Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts

Monday, July 24, 2006

Quote : Linux vs Windows

Came across an interesting quote:

If you face problems in Windows, reboot. If you face problems in Linux, be root

Courtesy: Jimmy Louis

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Age of Empires III .. Can't wait to lay my hands on

According to AoE III homepage, the big daddy of Realtime Strategy Games is coming. Age of Empires III. It will have full 3D graphics realistic water effects, shadows, and terrains. The screenshots at this site are really amazing. Whoever watched this site, vowed to buy the game as soon as it is launched. Unfortunately, the site does not mention the release date (it says, latter half of 2005).

AoE-III is looks very different compared to its ancestors. We don't have to manage iron and bronze civilizations. It tells the story of European and American people of 1500-1800 AD. AoE III introduces the concept of the Home City, the city which grows with your progress and supports you by sending ammunition and military reinforcements. This somewhat goes inline with Caesar III, where you can borrow money and food from Rome. And, it seems the combat animation and AI are drastically improved. The building destructions and infantry deaths are rendered on the fly to generate unique animation each time. I hate to play salesman for M$. But, I can't help it after seeing the site. I can't wait to play it.

I am just wondering why such games are not being developed by the open source community. I am aware of only Quake and its siblings (FPS games) available in Linux. Are there other games being developed for linux ? If not, why ? Hackers and nerds are supposed to the best gamers, aren't they ? Then, why this dearth of linux games ?

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Ubuntu Hoary LiveCD Experience

I tried Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary HedgeHog) Preview LiveCD on my T42 last week. First experience with a LiveCD. I was in for in surprise.. Please read on..

Looking at the new features and apps coming with it, I was anxiously waiting to get the new Ubuntu release, strangely named Hoary Hedgehog. I already have a system running Warty, which am very pleased about. It is so easy to get new apps for it and there are lots of howtos available if you want to try out a new one. I was very not brave enough to dist-upgrade it to a probably unstable hoary. Then I came across the concept of LiveCD which will run the new release without touching my harddisk.. WOW.. This is the one for me..

I downloaded the LiveCD iso and burnt it. Booted my T42 Laptop with it. This was my first experience with a LiveCD, so did not know how it was going to behave. The initial stages of the bootup was simillar to an installation CD. Was very tempted to stop the procedure lest I downloaded the wrong CD. But, after asking the keyboard layout stuff etc., it detected the various devices and proceeded to start X.

It started a gnome session without any problems. Now my T42 was running linux kernel 2.6.10 with Gnome 2.10 instead of M$ W2K, that too without touching my harddisk.. wow, isn't that great ? I want to know how it is really done. Mapping /dev/hda to memory ?? :-).. I should read on that. Coming back the main topic, the various apps it included was Firefox 1.0, Thunderbird 1.0, OpenOffice 1.1.3 etc. The openoffice suite was not the latest (1.1.4 was out in dec ). But with OpenOffice 2.0 release around corner, it is not a major problem. I am sure Hoary will be updated when Sun confirms its stability.

The major disappointments were the absence of Tomboy and Beagle. The two new kids on the block powered by Mono, Novell's implementation of .Net. I am using Tomboy in my Warty machine to manage my notes. It was not in the liveCD. Could get it from the universe tree and install it, but could not manage it to run. Absence of beagle was a real disappointment. I was not able to run beagle in my current machine even after spending countless hours of recompiling the kernel, tweaking inotify etc.. So I was really waiting for a stock version of it which just ran at the click of button. sad.. :-( it was not there. Hope, they will include it in the final release.. (But I heard they have frozen the feature list long ago. )

But, on the whole, the entire liveCD experience was nice. The concept of it itself, charms me. It is really wonderful idea to safely experiment with a new release or a new distribution. Hope others are listening.

Hey, one more thing.. I am posting this from my LiveSession.. :-)

Friday, March 04, 2005

How to say "Linux"

Is it Linux where `i` is pronunced as in "pit" or Linux where `i` is pronounced as in "sign" ? The argument goes on.. People swear by what they use. But which is the correct one. As the name of this widely used OS is derived from its author's name, lets here from him what he has to say on this..Here is the sound file that used to come with the "sndconfig" utility.. It says Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux!. Here are the files. WAV MP3. I think this settles the argument, but people are just incorrigible. :-)