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Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
When I first got in to Linux as a hobby many years ago, and just like many others did, gaming was an un-spoken subject. I wanted to play Half Life and Counter Strike in Linux and I was pretty much told to forget it. Not being the sort of person to really just forget anything, I didn’t, instead I installed Wine (I think it was on version 0.2 or something back then I can’t remember), and proceeded to install Steam and HL, then CS. Sure enough the graphics had serious issues, there was no sound and I seemed to always have a huge ping on the servers I joined. So I gave it up as a bad job, but safe in the knowledge that Wine would improve and some day I’d be able to play all my favorite games in Linux.
Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
Well that day hasn’t quite come yet, we still can’t play EVERYTHING or run EVERY program from Windows in Wine, but we’re getting bloody close now. I can play CSS and HL2 seemlessly in Wine, sound works, graphics are fine, installers, save games etc, everything just works, you can now run programs like Photoshop CS2 (CS3 kinda works I’m told) and Dreamweaver CS2 without any problems that would really phase you and now that the Quake and Doom engines have been OSS’d there are all sorts of open source games, released under the GPL, that are freely available to play on Linux without the aid of Wine.
Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
Nexuiz is one I’vebeen toying with recently, it was actually my partner who brought it to my attention, she was looking through the lists of open source programs on wikipedia and just for a laugh decided to take a look at games, she spotted nexuiz and told me to try it on my Debian Lenny system. I was a little apprehensive as I run dual screens and that never seems to work well for games in Linux, but I apt-get install nexuiz anyway. Once installed I disabled my second monitor (Who needs it anyway when you’re gaming and it’s easy as you like with the Nvidia-Settings-Manager these days) and loaded up the game expecting to see a re-vamped Alien Arena or Open Arena, I was surprised to say the least.
Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
This game is brilliant, yes it looks like it might use the quake engine but I don’t care, it’s just so good. Incredibly playable, the menus work great, the graphics are brilliant and I was just immediately hooked. I played for about half an hour before I remembered I had work to do and reluctantly turned the game off, re-enabled my second screen and began coding again.
The reason for this post, is now to put more propoganda out there for Linux, but to make some of the Linux users realise that just because we can’t run Windows games all the time and perfectly in Linux, doesn’t mean there aren’t alternatives out there ready and waiting for us. So if you’re using a Debian or Debian-based system, go ahead and apt-get install nexuiz and try it out for yourself, let me know how you get on and whether you liked the game or not.
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Debian (Lenny) Linux – Beta2 is now my desktop OS
Well anyone who read my review of Lenny last month will probably have expected this, but I’ve dumped my 64bit installation of Ubuntu Hardy in favor of Debian 5.0 (Lenny). I couldn’t be happier in all honesty, it runs faster (Even though it’s only x86/32 bit as opposed to 64 bit like Ubuntu was), it looks nicer, it does what I tell it to (Sort of) and I feel like a grown up again instead of a newbie using an easy OS. No offense to newbies but you are who Ubuntu is designed for to be fair.
Debian (Lenny) FF3 Installed - Screenshot.
You can see in the screenshot to the right that I’ve managed to install FF3 instead of being forced to use IceWeasle, which I’m sorry I don’t care who you are or how much you tell me it’s the same, it isn’t ok so shutup! lol. Anyway the point being that Lenny does have it’s downfalls when it comes to installing some programs and drivers that are very easy on Ubuntu/Kubuntu Hardy. For example, when you install Kubuntu Hardy and you have an Nvidia card, Ubuntu pops up and says “I see you have an Nvidia card, would you like to install the drivers for it?” You click yes and you’re on your way, with Lenny however you log into your system and there’s no such pop-up, so you say, “Lenny, I have an Nvidia card and I’d like to install it please”, to which Lenny promptly replies, “Well drop to console and work for it bitch!” Obviously you understand Lenny isn’t a real person and it doesn’t actually talk to you in voice by default, but I had to do it that way for the joke to work. 
I’ve installed all my usual programs, like Yakuake (Screenshot below, which also includes my dual screen spanning desktop just for good measure), Filezilla, Thunderbird, aMSN, Opera, Netscape, Flock and a host of other simpler but neccessity applications for me like, Flash player, VLC, MPlayer, Audacity etc.
Lenny Yakuake - Screenshot.
This last few weeks has seen lots of change in the world, our own fair New Zealand has taken a new government, America elected a new saviour, sorry I mean president, I mean, well you get the point, so I decided it was time for the Symsys-Kubuntu-804 machine to become Symsys-Lenny instead. Change is good!
