For those who haven’t heard, Linux runs games nearly as well as Windows does. In fact, if you’ve got a good driver for your video card and even semi-stable video acceleration, then your system might run games even better.
If you’re looking to find great 3D action games for Linux, I recommend first checking out Unreal Tournament and all the other stuff that Loki Games has released.
The Somers, N.Y. based software group also said it is expanding its own developerWorks Web site with more resources including training in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) a popular open-source programming language for creating Web pages. and other popular technologies. It is also working with Zend Technologies on a new developerWorks subsite devoted to PHP.
PHP has long been regarded as the ideal combination of ease of use, speed of development, durability, and integration for running web applications on a linux server. It’s also been popular to run PHP on IIS but definitely less so than on Apache. For IBM to support it is a huge mark toward greater web applications
In a report by The Register, the update available to Firefox contains something that is not only unnecessary, but harmful to the internationalization of the world’s DNS systems.
The new Mozilla Firefox release has many great updates and improvements. There are many things about system integration and proper file permissions handling that are definitely useful additions. However, there’s been criticism about one update that removes the ability to use URLs of different languages. This might help to avoid some spoofing, but it’s a step back for localization and de-Westernization.
The Register writes that the ICANN and CENTR have publicly scolded the Mozilla Foundation for this move. The process of removing English as the sole language of the internet is important for all who care about unity or even fairness.
The world’s registrars and registries didn’t agree. CENTR - the Council of European National TLD Registries - called Mozilla’s post a “hasty ill-considered response”. Centr represents “over 98 per cent of domain registrations worldwide” and “believes such strong reactions are heavily detrimental to the effort to introduce non-English languages and scripts to the internet, and could have lasting repercussions on the ongoing effort to internationalise the DNS”.
From this article :NewsForge | The GIMP at a crossroads, it seems that the CIMP (the linux answer to Adobe Photoshop) might need to be completely overhauled in it’s GUI and have some of its features removed and developed into separate tools.
The GIMP has always been too difficult for me to work with. It clearly has a lot of power in it, but that power has been unaccessible to a man who’s used to Photoshop. Here’s an excerpt from the newsforge article about this:
It is fair to say that the GIMP urgently needs a sleek, modern, and user-friendly look that complies with current interface standards. This is all the more important since other open source apps (e.g. Scribus and Inkscape) are already moving in that direction. Sharing a unified look and feel with them would make collaboration smoother from which ultimately, all programs could benefit.
I have heard about Gentoo a few times, but I always wrote it off as an unnecessary distribution until today. Thanks to reading the Gentoo ‘about’ page (Gentoo Linux — About Gentoo Linux) I’m beginning to realize that Gentoo Linux might be my next distribution to try. In fact, maybe sometime next week I might switch over. If I do I’ll keep y’all posted on how that works. Here’s one of the things that really hooked me from the Gentoo site:
Thanks to a technology called Portage, Gentoo Linux can become an ideal secure server, development workstation, professional desktop, gaming system, embedded solution or something else — whatever you need it to be. Because of its near-unlimited adaptability, we call Gentoo Linux a metadistribution.
In Eric Clapsaddle’s Article A Linux Island in a C:\ of Windows, Part 1 | Linux Journal he discusses how to use Linux at work without buying any new hardware or trying to dual-boot anything. VMWare is a handy program that simulates a computer within your computer, so you can have a whole different PC running in a window on your desktop. The best part of this article is one of the comments: (by Paul Archer)
Repartition your drive and install Linux as if you were going to do a standard dual-boot setup. Then run VMWare under Windows and point it to the Linux partition. Now when you’re ready to switch to Linux as the primary OS, you can boot to Linux and setup VMWare on Linux to run Windows.
With this setup, you have the ability to access both OSes from either OS. And SuSE has a system profile switcher that would come in really handy for running Linux under VMWare and then switching to running natively.
In a late episode of Linux Today there’s a reference to “SCO’s ‘death spiral.’” The cranky bastard of open-source is finally biting the dust.
excerpt:
How the mighty have fallen. From an early Linux advocate to open-source pariah, SCO Group, under the leadership of bellicose CEO Darl McBride, has turned into nothing but a lawsuit and a prayer…”
The guy at torncurtain.com is dealing with losing ~20GB of music while swapping hard drives. It sounds like he lost it for good because he didn’t post anything about the recovery process, but the moral of his story is that upgrading to a 200GB drive is still worthwhile.
Does anyone run more than three hard drives under linux? If so, could you post the details in a comment so we can all check it out?
If you’re thinking of setting up a webserver that runs linux (and why would you run anything else (besides BSD)) here’s a guy who’s making a server that runs Gentoo. If you’re in the process of deciding which linux distribution is best to run a server or if you’re interested in running Fluxbox on a server, here ya go: My First Linux Server: Setting Up Gentoo
The Linux Mafia has put out a report on running serial ATA (SATA) on Linux. If you’re running serial ata (SATA) on Linux or trying to run SATA on Linux, then you should check this page out.
