keep the number of running apps to a minimum.

Creating and Building a Pipeline in Jenkins

Before you begin, you’ll want to make sure you’ve run through the steps in Part 1, in which we set up our image repository running in a pod (to do so quickly, you can run the npm part1 automated script detailed below).

If you previously stopped Minikube, you’ll need to start it up again. Enter the following terminal command, and wait for the cluster to start:

minikube start

You can check the cluster status and view all the pods that are running.

kubectl cluster-info kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

Make sure that the registry pod has a Status of Running.

We are ready to build out our Jenkins infrastructure.

Remember, you don’t actually have to type the commands below—just press Enter at each step and the script will enter the command for you!

1. First, let’s build the Jenkins image we’ll use in our Kubernetes cluster.

docker build -t 127.0.0.1:30400/jenkins:latest   -f applications/jenkins/Dockerfile applications/jenkins

2. Once again we’ll need to set up the Socat Registry proxy container to push images, so let’s build it. Feel free to skip this step in case the socat-registry image already exists from Part 1 (to check, run docker images).

docker build -t socat-registry -f applications/socat/Dockerfile applications/socat

3. Run the proxy container from the image.

docker stop socat-registry; docker rm socat-registry;   docker run -d -e "REG_IP=`minikube ip`" -e "REG_PORT=30400"   --name socat-registry -p 30400:5000 socat-registry

This step will fail if local port 30400 is currently in use by another process. You can check if there’s any process currently using this port by running the command lsof -i :30400

4. With our proxy container up and running, we can now push our Jenkins image to the local repository.

docker push 127.0.0.1:30400/jenkins:latest

You can see the newly pushed Jenkins image in the registry UI using the following command.

minikube service registry-ui

5. The proxy’s work is done, so you can go ahead and stop it.

docker stop socat-registry

6. Deploy Jenkins, which we’ll use to create our automated CI/CD pipeline. It will take the pod a minute or two to roll out.

kubectl apply -f manifests/jenkins.yaml; kubectl rollout status deployment/jenkins

Inspect all the pods that are running. You’ll see a pod for Jenkins now.

kubectl get pods

Jenkins as a CD tool needs special rights in order to interact with the Kubernetes cluster, so we’ve setup RBAC (Role Based Access Control) authorization for it inside the jenkins.yaml deployment manifest. RBAC consists of a Role, a ServiceAccount and a Binding object that binds the two together. Here’s how we configured Jenkins with these resources: Role: For simplicity we leveraged the pre-existing ClusterRole “cluster-admin” which by default has unlimited access to the cluster. (In a real life scenario you might want to narrow down Jenkins’ access rights by creating a new role with the least privileged PolicyRule.) ServiceAccount: We created a new ServiceAccount named “Jenkins”. The property “automountServiceAccountToken” has been set to true; this will automatically mount the authentication resources needed for a kubeconfig context to be setup on the pod (i.e. Cluster info, User represented by a token and a Namespace). RoleBinding: We created a ClusterRoleBinding that binds together the “Jenkins” serviceAccount to the “cluster-admin” ClusterRole. Lastly, we tell our Jenkins deployment to run as the Jenkins ServiceAccount.

Notice our Jenkins deployment has an initContainer. This is a container that will run to completion before the main container is deployed on our pod. The job of this init container is to create a kubeconfig file based on the provided context and to share it with the main Jenkins container through an “emptyDir” volume.

7. Open the Jenkins UI in a web browser.

minikube service jenkins

8. Display the Jenkins admin password with the following command, and right-click to copy it.

kubectl exec -it `kubectl get pods --selector=app=jenkins  --output=jsonpath={.items..metadata.name}` cat  /var/jenkins_home/secrets/initialAdminPassword

9. Switch back to the Jenkins UI. Paste the Jenkins admin password in the box and click Continue. Click Install suggested plugins. Plugins have actually been pre-downloaded during the Jenkins image build, so this step should finish fairly quickly.

