Seven Weeks Later, LGP & Its DRM Is Still Down

Last week we reported on the situation where LGP has been without its server for a month and a half after their single server lost its lone hard drive used to host the Linux Game Publishing web-site (along with the LGP-owned Tux Games and Happy Penguin web-sites), their online store, and their Digital Rights Management platform for their Linux games. LGP didn't keep around any recent backups and this server was not mirrored but just running with an off-the-shelf Serial ATA hard drive that evidently failed and then additionally suffered from firmware corruption, chemical degradation, and file-system damage, according to Michael Simms, the CEO of LGP.

We're now into the seventh week of this ordeal and the last official update from LGP posted to their text web-site (we also have yet to receive a response to our LGP emails) was last week.

As of Nov 15th, we have begin database reconstruction. As there was significant filesystem damage, this will take a while, as we need to manually sanity check the database records, and there are a lot of them. We still hope to have things up and running this week.

Well, if you didn't notice, they are still as dead as they were at the beginning of October when the crash occurred. Some are even beginning to wonder whether Linux Game Publishing will ever return, seeing as their fate has already been questionable prior to this catastrophic failure that has only led more people to lose faith in this once-fledging company that's ported a number of games to the Linux platform.

Sadly, things have also been quiet on the side of Ryan "Icculus" Gordon who has also ported many games to Linux in the past. Hopefully though more confidence will be restored to Linux gaming once Valve releases their Steam Linux client, which is still expected to happen. Until then we at least have Unigine's OilRush game.