Good excerpt from the page:
There is no such thing as a distribution or its installer (generically) “having SATA support” (or not). Please send anyone speaking in such terms to this page. (Some SATA chipsets have been supported since practically forever, as their programming interfaces are unchanged from PATA predecessors. Others are brand-new and require new drivers from scratch.)
Here’s a web page that is absolutely no help to me. Still, I recommend checking it out just to see how a detailed help page looks. This guy has what he calls the Linux Hardware Problem and Solution Page which does precisely one thing: It lists the voltage and some other setting requirements of a specific motherboard so you’ll know how to compile your linux kernel to work with that motherboard. This guy’s brilliant, but this page is useless to all but four people.
I give this example as a way to illustrate how difficult it is to collect really useful data into a Linux help page. You can either be too broad and help no one, or too specific and help just one or two people. I think this is why forums like the one at LinuxQuestions.org are important because it collects the sum of all the knowledge of it’s visitors, whether newbs or pros and selects just parts of that knowlege to answer specific questions. In my opinion this is a much better way to run a help site. Not to knock the guy at the first link - he wasn’t going for a comprehensive page.
Praise the Lord for the Bittorrent network. If you’re not familiar with the Bittorrent protocol, you should check it out the next time you need to distribute a lot of data to a lot of people. In my opinion the single greatest use of this protocol is for exchanging full copies of (open source) operating systems. I found Suse 9.2 in DVD format so I don’t have to waste five CD-Rs each time it’s released anymore. Also, I can take just the one disk with me on the road in case I need to do any emergency installs.
I’m also getting the bootable DVD of Mandrake Linux 10.1. I’m having some issues with the ipw2200 package crashing my Dell 600m and I’d like to see if I can get it running a little better with a different distribution. It’s not that the distro has anything to do with the package software, but the installation of a device driver is so complex that I’m still far short of understanding it.
For those of you who are interested in the Bittorrent network, I recommend Azureus. You have to use your browser to find the *.torrent files (they’re pretty small in size) but you’ll need different software for downloading the real file, and for that Azureus can’t be beat. Named after the poison dart frog (how cool) it runs on virtually every operating system (it’s runs in Java) and it’s fast, secure, and even pretty. It’s a great example of how open-source code can run really smoothly.
I know this is out of context for this site’s regular theme, but there’s something cool that you might want to check out if you’re into RSS feeds or data aggregation or any of that. I’ve altered a WordPress RSS Aggregator to work with my version of WordPress (still on 1.2.2, waiting on the guys at Cpanel).
What I’m doing is running an experiment on whether a site can be made entirely out of aggregated (combined) entries (with the respectful links to the respective authors) automatically. I’m not doing any posting on it, I’m just letting it run to see if it can eventually provide any useful information.
So if you want to check it out, see the Stock Market Watch
I don’t really know about the ethics involved here, so if anybody wants to toss this idea around and get back to me I’d appreciate it.
Tim Miller Writes that sometimes, Linux is hard. Amen Tim. This article was written in the middle of trying to compile a 2.4.20 kernel with headers from the 2.4.25. I’m not sure why he was surprised that that situation cause him problems, but then I’m also not sure how nerdy one must become to attempt to not only configure your own kernel, but attempt to directly mismatch kernel pieces. This guy is crazy enough to get a salute from Linux is Hard.
I’ve found an article that puts in in clear terms that Linux is hard, Windows is easy but this guys also sorta misses the bigger picture. He says that Linux is mostly just good for large companies because you have to write your own software to take full advantage of the open-source concept.
I admin that writing your own code is a great way to participate in this technological revolution, but open-source is the doorway to opportunity for many people, not just for the elite coders and those who employ them.
It’s true that small companies would be more likely to lack some of the programming skill of larger companies, but the licensing fees on software that are pocket change to the big guys can really impact others. A small business can put in a Gentoo disk and start using Linux immediately. They can have full access to all the necessary accounting, office, and communication software that they could possibly need.
So yes, it helps to be able to write your own software, but open-source is good for the beginners too.
(Case in point: this article was written on a Suse box with Mozilla Firefox and served off of a RedHat server using PHP, Apache, and Mysql.)
This guy has it right. He’s got a grasp on the difficulty of Linux that still escapes many. Wait, no, nobody actually disbelieves that Linux is hard, but this guy is definitely in touch with reality.
His article is from a long time ago (back in 2001) but it’s as timely as ever. It’s an example of how most first-installs of Linux go: install slowly, get the configurations wrong, install again immediately after the first time, get things mostly correct, go crazy looking at a command prompt, switch back to Windows.
It’s becoming a very common story. My advice to anyone who feels this is familiar is this: give up when you have to, but try again soon. At least try the next version of the distribution you tried - things always get a little better with each release.
One of these days we’ll have a version of Linux that’s as easy to use as MacOSX, until then we’ll take the free stuff at it’s full cost.