One of the plugins being installed is Kubernetes Continuous Deploy, which allows Jenkins to directly interact with the Kubernetes cluster rather than through kubectl commands. This plugin was pre-downloaded with the Jenkins image build.

10. Create an admin user and credentials, and click Save and Continue. (Make sure to remember these credentials as you will need them for repeated logins.)

11. On the Instance Configuration page, click Save and Finish. On the next page, click Restart (if it appears to hang for some time on restarting, you may have to refresh the browser window). Login to Jenkins.

12. Before we create a pipeline, we first need to provision the Kubernetes Continuous Deploy plugin with a kubeconfig file that will allow access to our Kubernetes cluster. In Jenkins on the left, click on Credentials, select the Jenkins store, then Global credentials (unrestricted), and Add Credentials on the left menu

13. The following values must be entered precisely as indicated:

• Kind: Kubernetes configuration (kubeconfig)

• ID: kenzan_kubeconfig

• Kubeconfig: From a file on the Jenkins master

• File: /var/jenkins_home/.kube/config

Finally click Ok.

13. We now want to create a new pipeline for use with our Hello-Kenzan app. Back on Jenkins Home, on the left, click New Item.

Enter the item name as Hello-Kenzan Pipeline, select Pipeline, and click OK.

14. Under the Pipeline section at the bottom, change the Definition to be Pipeline script from SCM.

15. Change the SCM to Git. Change the Repository URL to be the URL of your forked Git repository, such as https://github.com/[GIT USERNAME]/kubernetes-ci-cd.

Note for the Script Path, we are using a Jenkinsfile located in the root of our project on our Github repo. This defines the build, push and deploy steps for our hello-kenzan application.

Click Save. On the left, click Build Now to run the new pipeline. You should see it run through the build, push, and deploy steps in a few seconds.

16. After all pipeline stages are colored green as complete, view the Hello-Kenzan application.

minikube service hello-kenzan

You might notice that you’re not seeing the uncommitted change you previously made to index.html in Part 1. That’s because Jenkins wasn’t using your local code. Instead, Jenkins pulled the code from your forked repo on GitHub, used that code to build the image, push it, and then deploy it.

Pushing Code Changes Through the Pipeline

Now let’s see some Continuous Integration in action! try changing the index.html in our Hello-Kenzan app, then building again to verify that the Jenkins build process works.

a. Open applications/hello-kenzan/index.html in a text editor.

nano applications/hello-kenzan/index.html

b. Add the following html at the end of the file (or any other html you like). (Tip: You can right-click in nano and choose Paste.)

<p style="font-family:sans-serif">For more from Kenzan, check out our <a href="http://kenzan.io">website</a>.</p>

c. Press Ctrl+X to close the file, type Y to confirm the filename, and press Enter to write the changes to the file.

d. Commit the changed file to your Git repo (you may need to enter your GitHub credentials):

git commit -am "Added message to index.html" git push

In the Jenkins UI, click Build Now to run the build again.

18. View the updated Hello-Kenzan application. You should see the message you added to index.html. (If you don’t, hold down Shift and refresh your browser to force it to reload.)

minikube service hello-kenzan

And that’s it! You’ve successfully used your pipeline to automatically pull the latest code from your Git repository, build and push a container image to your cluster, and then deploy it in a pod. And you did it all with one click—that’s the power of a CI/CD pipeline.

If you’re done working in Minikube for now, you can go ahead and stop the cluster by entering the following command:

minikube stop

a. curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_7.x | sudo -E bash - b. sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

a. cd ~/kubernetes-ci-cd b. npm install

npm run part1 (or part2, part3, part4 of the blog series)

Up Next

In Parts 3 and 4, we will deploy our Kr8sswordz Puzzle app through a Jenkins CI/CD pipeline. We will demonstrate its use of caching with etcd, as well as scaling the app up with multiple puzzle service instances so that we can try running a load test. All of this will be shown in the UI of the app itself so that we can visualize these pieces in action.

