earobinson.org

I have never been a huge gamer, if a new game comes out I will sometimes play it for a day or two and then be done with it. Linux has always been a great os for me but if I was a hardcore gamer I’m not so sure that would be true. That being said there are many great ways to play games on Linux, Wine and Cedega being the two main ones.

The problem is that Wine (I have no experience with Cedega) is not perfect, however it has been able to do some great things. I have been able to get world of warcraft, Microsoft office, msdnaa (you need to download an exe in order to download the software and why not try out vista for free, and yes I’m still with Linux even though windows is free for me) and many other applications running under Wine. There have been many that I have not been able to get running also, evil genius for example.

Chances are none of this is new to you but stay with me. About a year ago, maybe six months. Google came out with two products for Linux, Google Earth, and Picasa. The really cool thing is that they did not rewrite the code they instead opted to modify there code and then use Wine to make it all work. Now while I’m not sure of the legalities of distributing GPL software and proprietary software in the same package I assume its all on the up and up, google would never do evil.

Yesterday on digg I saw an article about the latest release of Soldat, What I found interesting is that when you go to the download page they list there requirements as follows

“Requirements: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista or Linux + Wine; DirectX 8.1;”

Now I found this really nifty. I know that Unreal Tournament and a few other games have had Linux releases, but I’m not sure how successful they where. This really makes me wounder however, how hard it is to make a program that is wine compatible / works with Wine and secondly is this a viable option for game makers.

Is the cost of making your applications Wine compatible less than the extra revenue that companies would see if they made there applications work with Wine. I know this was touched on at Ubuntu open week ask mark session. Seeing wine as an option to play a game just inspired me to post about it.

I would encourage any software producer to at least make there applications run under wine even if they where to lose money if only to maintain product dominance in your market otherwise like Mark said we will just make open source equivalents. But thats just my two cents.

Edit: Oops it seems that Google Earth Linux port is a native Linux application built with the open source Qt application development toolkit. Thanks Everett.

• Desktop tower defence - a great flash tower defence game.
• Jott - Mobile Note Taking and Hands-Free Messaging

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s) –http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

I first learned about synergy about six months ago. At the time I thought it was a great application but my problem was that i didn’t want to set it up. It seemed like a bit of work and well I didn’t really need it.

Today I again read about synergy on lifehacker and again my interest was sparked.

So I fired up synaptic and searched for synergy and I find quicksynergy which is described as “GUI for easy configuration of Synergy” and that’s exactly what it is. After installing quicksynergy which installs synergy as a dependency I can tell you that’s exactly what it is.

I simply Installed it, added the clients to the server (Note that the name of the computer must be used not the IP)

Started the server. Then added the server IP to the client and started that and I was off.

The whole process took less than 10 minutes (Including solving a problem I had where I was putting NaN’s IP instead of its name) and this whole post has been typed from my main computer’s (MinusOne) keyboard on my laptop (NaN). This is definitely a program I seem myself using in the future since I am always using more than one computer, and one of the best features is that it lets me share my cut and paste buffer across the computers. letting me cut on one computer and paste on another.

Got any great ubuntu tips? I would love to hear about them. earobinson@ubuntu.com

Note: “You should be aware that synergy does not provide any secure connection. Anyone who has access to your network segment may sniff the keystrokes and get a password typed from one computer to another for example.” — Jeremie Corbie That being said its still great for controlling my music, or video, or just typing on another computer. Just not for typing passwords. More Info

I woke up at 6:00 this morning to download feisty before going to work and ubuntu.com was down (suffering from the /. effect). Guess that shows how popular ubuntu really is.

Would be really cool to see some kind of server stats.

 Warning: There are reports that Democracy dose not work with feisty, see the comments for more info.

Every once in a while you find that application that is truly amazing. With the up coming launch of Feisty, Democracy Player is the king of podcasts and vlogs for me.

With Democracy you can subscribe to any podcast or vlogs rss feed and like an RSS reader it will alert you when that feed has new content. Not only will It alert you of new content but it will download it for you this is great for vlogs like diggnation or ze frank (even though the show is now over) for two different reasons. diggnation is a weekly vlog but is is quite large and takes some time do download, before Democracy I was forced to download the show and wait, or play it while it downloaded which when my Internet connection was slow caused me to have to restart the show 3 or 4 times.

With the arrival of Democracy I’m now watching more and more vlogs some worth highlighting include
• NBC nightly news
• Global National nightly news
• Diggnation
• Ask a ninja
• I’m sure I’m missing some. See the screenshot

Great so Democracy is good for people, but you said everyone wins, what gives?

If a player like Democracy where to become the norm everyone would win. Some of Democracys features include, ranking content and allowing people to search there archive for what interests them, this gives the producers more exposure. Another big problem that producers may have is that as they get more and more users they are using more and more bandwidth. Democracy also solves this problem by letting you subscribe to a feed with torrents instead of actual videos. This lets content providers produce distribute there content without paying for the bandwidth.