So after much wrestling with the idea I've come to the decision that I need to switch to Fedora in order to get full support for my IBM ThnkCenter. I don't know why, but ubuntu has never really taken to it and looking at what the hardware has been approved for it seems all Big Blue knows is Red Hat. They don't even list a Debian compatibility for my pc. I really don't get this, I thought IBM loved us?
In any case I'll hold off on the big move until the new version drops next week. Fedora 9 hits the 13th which is Tuesday of next week. So after that it seems I'll have to figure something else to call this blog, since my advice won't be *-buntu based anymore. Darg's Fedora fartknockers? Hmm...
So my coverage will change but the general idea won't: getting Free Software to work.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
Abandoned dreams
I find myself more and more drawn into the retro movement in my search for quality games. Playing games I haven't played since I was a kid is great fun. It also brings back great memories of a better time in gaming. When games were hard and before it was socially acceptable. Now it seems everyone and their grandmother (literally) is playing games, and the games reflect this mob mentality. But at a time when patent and property rights issues abound, some have simply given up.
It's called Abandonware.
It's a sad example of the times we live in. When companies are so afraid to relent something so simple as the code the games are made with for fear they might actually - gasp - be useful to someone else. I've been pleasantly surprised to play games like Stunts and Warcraft that I used to play back in the day.
How odd that companies like Blizzard and EA can demand so much for their products when they are produced, then simply condone their piracy once it becomes profitable to do so. All the while not having to show what exactly that program is doing, game or not. I suppose they are cautious of someone reworking them and actually making them better. Stunts is a game I could see being great if it were brought up to today's standards. Warcraft (that would be the ORIGINAL) is still a fun game today if simple.
Even more surprising was what led to me finding these two games in particular - the PCLinuxOS Gnome repository. I recently installed the newer distro and found many dosbox games already in the repos.
This was a pleasant surprise but it made me look at game companies in much broader terms. When a company like Blizzard treats something that in reality is a game that few play like a sacred scroll that needs to be buried, I begin to worry about games as a whole. What about the huge libraries of NES and SNES games that Nintendo has most of the rights to? What happens when these companies stop giving a hoot, what then? It's great that they might today, but ask yourself, will they tomorrow? What is their incentive to do so?
In any case, is it really asking too much to release the source for these old games and programs? If they're not being used anyway, they can be given away to others who might. It seems foolish at this point to clutch source code of a 10 year old program. Any project that goes more than a year without work anymore is declared dead by the community. People show up and see no others currently active, and leave. No big deal. (Though it would be nice to have a compiled Nestopia binary - hint hint). Yet companies can keep a project afloat as long as they need to - then, simply abandon it.
It's called Abandonware.
It's a sad example of the times we live in. When companies are so afraid to relent something so simple as the code the games are made with for fear they might actually - gasp - be useful to someone else. I've been pleasantly surprised to play games like Stunts and Warcraft that I used to play back in the day.
How odd that companies like Blizzard and EA can demand so much for their products when they are produced, then simply condone their piracy once it becomes profitable to do so. All the while not having to show what exactly that program is doing, game or not. I suppose they are cautious of someone reworking them and actually making them better. Stunts is a game I could see being great if it were brought up to today's standards. Warcraft (that would be the ORIGINAL) is still a fun game today if simple.
Even more surprising was what led to me finding these two games in particular - the PCLinuxOS Gnome repository. I recently installed the newer distro and found many dosbox games already in the repos.
This was a pleasant surprise but it made me look at game companies in much broader terms. When a company like Blizzard treats something that in reality is a game that few play like a sacred scroll that needs to be buried, I begin to worry about games as a whole. What about the huge libraries of NES and SNES games that Nintendo has most of the rights to? What happens when these companies stop giving a hoot, what then? It's great that they might today, but ask yourself, will they tomorrow? What is their incentive to do so?
In any case, is it really asking too much to release the source for these old games and programs? If they're not being used anyway, they can be given away to others who might. It seems foolish at this point to clutch source code of a 10 year old program. Any project that goes more than a year without work anymore is declared dead by the community. People show up and see no others currently active, and leave. No big deal. (Though it would be nice to have a compiled Nestopia binary - hint hint). Yet companies can keep a project afloat as long as they need to - then, simply abandon it.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
A year and a half later
So here I am trying to breathe new life into my dormant blogger account. It's been a while since I've posted, and while I'm in a much better position to give advice now, not much has changed in the Ubuntu community.
For example, the same ati woes I last blogged about still exist. While ati now offers linux drivers through their site, the binary installers still do not set up the drivers properly. There are a few guides around, like here and here. It can still be quite tricky to uncompress the ati driver into usable binaries and then get the driver properly set up so that the mesa driver is no longer being used.
On the up side, the next ubuntu distro, Hardy Heron, should be coming out (or I like to say "dropping") on this Saturday, the 19th of April. You can always check distrowatch to see when new distros hit. I must admit it's one of my favorite sites to swing by every fews days just to see what's new. I've also found it very helpful in finding the differences between each distrobution and what's new in each release. They keep track of what packages are included in each distro, so you can see what window managers or media players that distro uses or if they have the latest drivers included. Quite a nifty little site.
I hope to actually try and keep up this time around. I've got the crazy idea I might be able to help others and maybe even myself with this. I'm not out to make money, just provide for my family.
Thank you for reading.
For example, the same ati woes I last blogged about still exist. While ati now offers linux drivers through their site, the binary installers still do not set up the drivers properly. There are a few guides around, like here and here. It can still be quite tricky to uncompress the ati driver into usable binaries and then get the driver properly set up so that the mesa driver is no longer being used.
On the up side, the next ubuntu distro, Hardy Heron, should be coming out (or I like to say "dropping") on this Saturday, the 19th of April. You can always check distrowatch to see when new distros hit. I must admit it's one of my favorite sites to swing by every fews days just to see what's new. I've also found it very helpful in finding the differences between each distrobution and what's new in each release. They keep track of what packages are included in each distro, so you can see what window managers or media players that distro uses or if they have the latest drivers included. Quite a nifty little site.
I hope to actually try and keep up this time around. I've got the crazy idea I might be able to help others and maybe even myself with this. I'm not out to make money, just provide for my family.
Thank you for reading.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Installing the right ATi drivers
I was having problems with Ubuntu on the new box. I used the live-cd to shrink my windows NTFS partition the other day using the partition editor (gparted). I had made sure to defrag windows before I did this. After cutting the Hard Drive almost in half (19 and 18 gigs respectively) I was left with a NTFS and a blank partition. I created an ext3 partition (primary partition) and then a SWAP partition (of about 1200 megabytes). I then ran the installer and installed ubuntu rather flawlessly. I had to setup the network card, but everything ran, installed, and booted fine. I booted windows (XP professional) and chkdisk ran. After spending quite some time checking the disk, the system restarted again. Selecting windows through GRUB xp loaded and everything seems to be fine. Wahoo! A dual booter!
So now that I had my main box running both, I had to configure the ATi Radeon 9200 graphics card I had installed. I used easyubuntu to install the only driver I could find, but X kept crashing. The screen would just go black, and I would have to reboot. I even tried switching monitors to no avail. After some searching I found an exellent wiki that is just for setting up an ait card in ubuntu:
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Dapper_Installation_Guide
I had found a post on the ubuntu forums and had to do more searching. It did lead me to sign up for those, so here's the thread for my first post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75378
Hope that info helps.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
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