Curious to learn more about Kubernetes? Enroll in Introduction to Kubernetes, a FREE training course from The Linux Foundation, hosted on edX.org.

This article was revised and updated by David Zuluaga, a front end developer at Kenzan. He was born and raised in Colombia, where he studied his BE in Systems Engineering. After moving to the United States, he studied received his master’s degree in computer science at Maharishi University of Management. David has been working at Kenzan for four years, dynamically moving throughout a wide range of areas of technology, from front-end and back-end development to platform and cloud computing. David’s also helped design and deliver training sessions on Microservices for multiple client teams.

Comparing Spinnaker and Kubernetes in this way is somewhat unfair to both projects. The scale, scope, and magnitude of these technologies are different, but parallels can still be drawn.

Just like Kubernetes, Spinnaker is a technology that is battle tested, with Netflix using Spinnaker internally for continuous delivery. Like Kubernetes, Spinnaker is backed by some of the biggest names in the industry, which helps breed confidence among users. Most importantly, though, both projects are open source, designed to build a diverse and inclusive ecosystem around them.

Frankenstein’s Monster

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a solved problem, but it has been a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, with companies trying to build their own creations by stitching parts together, along with Jenkins. “We tried to build a lot of custom continuous delivery tooling, but they all fell short of our expectation,” said Brandon Leach, Sr. Manager of Platform Engineering at Lookout.

“We were using Jenkins along with tools like Rundeck, but both had their own set of problems. While Rundeck didn’t have a first-class deployment tool, Jenkins was becoming a nightmare and we ended up moving to Gitlabs,” said Gard Voigt Rimestad of Schibsted, a major Norwegian media group.

Netflix created a more elegant way for continuous delivery called Asgard, open sourced in 2012, which was designed to run Netflix’s own workload on AWS. Many companies were using Asgard, including Schibsted, and it was gaining momentum. But it was tied closely to the kind of workload Netflix was running with AWS. Bigger companies who liked Asgard forked it to run their own workloads. IBM forked it twice to make it work with Docker containers.

IBM’s forking of Asgard was an eye-opening experience for Netflix. At that point, Netflix had started looking into containerized workloads, and IBM showed how it could be done with Asgard.

Google was also planning to fork Asgard to make it work on Google Compute Engine. By that time, Netflix had started working on the successor to Asgard, called Spinnaker. “Before Google could fork the project, we managed to convince Google to collaborate on Spinnaker instead of forking Asgard. Pivotal also joined in,” said Andy Glover, shepherd of Spinnaker and Director of Delivery Engineering at Netflix. The rest is history.

Continuous popularity

There are many factors at play that contribute to the popularity and adoption of Spinnaker. First and foremost, it’s a proven technology that’s been used at Netflix. It instills confidence in users. “Spinnaker is the way Netflix deploys its services. They do things at the scale we don’t do in AWS. That was compelling,” said Leach.

The second factor is the powerful community around Spinnaker that includes heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, and Netflix. “These companies have engineers on their staff that are dedicated to working on Spinnaker,” added Leach.

Governance

In October 2018, the Spinnaker community organized its first official Spinnaker Summit in Seattle. During the Summit, the community announced the governance structure for the project.

“Initially, there will be a steering committee and a technical oversight committee. At the moment Google and Netflix are steering the governance body, but we would like to see more diversity,” said Steven Kim, Google’s Software Engineering Manager who leads the Google team that works on Spinnaker.  The broader community is organized around a set of special interest groups (SIGs) that enable users to focus on particular areas of interest.

“There are users who have deployed Spinnaker in their environment, but they are often intimidated by two big players like Google and Netflix. The governance structure will enable everyone to be able to have a voice in the community,” said Kim.

At the moment, the project is being run by Google and Netflix, but eventually, it may be donated to an organization that has a better infrastructure for managing such projects. “It could be the OpenStack Foundation, CNCF, or the Apache Foundation,” said Boris Renski, Co-founder and CMO of Mirantis.

