This is my first post about a Linux game, but I figured it was worth the time to write about because this game proves that Linux can do anything. If you’ve not heard about Battle for Wesnoth, it’s an excellent turn-based role playing game that’s developed natively for Linux and released open source. It’s a cross between WarCraft and Civilization in the gameplay. It doesn’t have the graphics of either (the open source community is rather poor so far at communicating with graphic artists) but it has excellent playability.

The main character of the game is a young prince who’s just inherited a kingdom but is being hunted by his kingdoms enemies. The first few levels are spent escaping/fighting with enemy armies and learning the basics of economic upkeep and fighting with various classes of characters. Gameplay is from an overhead perspective on a hexagonal-sectioned map. You have to keep track of various different stats for different characters (as any rpg) and there is a focus on fewer, well-managed characters over large armies.

It’s still in pre-beta but it’s very playable. I recommend getting it through one of the following means:
# emerge wesnoth (on a Gentoo system)
# apt-get install wesnoth (on a Debian/Ubuntu/DSL system)
# firefox http://www.wesnoth.org

Nick Myra writes on OS.NewsForge.com about how his main desktop runs Damn Small Linux. DSL started as a pocket-sized CD distro but has evolved into something entirely cooler. As Gary (featured columnist here at Distro Jockey) would probably agree with, Damn Small Linux is as damn powerful as it is damn small.

It can be used to run on a tiny partition on an older computer and can compete with almost any other system for productivity. It can’t actually make the processor go any faster, but it can run programs that together require far less computing to do the same task as other, larger programs. At its base DSL has Fluxbox as a window manager which provides very low overhead for very nearly as much functionality as KDE or Gnome. DSL also comes with a control panel that lets you really mess with your system.

DSL’s control panel is one of its coolest features. It lets you easily start your Web, FTP, or SSH server, back up and restore your LiveCD settings and files, set up and configure your Ethernet, modem, and printer hardware, and more. Of course, you could do all this configuration from the command line, but the GUI makes it so easy. DSL has great support for wireless LAN cards too, including wlanconfig, ndiswrapper, and Prism2 support.

This is the third post in my series on installing Xen. Hopefully this’ll be useful for folks who are either just setting up the Xen Hypervisor into their current Grub installation and new Grub users alike.

Here’s a copy of my /boot/grub/grub.conf:

# this loads the first profile by default
default 0
# wait 12 seconds before loading default
timeout 12
# use a nifty image
spashimage=(hd0,4)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

# in case of a proprietary emergency (which has yet to happen)
title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1


After you’ve saved this file, run:
# grub-install
That should set up your grub installation. If it doesn’t work, try the following links.

Other resources to help you set up Grub for Xen:
Gentoo.org Grub installation documentation
Small Grub tutorial

I got used to Lilo back when I installed my first Linux system years ago. It was Mandrake 7.somthin’ and it was already so complicated for me to get the thing set up that I happily allowed them to give me the default boot loader. Lilo was the default on my next several installations and eventually I began to deliberately choose it.

Now I’m switching to Grub. The Xen Hypervisor requires a multi-boot standard that only Grub can handle.

To install Grub, check out these fine instructions:
Redhat Grub Installation Instructions
Grub 2 Documentation

This is hard. I’ve downloaded the binary package of the Xen Hypervisor (available here) and I’ve started installing it. I’ve had the chance to unpack it and start fooling around and I’m noticing that this is a fine, fine piece of software. Because of that, it’s complicated and therefore it takes some work to get it going.

In January of this year XenSource (the company that makes Xen happen) reported that they raised $6 million in funding. That’s a serious approach to software. Considering the size of this project and the scope of their resources, I imagine this is going to be a show-stopping piece of software. In a couple years no powerful Linux box will be found without it.

A while ago I came into the posession of three old computers. They’re all micro-atx cases that have 500MHz processors, 128MB of ram and a 5GB hard drive. I got them for free with keyboards, mice, and monitors. I wasn’t sure what to do with them at first but after thinking hard for five seconds I had decided their destiny: they would run Linux. Not just any Linux mind you, all possible versions of Linux that can run on them - and the ones that can’t too.

I’ve got them set up in the basement of my house where none of my housemates nor I ever go. They’re sitting on an old workbench with a giant vice clamp on it and to get them connected to the internet I had to run a 50ft LAN cable down my basement stairs. I call this place my laboratory because when I’m in it I feel like a mad scientist.

I’ll be writing reviews of distros from time to time and when you read one you can be certain that I wrote it while in my lab trying wild new things with four computers (my laptop included). It’s funny to think about how excited I get about using these three donated computers when their combined resources are still less that those of my laptop in every regard. Still, I have a lot of fun down there.

