Archive for the Category "Linux"

Finally got my turn to try out Jolicloud, a “cool new OS for your netbook“. I learned about it several weeks ago and it took quite a while for me to get a invite.

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A new toy to add to my collection, SpaceNavigator.

Put some extensive testing into it the past day, installed it on Ubuntu 8.10, MacOS and Windows Vista 64bit.

My initial reaction is, wow. It really shows they put a lot of effort into making it work where ever one might need it. Ubuntu needed a bit of configuration, as 8.10 has this hotplug Xorg driver that gets in the way. Then just a regular install and it works with a updated Blender.

The configuration tools are the same throughout platforms and usability is also identical. Trough the device depends on the applications use of it for OOTB functionality, it also has some individual program configurations.

The SpaceNavigator itself has absolute positioning, although it registers as a relative positioning device (that makes linux use it wrong without drivers). Phisically its a big heavy metal ring with plastic/rubber controol ends. The metal is there to keep it grouned while you use the up/down axis. Rotating it left/right works to about 5 degrees and about double that for all the other axes.

The thing I disslike about it is really something I fealt before with the graphics tablet but didnt mention. The bright blue circual light. When I leave my pc standing for some time, monitor turns off and the room turns blue. (not as bad as with the pulsating bamtoo tablet but non the less brings alot of unneeded attention to itself)

The best use I found for it is Google Earth and Blender. Worth the 60$ ?

Creating a kiosk environment.
The tools:

• Touchscreen Monitor

The requierments:

• Firefox 3
• Linux
• Non-exit-able
• Onscreen Keyboard

As you might expect, I tried everything.

R-Kiosk. Perfect.

A inline javascript Keyboard. While it did what was needed, it fails on forms that are on the bottom of the screen and in Iframes. Good side: Language was dependant on the page’s language. But Fail.

xvkbd. While I did manage to place it on top of Firefox and lock it so people cant close or edit it, and change their language.. it was annoying to do so. Moving it around the screen more so. Porting it to win32 impossible. Fail.

Ok, lets try a different aproach.
http://stlouis-shopper.com/~jtjsoftware/software/vkeyboard.xpi is a firefox Addon I found. A simple tweak made it work on Fx3. Here is what I made. The first step in porting the app, is thus in bad shape. ~Win.

If there is enough interest in such a plugin for Fx3, I myself and the original author will continue to work on it. A lot of things are already on my mind that I want to do with this project. Suggestions ?

Image by via CrunchBase

I’ve found myself trapped on a Windows Vista environment for the next two weeks. The reason is that I recently bought a new PC and while installing OpenSUSE I realized the next mayor version is due in less then a month so I decided to stick with the then installed Vista Ultimate 64bit to avoid the hassle of upgrading the distro. That would also give me a opportunity to get some insight on the capability of the hardware using the operating system the accompanying software was written for.

Read the story after the jump.. (more…)

How hard can it be to install a app for everyone to use, BlueHost ?!

Well, in any case. This is how to do it yourself ( source ):

cd ~
mkdir src
cd ~/src
wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/apache/apr/apr-util-1.2.12.tar.gz
wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/apache/apr/apr-1.2.12.tar.gz
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz
wget http://www.webdav.org/neon/neon-0.25.5.tar.gz
tar -xzf apr-util-1.2.12.tar.gz
tar -xzf apr-1.2.12.tar.gz
tar -xzf subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz
tar -xzf neon-0.25.5.tar.gz
cd ~/src/apr-1.2.12
./configure --prefix=$HOME LDFLAGS="-L/lib64"
make
make install
cd ~/src/apr-util-1.2.12
./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-apr=$HOME LDFLAGS="-L/lib64"
make
make install
cd ~/src/neon-0.25.5
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=$HOME LDFLAGS="-L/lib64"
make
make install
cd ~/src/subversion-1.4.6
./configure --prefix=$HOME --without-berkeley-db --with-zlib --with-ssl LDFLAGS="-L/lib64"
make
make install


I Bought a Wacom Bamboo Fun Small Graphics Tablet a couple of days ago.
Wanting one for quite some time now, I decided to go and buy it on-line. And after 3 days, it came all the way from Germany .

I didnt even try running it on windows/mac before I plugged it into my ‘box running OpenSuse 11. First thing I notice: Its already working. Kindof.  It’s got relative tracking and the pad/buttons dont work.

How i got it running and some pics, after the jump. (more…)

Image via CrunchBase

Spore, the multi-genre “massively single-player online game” by Maxis was succesfully tested on Linux trough WINE. The actual video after the jump.

Both the PC and Mac versions of the game will feature the full experience of cell through to space with editors for designing creatures, buildings, and vehicles. Spore for the Mac will be made possible through TransGaming‘s Cider Portability Engine, with experience gained from the past EA Mac titles.

Also, a side affect of the Cider port, its cousin project WINE has all the benefits. That also brings up the question why didn’t Maxis go and release the title under Linux.    (more…)

Image via Wikipedia

Since I am a big fan of the Half-Life series, I went and picked up Half-Life 1 Anthology ( Team Fortress Classic, Half-Life: Opposing Force, Half-Life, Half-Life: Blue Shift ) yesterday to play the original just like I did about 8 years ago.  Or so I thought.

My Inspiron 1525 is where I installed the game. A quite modern piece of equipment, thus more than capable of running HL1. But alas, under Vista, the resolution is limited to only 1024*768 (or smaller.) The game doesn’t go into fullscreen and it runs terribly slow. Changing settings is futile.

But I didn’t give up so fast. I was quick to boot my workstation and just missing the boot screen to go into WinXP, I decided to try my luck under my favorite OS openSUSE GNU/Linux. So the first thing to do was to install Steam onto wine: wine msiexec /i SteamInstall.msi etc.. then installing HL1 trough steam. Steam itself is slow on my P4 1.6GHz 512mb GF2MX, but it gets the job done.

I have to note how little trouble it was to get HL1 running under Wine. Besides the .msi installer trick I had to once again google to figure out, it was straightfoward.

Running HL1: Right away it went into full screen mode and unlike under Vista, it let me set resolutions to match my hardware (22′). Speed was no issue here.

Just goes to show the level of quality and dedication in Wine. Im off to play some HL =D

Image by Acid Zebra via Flickr

The recently released Banshee media player sparked interest after i read a linux.com review about it, so i thought i would check it out and compare it to my favorite player Amarok.

Since Amarok is well ahead of its competitor, lets focus on what they did right from the start:

• Video Player: since you dont have only MP3′s and you like to use your iPod for something other then those.
• Bookmarks: when you just dont want to make a playlist
• CD Media extraction: When you want to store that CD and find it later

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As i am writing, I am installing the stable release of OpenSUSE 11, the latest distro of the same named project.

I was simply fascinated how the distro is well polished, recognised my madwifi-based wireless card, sound, and graphics card instantly, so i was able to continue my work as the distro itself installed.

KDE4 was the desktop of my choice. Trough it was not able to shine fully since OpenGL was not setup in the live version, I found the interface to be quite appealing.

Yast2 has gotten a really impressive makeover, cutting down processing time multiple times.

Many programs arent ported to KDE4 yet so any big changes from what i had setup on 10.3 werent expected.

All in all, Install is fast, the interface is simple, the programs are new.