I met with more than a dozen users at the Summit, and they were extremely bullish about Spinnaker. Companies are already using it in a way even Netflix didn’t envision. Since continuous delivery is at the heart of multi-cloud strategy, Spinnaker is slowly but steadily starting to beat at the heart of many companies.

Spinnaker might not become as big as Kubernetes, due to its scope, but it’s certainly becoming as important. Spinnaker has made some bold promises, and I am sure it will continue to deliver on them.

Surface Hub 2’s light, sleek and intelligent design starts to ship in Q2 2019

Surface Hub 2 enables the power of collaborative work, allowing businesses to unlock the full potential of their greatest resource – people.  As work changes – thanks to the ongoing digital revolution and a shift to non-traditional work spaces – fostering a team-based collaborative culture and spaces designed to enhance productivity and creativity are critical to businesses’ success. 48% of executives recognize the importance of collaboration and are modernizing their workplaces and systems to attract and retain the next generation of talent.

Surface Hub 2 represents the culmination of years of listening to our customers to better understand their needs. Often to better compete, these businesses must modernize their workplaces and systems to attract the best of the next generation.

People loved the original Surface Hub because it brought people together to work and create, but they also asked us for a more beautiful screen, something easier to install and transport, and more seamless integration of software and apps. We’ve taken that feedback to heart and used it to work across Microsoft to transform the creation process for Surface Hub 2 and our two new offerings in the Surface Hub family – Surface Hub 2S and Surface Hub 2X. Today we’re pumped to share more about these incredible collaboration devices.

Lighter, sleeker, and easier to use

We’ve learned a lot from our Surface fans who have been vocal in their appreciation for our meticulously designed products, attention to detail, brilliant touch displays, and cohesive experiences across not only modes of input like Surface Pen, but also across hardware and software.  Surface Hub 2 is gorgeous – lighter, sleeker, and more intuitive than its predecessor, all while being as easy to install as putting a TV on a wall. Paired with elegant mobile stands from our partner Steelcase, Surface Hub 2 can be moved around the room with ease and anchored to a spot with a simple tap of your foot, providing the kind of freedom that’s never been seen in collaborative workspaces before. Now you can have a meeting wherever you choose, helping shift meetings from being passive to active, helping people better engage, create better ideas and drive better business outcomes.

We all remember how we felt when we received our first laptop. For the first time we weren’t tethered to our offices or the computer in our parent’s kitchen. We were free to go where we wanted, write our ideas down whenever and wherever inspiration struck, go write a paper in a coffee shop or create a presentation from the couch while watching our favorite show. Surface Hub 2 brings freedom not just to large screen devices, but also the collaborative process.

Collaborate across the world

In addition to having the convenience of being able to create an anytime, anywhere collaboration space with the transportable Surface Hub 2 stand you can effectively meet with teams from all over the world. If your colleague is hundreds or even thousands of miles away from you, they will feel like they’re in the same room with Surface Hub 2. Meetings sound and look crystal clear in Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business with our improved microphones, speakers, 4K camera, and true to scale video calling.

Intuitive experiences to make your team more productive

Surface Hub 2 seamlessly integrates intuitive hardware, software, and modes of interaction to help people get in and stay in their flow.  With the new Microsoft Whiteboard app, amazing features designed for large touch screens make you feel like you’re at a real whiteboard, but with the added benefit of intelligent ink, the ability to find people, Bing search built in, image stacks, and more. Surface Hub 2 provides a robust whiteboard experience, but your whiteboard can be shared across Windows 10, iOS, and Android devices, so you can jump back into the same brainstorm session anytime, anywhere, from any device.

Surface Hub 2S

Since we previewed Surface Hub 2 in May, we’ve been humbled by the positive feedback we’ve received from the ecosystem. Current and future Surface Hub customers see the promise of Surface Hub 2 and demand for the device is real, which is why we’re so excited to share that we will begin to ship Surface Hub 2S in Q2 2019!