Last weekend I finished setting the laboratory up and the first thing I did was reviewed Dynebolic 1.4. It turned out that the PS/2 mouse with no scrollwheel didn’t work on this distro so I had to swap mice. I also prepared (but didn’t write) a review on the Linux Live Gaming Project and Mandrake 10.1.

This laboratory is to a distro jockey what a good ranch is to a real jockey - it’s a place to ride freely. I hope to be able to try out many more operating systems as the days progress, there’s a lot of good stuff out there.

Mplayer is an excellent video player for Linux. It’s plays DVDs and just about any thing else that it needs to - even WMV files. The problem with Mplayer is that it lacks a native GUI. You can play a file with mplayer by typing # mplayer /path/filename but all you’ll see is a small window with no navigation pop up, play until the end of the file, and then close itself.

Kplayer is the solution to that. Kplayer does to Mplayer what Kaffeine does to Xine. Kplayer is a frontend for Mplayer that integrates well into KDE (allowing drag-and-drop of files and compatibility with other KDE apps). It also provides start and stop (and other) controls for multimedia playback.

Kaffeine does this with Xine. Kaffeine is a frontend for Xine that gives Xine total compatibility with the rest of KDE. The new version of Kaffeine that ships with KDE 3.4 also features excellent playlist management.

The big thing that you’ll need to know about these two programs is this: If Kaffeine won’t play something, try it in Kplayer - and vice versa. They run off of totally different multimedia processing engines and they compliment each other nicely - so make sure you’ve got both installed.

I wrote about my first experience with a BSD when I tested the NetBSD 2.0 LiveCD last week. I recall that, for all its functionality, it was a really ugly and two-years-ago operating system. From what I can tell that is not uncommon with distributions of BSDs.

It looks like that’s about to change with PC-BSD. PC-BSD is still in a pre-release version (you can get the 0.5a beta version here) but it seems promising. According to the release specs and the screenshots PC-BSD is capable of running a moden KDE and other software packages.

This is great news for the Linux user who wants greater security or the BSD user who wants to finally get their hands on some decent software.

As a wild guess, I’d say that fewer than 10% of the computing populace regularly uses a command line interface (DOS prompt for Windows folk). It’s now possible to do basically everything needed in normal day-to-day ops, using Linux, without ever once firing up the console.

For migratory Windows birds, this is a good thing. However, for people who are wanting just a bit more out of their computer, and are willing to learn a few simple commands, it’s actually easier to use the CLI in several instances than it is to use the GUI equivalent. I’ll give three easy examples:

1. Adding or deleting a new user.
   In KDE, this requires that you fire up the KDE User Manager, enter the root password (assuming you’re not in root…and if you are, why?) then start pointing and clicking.
   Using the console, you simply type “sudo adduser [username]” and enter, then re-enter their password at the prompt. You’re also given the option of filling in personal info such as name, etc., or can bypass those by hitting enter a few times. Deleting a user via KDE’s User Manager is similar to adding one, and the same’s true with the CLI: type “sudo deluser [username]” and you’re done.
2. Restarting an interrupted download.
   It never fails…you find the program (or distro) of your dreams, hit the old download button and 2k from the end, you get knocked offline, the power goes out, or something else happens to disrupt the download. This is why download managers were invented…but you don’t need a fancy d-load manager with Linux. Open the console, type “wget [url path to file]” and off you go (this assumes you’re online). If your download should be interrupted for any reason, simply type “wget -c [url path to file]” and wget will pick up where it left off. While this isn’t as much an issue (probably) to broadband users, us folk who live in the boonies and can only get dialup find this a godsend.
3. Kicking Nero’s butt
   Everywhere I go, Windows types sing the praises of Nero, a CD burner for Windows. K3b and others have dedicated followings in Linux, and I was initially one of them, until I discovered the CLI command “cdrecord.” I use it exclusively for burning isos now. Instead of all the pointing and clicking required in the various GUI roasters, simply type “cdrecord -scanbus” and note which bus your CDRW drive is on. Usually, it’ll be bus 0,0,0.
   Then type “cdrecord dev=0,0,0 [path to directory containing the file(s) you want to burn to cd]” and hit enter. You can modify the cd burn in various fashions–setting the speed, etc., via other command options (available via “cdrecord –help”), but with a 48 or 52x burner, these are usually not necessary. That’s it.

Regardless of how polished a GUI is, there is always a good reason for a CLI, and good reason to learn a few CLI commands. These are just three more-or-less random examples.

