I’m excited to see that Quake IV will have Linux support via a client patch within a few weeks (the game went gold last week).
You have to love iD Software for doing the right thing – whether it’s Linux clients or GPL’ing the source of their games when they are done with them.
Though the PC Gamer review score of 70% is a little worrisome.
But it’s Raven and iD, and I love both studios for their quality work.
I upgraded Ubuntu on my laptop from Colony 3 to Preview 1. I’m finally wireless again – it’s something to sit on the couch in front of the TV and surf (and blog). I needed to get everything running for my trip this weekend so I can blog the LAN party and upload the pictures in real time to Flickr.
My wireless settings for Centrino weren’t working on Colony 3, but a quick apt-get upgrade and double checking my ESSID and WEP and everything is up and running again.
What a change from Hoary – getting Centrino support was a bear and then some. From upgrading the firmware and the drivers, this time it was just a matter of activating it.
Now I have to find the instructions somewhere on the net to get the pretty blue light working again when the wireless is on. 🙂
Seb Payne reviews SUSE 10 OSS so you don’t have to. More of a mini-review, really, but it hits the good points.
YAST support is so-so and GNOME feels unfinished. One of the things that has driven me nuts about SUSE in the past is it’s KDE icons in GNOME – which it still retains.
Seb Payne is a Hula developer, and has been bouncing back from Ubuntu to SUSE and back again. Like Seb, I’m sticking with Ubuntu.
This week’s updates to the upcoming Breezy Badger release contain an “uh-oh”. The Ubuntu team has changed some of the default GNOME artwork, specifically replacing the GNOME foot with an Ubuntu logo.
Old Ubuntu taskbar:
New Ubuntu taskbar:
I can’t say I’m very happy about it. Sure, it’s extremely minor. But one of the things I love about Ubuntu is how close they’ve stayed to GNOME. Re-branding bits of it I can see, but I struggle with this one. The taskbar, to me, feels like it should be off limits.
I signed up for an account at Last.fm and downloaded and installed the XMMS plug-in. (I manually downloaded the plugin from their site, and then thought to check Synaptic. Sure enough, it was in the Ubuntu repository!)
It’s pretty cool so far – after listening to only two or three different artists it already had Weezer at the top of the recommended list for me, and I’m a huge Weezer fan. It will be really interesting to see it when it really kicks in with other users in addition to just figuring out my listening habits.
If you’re really curious about my musical tastes, you can see my Last.fm user page here.
I was taking a peek at WordPress.com (more on that in a minute) and it showed one of the top hosted blogs there is the Ubuntu weblog.
It already has some nice tips and tricks posted (like the bash command append). I’ll definitely be adding that to my blogroll.
WordPress.com is similar to Movable Type – hosted blog solution for users who don’t want or have a server to host their own blog on.
I had mentioned in my Colony 4 upgrade post some of the problems I was having. It turns out the icons weren’t appearing because I had a custom theme chosen. Choosing Clearlooks set everything right again, though Ubuntu seems to have changed the Tomboy icons in the panel and in the Applications menu.
Doing an apt-get upgrade after getting home from traveling resulted in 24 hours of panic. Upon upgrading, my networking stopped working. It seems I wasn’t the only one with this problem, but thankfully one of the posters in that thread mentioned how the upgrade seemed to have stopped half way through. Going to a terminal and doing another apt-get upgrade and a reboot fixed the problem, thank god.
Overall, I’m still very happy with Breezy Badger. I’m waiting for the X.org packages to get a bit more stable as it seems I upgrade them almost daily and then I’ll get my monitor and ATI drivers working properly.
Just a few weeks from Breezy Badger going final!
I upgraded my main computer with Ubuntu’s Hoary Hedgehog release from May ’04 to the latest version of testing (Colony 4) Tuesday night. I wanted to perform the upgrade with the release of GNOME 2.12 Wed., and Breezy Badger about a month out.
I used apt-get to perform the install, and considering it’s not even to preview version, some things went right and some things went wrong.
The Good:
Updated my /etc/apt/sources.list and replaced all instances of “Hoary” with “Breezy”
It took about 20 minutes to install and upgrade, had a few instances where I had to force (-f) the packages
The Bad:
ATI binary drivers aren’t in Breezy yet
My xorg.conf file is pretty messed up. My original Hoary xorg.conf included the actual scan lines for my Dell 2405 monitor. I ran through the manual setup script and removed one bad resolution (1920 x 1440) and am using DRI to draw the desktop. At least I get to the desktop to that way, though I currently have no 3d acceleration.
The Ugly:
My icons are pretty messed up – I’ll post a screenshot tonight. Including icons on the panel (Tomboy specifically) and on the desktop.
I keep my desktop clean of icons, with the exception of my Samba and SSH links to my remote servers. Those icons are messed up, as is Nautilus, including the new spatial tree view.
Overall, GNOME still feels snappy, even in DRI mode, and I’m fairly excited about some of the new features, especially the spatial tree view in Nautilus.
I’ll have to agree whole-heartedly with Jeff Waugh on this one: Reampsire!
Here’s a Linux company who went after Microsoft with their first name (Lindows), then took Microsoft’s money to the tune of $20 million to change it, going after a project that was more dissimilar than they were when they were called Linspire.
And then, to top it off, the article itslef is belittling and insulting to other Linux distributions. No matter how many flamewars go on at any given time in the Linux community, there is always some respect between distributions and it’s users. Because you’ve made the right choice and that choice is Linux.
Yet Linspire:
The name Freespire, however, did create some confusion in the short time it was used. The name implies a “free” copy of Linspire, which of course it is not. The very things that were taken out of Linspire for Andrew’s project are in fact some of the very things that make Linspire, well…Linspire. One of the main differences between Linspire and other Linux distros (Mandriva, Ubuntu, MEPIS, etc.) is that Linspire does include a lot of legal and paid-for 3rd-party licenses for things like mp3, Java, Flash, Quick Time, Windows Media, Bitstream fonts, Real media, music, etc., and this is all pre-loaded, tested and ready to use. Take all that away and you don’t have Linspire, you have something more like other Linux distros. So you see, the term Freespire (free + Linspire) is actually an oxymoron and would be a term like VanillaChocolateCake, where you take out all the chocolate.
Andrew has decided to change the name of his project to ‘squiggle’ to avoid any confusion.
The only true “Freespire,” would need to be a FREE COPY of the real LINSPIRE.
I’ve been researching this for years, and waiting for the right moment, and that moment is quickly coming in to focus. That moment will entail buying all of the parts for a Home Theater PC and installing MythTV said HTPC.
What is MythTV, you ask? It’s a software program for Linux distributions, that manages all the media – TV recording, DVD playback, DVD ripping, burn TV to DVD, music, weather and more.
Here is one man’s way to build a $500 MythTV PC. I’m thinking mine will be a bit beefier, with a better processor, home theater looking case, more memory and much more storage.
More to come in the coming months.