Surface Hub 2S was built for customers who have told us they still want the original Surface Hub experience that they know and have built for, but in a lighter, thinner, more vibrant design. With Surface Hub 2S customers will be able to deploy either an on-premise or hybrid environment and keep the software experiences that they have standardized on with the original Surface Hub. Businesses can also now continue to use Skype for Business on their Surface Hub 2S or deploy the latest version of Microsoft Teams.

Thoughtfully Composed

Looking forward to 2020, we will release updates to the Surface Hub family to enable customers to update to Surface Hub 2X. This includes the ability to tile, rotate, and enable multi user log in. This simple update is enabled by our design of removable processor cartridges, in an easily accessible hardware chassis on the back of the Surface Hub 2. This processor cartridge can be removed, upgraded and serviced over time. The cartridge is what will enable customers to make the switch to the Microsoft 365 powered Surface Hub 2X in 2020.

We are kicking off conversations with our customers about deploying Surface Hub 2 now. For more information on Surface Hub 2, visit www.microsoft.com/surface/business/surface-hub-2.

As with all our devices, Surface Hub 2 was designed to give people a product that will help them create more, do more, and achieve more. With Surface Hub 2 we believe we have created an experience that not only people, but teams will love. Surface Hub 2 breaks down barriers between teammates and will help organizations around the world to elevate themselves with a more modern and collaborative culture. We can’t wait to see how and where our customers use Surface Hub 2 and look forward to sharing more news in the coming months.

Updated October 3, 2018 11:32 am

We live in an era of free games, with very loose definitions of the word “free’. In-app purchases can be the icing on the cake of a great game or the shit at the middle of a shit sandwich; they can be fun cosmetic upgrades, pay-to-win cheats, or something more like gambling than video gaming.

Free stuff is great and all, but have you checked out these awesome card games?

But did you know that there are also games that are genuinely free? There are games that have been created by beautiful, dedicated teams of people for the love of the craft. They are free, really free — free as in America, not free as in beer. No ads. No gold, diamonds, coins, elixir, timers, or hats. They are what was once called “freeware”, and we’re here today to share some of them with you…

Some of the greatest games ever have been freeware. The openness of the Android system has led to many, many freeware games making it onto the Play store. In this article, we look at the cream of the crop of RPG and strategy titles, only a handful of which you can find for free on Apple devices. None of these games have ads or IAP beyond donations, nor are they demos. They are full, free and unlimited.

Pixel Dungeon (Google Play)

The easiest freeware game to recommend (of any kind) is the great Pixel Dungeon. This is a full-featured roguelike made to be controlled on mobile – in one handed portrait mode, no less! It’s got classes, bottomless pits, status effects, secrets, randomly named potions that will set you on fire when you drink them, the whole kaboodle. The graphics are chunky pixels, but they are clear an communicative. The controls are simple, but the gameplay is anything but. You’ll need to balance caution and daring to make it even a few floors in to this dungeon. The desktop version of this great game is paid, but the Android version is donation only!

Roguelike Honorable Mentions:

For a more mind-bending roguelike experience, try HyperRogue, which is set in non-Euclidean space on a hyperbolic plane. Among the granddaddies of roguelikes, only Nethack has a really good mobile implementation.

Battleheart (Google Play)

Android users are lucky enough to have the excellent tactical RPG Battleheart gone truly FTP. Battleheart was one of the earliest big hits on mobile, spawning a couple of likewise well-received sequels. It achieves this success by boiling down classic RPG gameplay into a system perfectly suited for mobile play. It’s entirely battle-focused with very little story, but what battles they are. You’ll lead a four-person team of varying classes, strengths and abilities against a wide variety of monsters with World of Warcraft-style tank-heal-damage strategy. It’s like an MMORPG but instead of forty friends you just need four fingers. You can swap out different class types and experiment with sets of complimentary abilities. It all looks and controls beautifully, smoothly animated with simple line-drawing controls that were born for mobile.