I was trying to let a Windows computer access some multimedia files on my Gentoo laptop recently. I forgot that I hadn’t set up samba server on my most recent installation so I decided to do it and write about it at the same time. This is not a full explanation of how to configure samba, it’s just a way to help you do it as quick as possible.

Getting Samba
For Gentoo users like myself the process of installing samba is just typing:
# emerge samba
For Debian/Ubuntu users:
# apt-get install samba samba-common
For other folks you can either use your given package management tool (Suse: Yast, Mandriva: Rpmdrake, etc.) or just install the rpm directly. You can find an rpm appropriate for your system here.

Configuring Samba
There are some programs built to configure samba for you, but it’s really quite easy to edit the configuration file by hand. With root privileges open the file /etc/samba/smb.conf

My system gave me a default file that looked like this:

[global]
server string = faith
wins support = no
workgroup = SpiritNet

“faith” is my computer name and “SpiritNet” is the name of my workgroup. This much was configured automatically by some Gentoo tool. If you’re file is blank or doesn’t exist don’t worry. You should at least have a file named /etc/samba/smb.conf.example or something like it to look at as an example. Just copy what I’ve got above and change the values to match what you want.

To share a directory you’ll need the following things:

• know the path to the folder you want to share
• know what you want to call the samba share
• know whether you want any anonymous user to be able to save/delete on the share

I’ll share how my smb.conf file looks after I’ve set up one share. It’s a partition mounted as /mnt/z_drive and I want it to be world-writeable.

[x_drive]
path = /mnt/x_drive
read only = no
printable = yes
guest ok = yes


After I save this file I only have to restart samba. This command may be different on your system from mine. Basically all it is is calling the samba program with a space and then the word ‘restart’. I’ll share two possible locations for samba (these are both potentially restart commands):
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb restart
# /etc/init.d/samba restart

This should give you a fully working samba server that people can connect to. This is only a brief overview of getting samba working and configured, but you can get a full instruction manual below:

All about samba (this page can also be optained by typing # man samba).

Late last week, DamnSmallLinux finally made the plunge from beta to full release, with v1.0.1 hitting the servers. I’d been using v0.9.3 for some time, and wasn’t really expecting a great deal of difference, but had decided to make the move as soon as it came out of v1.0rc(x) status. For those unfamiliar, rc(x) is short for release candidate number (x), and indicates that the version is nearly ready for primetime release, just needs a few edges smoothed.

Though I’m running up-to-date hardware, have vast untouched plains of disk space and plenty of RAM for any realistic application, I usually find myself using DSL, though I have remasted the CD (more on that in a moment) and installed it to hard drive.

This is despite the fact that I have top draw distros like SimplyMEPIS, Ubuntu, Mandrake 10.1 to name a few. Of that lot, I only have MEPIS installed on my main box, though my second box has Ubuntu alongside DSL. Why?

First of all is that DSL offers 90% of what I need from a distro, and does it in a trim, no-bloat fashion. My window manager of choice for day-to-day operations is FluxBox–which DSL uses–I spend a fair bit of time using the Dillo and links browsers, and I’m positively addicted to Sylpheed as a mail client, having switched to it 100% for all email accounts.

The main additions I made in remastering were AbiWord, as I prefer a word-processor with a bit more oomph, a couple of games, gnu-utils, xchat and the like.

With v1.0.1 came a menu selection, Apps>>Tools>>Make myDSL CD remaster, which allows you to add to the base DSL distro via apt-get, Synaptic (Apps>>Tools>>Synaptic) or the MyDSL icon on the desktop which shows packages that have been optimized for use with DSL. Simply select the remaster menu item, follow a couple of simple instructions, pop a blank CD in your CDRW drive and voila’! Instant custom LiveCD distro.

For all that I really, REALLY like DSL, I cannot in good conscience recommend it to everyone. It’s not really a beginner’s distro, unless that beginner is either computer-savvy or stubborn enough to overcome the (admittedly small, but significant) learning curve that FluxBox will present a Windows-weary warrior. For people who have little computer background, or extremely low frustration levels, Ubuntu/Kubuntu still strike me as the best option.

Though I do have plans to move on to bigger–not necessarily better–distros, DSL’s probably always going to have a home on my boxes. In fact, the only reason I have either MEPIS or Ubuntu on either box at this time is because DSL is based on the Linux kernel v2.4.26, and I’m in the early-middle stages of installing Linux From Scratch (http://linuxfromscratch.org), which requires kernel v2.6.2 or later, and also requires gcc 3.0+, a feature also missing in DSL, in the interest of saving space.

