The quest for the simple farm life has experienced a boom recently, both in the media and in computer games (e.g., Farmville), which allow those of us who haven't moved to farms to still grow lettuce in the city, keep bees, or at least care for virtual sheep, pigs, and wheat fields.

The Czech game developer Hammerware produced a 3-D real-time strategy game called Family Farm back in 2011 and won a national award for it. Now the game's successor, Goodfolks, has hit the market. The new game is different in many ways, but it still runs natively on Linux thanks to the open source engine Ogre3d (see the "Installation" box).

Intel users, however, are out of luck because Goodfolks, like its predecessor, runs only on AMD/ATI and NVidia graphics cards with their proprietary drivers. The "Family Farm vs. Goodfolks" box describes the main differences between the two games.

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