Warfare Incorporated (Google Play)

If you have a craving for Starcraft or Command & Conquer, but no Tiberium in the bank, you are in luck. On Android, Warfare Incorporated has successfully brought classic RTS gameplay to tiny touch screens in the form of a game that goes back to PalmOS of 2003. In this game, you command the forces of a far-future megacorp in its efforts to strip-mine an alien planet (keep in mind, this was developed before we all learned the valuable lessons of James Cameron’s Avatar).

War Inc. especially does a great job of adapting RTS commands to mobile controls. The interface gets out of your way, and simple intuitive taps order your troops around. Its graphics will either tap your nostalgia bone or make you scream at their messy pixels, but nonetheless do a good job communicating the state of the battlefield. There’s a great and extremely well-balanced campaign mode plus hundreds of user-created missions. Multiplayer also works well.

Mindustry (Google Play)

Mindustry has an unusual spin on tower defense that makes it quite a bit more complicated than your typical time-waster. It will remind you immediately of Factorio, especially as your chains of production sprawl all over the map. It’s played from a standard endless/survival formula that will drop you back at the beginning if you lose your base. To the basic TD formula, Mindustry adds conveyor belts that your towers need to keep running and supply chains that you need to keep building more towers. Running these systems efficiently is far more interesting and challenging than merely funneling creeps down corridors and wearing them away by attrition. The game includes a dozen maps and can be expanded with user-made downloads.

Mekorama (Google Play)

For puzzle fans, Mekorama [also on iOS] is a cute navigation puzzler in the vein of Monument Valley, but not quite so mind-twisting. You guide a cute robot around 3D mazes, dragging elements of the geography to make paths. There’s no Escher-esque visual trickery, but that doesn’t mean the puzzles aren’t challenging! IAP are for donations only, and you can make and share your own levels through QR codes! The design is clean and the animation of the robot is utterly adorable. This is one of the very few freeware games available on iOS thanks to Apple’s expensive developer hurdles, so be sure to give it a try and be doubly sure to drop a donation in the collection plate if you like it.

Open Panzer (Google Play)

Open Panzer [also on iOS] is an easy recommend for wargamers. This is a traditional hex-based historical strategy game that has you commanding World War II troops at the battalion level through mission-based scenarios. It builds on the venerable Panzer General II — one of the most classic wargames ever — and has great mobile controls. Just be sure to play the tutorial first. You’ll be commanding and upgrading thousands of different units through three lengthy campaigns of 72 different “semi-accurate” scenarios. It’s a hardcore game, but if you’ve been interested in dipping your toe into wargaming, you could do worse.

Freeciv (Google Play)

Yes, Civilization VI just came out on iOS Universal, but why play that mere demo when you could have an entire clone of the original classic for the price of exactly zero dollars? Freeciv is an open-source game originally on PC that is most similar to the classic Civilization II. If you’ve been living under a rock for thirty years, Civilization tasks you with guiding a civilization through six thousand years of gameplay, from the wheel to nuclear fission. Freeciv is well-implemented on Android, with new touch controls that are WYSIWYG but functional. The AI will provide a challenge, and there are tons of scenarios to undertake as well.

OpenTTD (Google Play)

This is a remake of Transport Tycoon, a business simulation game where you build transportation infrastructure. Okay, that sounds boring you think but then you’ve looked up and you’ve not just missed your bus stop, you’re sitting in the bus mall and the driver is yelling at you to get the hell out. You’ll make your fortune shipping products around the globe through a hundred years of gameplay, from steam engines to maglevs. The Android version is well-done, but doesn’t provide a lot of guidance, so you may want to start on a desktop and them let your capitalist hunger take you to the mobile screen — so long as it is one large enough for the tiny buttons and text.

The Battle for Wesnoth (Google Play)

This is an excellent 10-year-old turn-based strategy game in an elaborate fantasy world. It has always been developed as freeware and it has an unofficial Android version that is free. Unfortunately, not much has been done to adapt the game to mobile controls; it’s essentially just the PC game pasted onto your tablet screen. You will have to deal with dragging a cursor around on the screen to select things, which is cumbersome but not impossible for a turn-based game. The gameplay, however, is worth it, with sixteen extensive campaigns and empires with vast differences in playstyles; Wesnoth is a world you can get lost in.