Linux From Scratch is not precisely a Linux distribution. Rather, it’s an ebook (available for free) that gives step-by-step instructions on how to construct a basic Linux OS from the vanilla source code. There are several reasons a person might wish to do this, all explained in the book’s introduction, but my main reason is as a learning vehicle. While I can claim some knowledge of various distros and a bit more knowledge of such things as window managers, my knowledge of Linux’s innards is sadly lacking, and I freely admit gaping holes in some areas (e.g., networking–a shortcoming that I’m addressing these days, now that we’re a mult-computer family). LFS seems at least as suitable for this sort of masochistic self-tutorial than a stage 1 Gentoo installation (which I shall also be assaying directly). LFS can be purchased, and comes with a CD of the source code needed to compile and construct a Linux OS, or the CD iso can be downloaded free of charge.

If you’re wanting to learn how Linux works, as well as gain knowledge in its commands, this is undoubtably a good way to go. Not necessarily easy, but thorough.

At Gary’s motioning I tried out Dynebolic today. It’s a LiveCD that focuses entirely on multimedia tasks. It’s highly competent at playing, recording, mixing, and other tasks with both audio and video - even on crappy hardware. Read my whole review/distro check of this multimedia Linux distribution.

GCC, the heart of the GNU software movement, has just been released in version 4.0.

When Linux was just beginning it was nothing more than a tiny kernel created by Linus Torvalds. The GNU project is the movement that created all of KDE, Gnome, X11, and the other billions of free and open source programs that Linux users come across every day. There is one program, however, that is truly more important than all of the others.

The GNU project would never have gotten off the ground if they hadn’t deliberately made a compiler to make their code into useable systems. They couldn’t just take an existing compiler, they had to make one from scratch. The started with a very rudimentary thing called GCC which then forked until GCC 2.0 was made out of one of the highly-developed forks. It continued until now we’ve got version 4 as of yesterday or so.

What’s so great about GCC? Well, I’ll only name two things; one old and one brand new:

1. Support of ten trillion languages
   So maybe not quite that many, but from ADA to Java to several kinds of C - GCC is capable of turning nearly any source code into a working program.
2. Super Optimization
   Version 4 has what is referred to as “increased symbol visibility” among other improvements. Basically, the new GCC is able to detect connections between large pieces of code and compile it into a smaller, faster-executing program. This means that in a couple days when I download GCC 4.0 and re-compile my whole Gentoo system I’ll end up with a faster KDE.

The title isn’t what is sounds like, this is a non-dirty website I’m running here. What I’m referring to is a new, excellent post by Sam over at the Fedora Core Blog.

Sam discusses the way that any computer user who cares about making his/her system work well given their particular needs is bound to modify things, destabilize things, maybe even compromise general system integrity from time to time. Despite that, it’s worth it.

A lot of things are broken on my system. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I use Linux because I love technology and want to play with all the latest stuff. Linux for me isn’t about having a low-cost stable system; it is about having a technology testbed. I want to be the one filing the bugs and crashing my system.

I couldn’t have said it better Sam.

The Linux Blog reports on Microsoft’s announcement that the Microsoft Server 2005 will run on other operating systems besides Windows Server. This is huge news and I imagine it’s indicative of Microsoft feeling a change in the winds regarding their share of the server market.

Clete Blackwell of The Linux Blog writes:

…what Linux user would buy a Microsoft product to run on their Linux server machine? Sounds like another way to get more money. If they make a tiny profit off of it, they will keep it. It also makes them sound good. “Hey, I hear Microsoft is not so competetive anymore. They are making stuff for Linux too.”

The success of Open Office is partially due to it’s ability to run on Windows and not just on the open-source favorite Linux. I think MS is making an excellent move not to reclaim a monopoly but to avoid losing the market altogether.

Just today, actually my boss informed me that he’d like to use Microsoft Exchange Server to manage some parts of the business. All of our business hardware is running Linux so I had to tell him we’ll need to look for alternatives.

Well, Microsoft, it’s been a long time coming… but welcome to Linux.

The new hit thing for a Linux distro is to release a LiveCD so users can try out their release without any risk to their system. It’s useful not only for testing a new distro but also for a myriad of hardware testing, computer repair, portability, gaming, and security purposes.

NewsForge has an article on how PCLinuxOS will let you make your own LiveCD. This is an excellent way to get your Linux configuration - just how you need it - on a CD to share with others, use as a backup, or just play around with.

The Linux Live Gaming Project is an excellent example of a super-useful LiveCD. You simply boot the computer and you’re ready for a LAN party. With PCLinuxOS you can make your own and maybe even share your creation with the rest of us. (note: please share with the rest of us).