That abysmal moment when you want to play a little Marathon and your favorite games repository is down.. Some of you may have experience the discomfort of this is late December with GetDeb — and subsequently PlayDeb — went down for the count. Get Deb and PlayDeb had been around for years and has been a staple in the Ubuntu gaming community. Their server crash was severe, and most everything seemed lost. But that was not the case…
Fortunately, we did have an up-to-date backup of the old server at the end. The last days I was busy to get everything set up. The sites are up again and you should be able to browse the packages (none should be lost) as well as to use the repository as usual. If you have problems be sure that “dig screenshots.getdeb.net” outputs “208.113.160.150″. At the moment I am thinking of doing an online survey for Ubuntu 13.04. You can then vote which packages you like and do not want to miss on GetDeb/PlayDeb. This way unpopular packages can be left out of the repository for Ubuntu 13.04. Currently there are 130 source packages in GetDeb and 170 source packages in PlayDeb which is just too much. For the most popular packages I am also planning to get them intergrated in the official Ubuntu repositories directly. Or even better to get them integrated in Debian and let Ubuntu just sync them.
So far, you should be able to use GetDeb and PlayDeb as usual. Let me think about the future…
Well, they certainly left things up in the air a little bit, but for now, go play a little Marathon or maybe even a little Alien Arena. There is nothing stopping now.