There is also a paid version on Android and the game has even made it over to iOS.

There are so many great open-source and freeware games around these days I must have missed some great ones, so let us all know in the comments what else is out there. Just remember the rules: no demos, no ads, and no in-app purchases except for donations!

Open source software has become the dominant model for how technology infrastructure operates all around the world, impacting organizations of all sizes. Use of open source software leads to better and faster development, and wider collaboration, and open source skills are an ever more valuable form of currency in the job market. In this article series, we’ll take a closer look at one of the best new ways to gain open source fluency: the Introduction to Open Source Software Development, Git and Linux training course from The Linux Foundation.

Some development experience, as well as some command-line experience, are ideal prerequisites for taking the course, but are not required. The course presents a comprehensive learning path focused on development, Linux systems, and Git, the revision control system. The $299 course is self-paced and comes with extensive and easily referenced learning materials. Organizations interested in training more than five people through the course can get a quote on possible discounts here.

This story is the first in a four-part article series that highlights the major aspects of the training course. The course begins with a general introduction to working with open source software, and explores project collaboration, licensing and legal issues. On the topic of collaboration, the curriculum emphasizes that project collaboration offers some distinct advantages over other kinds of developments models:

• When progress is shared not everyone has to solve the same problems and make the same mistakes. Thus, progress can be much faster, and costs can be reduced.

• Having more eyeballs viewing code and more groups testing it also leads to stronger and more secure code.

• It is often hard for competitors to get used to the idea of sharing, and grasping that the benefits can be greater than the costs. But experience has shown this to be true again and again.

• Competitors can compete on user-facing interfaces, for example, instead of internal plumbing that everyone needs, so that end users still see plenty of product differentiation and have varying experiences.

The course’s discussion of licensing is comprehensive and explains clearly how some open source licenses are highly restrictive, while others are permissive. The discussion also delves into how differing project needs and philosophies can dictate how permissive or restrictive a license should be. Permissive licenses do not require modifications and enhancements be made generally available, as is noted in the the course materials. Prominent permissive licensing examples include the BSD and Apache licenses.

Before launching into some of the Linux- and Git-specific curriculum, the course presents other guidance that is important to observe when working with open source projects The downstream impact of leadership and control decisions is one of these topics. “If the controllers of a project take and do not give back by mentoring and moderating they are limiting what a project can accomplish,” the course materials state. “A good leader listens. Good ideas can originate from many different contributors, even recent entrants into a project. Even though leadership paradigms such as BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) are popular, note the use of the word benevolent.”

Additionally, the course covers the extremely important topic of getting help. This includes how to get help from others and how to access and work with documentation. First, the course considers how to view Linux man pages and then delves into how to use the info utility. Next, it examines how to use the built-in help facilities in many commands. Finally, it offers comprehensive coverage of graphical help interfaces.

Are you unfamiliar with some of these sources of help? The course explains them from the ground up:

• man is the workhorse of Linux documentation as it has been on all UNIX-like operating systems since their inception. Its name is short for manual.

• Info is a simple-to-use documentation system, hypertextual in nature, although it does not require a graphical browser. The documentation is built using the Texinfo system, which as a reader you need know nothing about.

• Whatever Linux distribution you are running, there should be a graphical interface to the online documentation. Exactly how you can invoke it from the menus on your taskbar will vary, but with a little bit of searching, you should find it.

With the groundwork laid for working with open source tools and platforms and comprehensive guidance for getting help, the course then delves into hands-on instruction on topics including working with shells, bash and the command line, and Command Details. We will cover the course’s approach to these important topics in coming installments of this series.

Learn more about Introduction to Open Source Development, Git, and Linux (LFD201) and sign up now to start your open source journey.