After installing my applications and installing the wonderful “Breathless” Icon theme, I changed a couple of fonts, uninstalled Open Office 2.4 and installed 3.0 from debs I already had, then decided I’d blog about how great it was.
Lenny 'K' Menu - Screenshot
So the long and short of this installation is that Nvidia drivers are not yet very easy to install in Lenny, unless you install them immediately after installing your system, unfortunately if you do that you’ll need to re-install them once you update to the 2.6.26 kernel, which will have been compiled from gcc-4.1 and if you’ve updated your kernel you’ve most likely upgraded gcc to gcc-4.3 or higher and the compilation of the Nvidia Kernel module will fail because of that very fact, so just a quick tip for those others out there googling this problem (And I found a few myself during the process as I had other errors too), make sure to download the absolute latest drivers from the Nvidia site, now you won’t be able to do that easily either, their site is now entirely flash/java and doesn’t tend to work well with Konqueror, Opera, Firefox or Netscape until the Nvidia drivers are actually installed (Dumb right?), anyway, visit http://www.nvidia.com/downloads and you’ll get what you need. Once you’ve got the latest drivers from Nvidias site, drop to console (Closing the GUI all together I mean here not just bring up Konsole or dropping to Ctrl Alt F4) make sure you have the correct linux-sources and build-essential installs, then type apt-get install gcc-4.1 then export CC=”gcc-4.1″ then immediately after that cd /usr/src && sh ./NVIDIA*.run agree to the license, say no to downloading a pre-compiled kernel and say ok (No other option) to compiling a new kernel, hopefully all should be well. Obviously don’t take this as a guide to installing Nvidia drivers by default because you may find that they install just fine for you if you have a newer release of Lenny, or a .deb package to install them with etc.
I might actually write a blog about the nvidia drivers installation with a few hints and tips on troubleshooting as well for those who get lost. Have a look for it in the menu on the right, if you can’t find it in there I haven’t written it yet so just stick a comment below here to give me a jab to do it.
I’m really really really impressed with Lenny and I couldn’t be happier to get rid of Kubuntu 64bit, now that’s something I never thought I’d say, Ubuntu/Kubuntu has always been so easy to install and easy to maintain but lately I’ve just been feeling frustrated, it’s so much harder to do “power user stuff” in Ubuntu now BECAUSE it’s so much easier to do the easy stuff. Now that Debian have given us Lenny with a fantastic installer, a brilliant package of programs out of the box and you still have the genious that is aptitude and synaptic if you want to install it, then I think I can now safely say that Debian is well and truly the Ubuntu for professionals and power users, although some may take offense at that so let’s say Ubuntu is the Debian for newbies, but no wait other people will be offended at that, hmmmmmmmmmm, well I like both, I prefer Debian for my pro stuff and Ubuntu for my clients that aren’t so technically minded, yeah that works .
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Why am I disappointed with Ubuntu?
I started using Ubuntu, or rather Kubuntu in fact, around 6.10 (Edgy) and didn’t reckon much to it in all honesty, I went back to using Gentoo and Debian 4.0 (Etch). When 7.04 (Feisty) was released, so intregued was I by Canonical’s marketing of Ubuntu and the media hype surrounding it, that I tried it out on an old Toshiba Sat Pro laptop (I forget the exact model number) and was reasonably impressed. 7.04 stayed on that laptop until 7.10 (Gutsy) was released and was immediately upgraded, again with an impressive result. I had to relinquish that laptop to another engineer in the company when I moved back to New Zealand, but by this time I had installed 7.10 on my desktop machine and was happy with it. Upon the 8.04 (Hardy) release I immediately upgraded my desktop without fear as the 7.04 to 7.10 upgrade had gone so well previously I figured I had nothing to fear right? Wrong! I had endless problems with the upgrade, eventually resulting in a complete reload of the system. I put the problems down to the upgrade itself and installed 8.04 from scratch on a fresh hard drive, and I must admit it went well, I was rather disappointed at the number of updates which were immediately required but I had become accustomed to this with other distributions so shrugged it off, and since that day my machine has run 8.04 happily.
Intrepid was released
When Intrepid was released I had been counting down the days until it’s release eagerly and was excited at the prospect of yet another release of this easy to use, friendly distribution. I wasn’t keen on the idea of KDE4.1 being used as I had tried KDE4.x a few times during it’s development and just didn’t get on with it, I was also weary of the problems I had upgrading from 7.10 to 8.04, so instead of just hitting that upgrade distribution button, I installed 8.04 in a VM and upgraded to 8.10 within the VM. This did not go well at all and resulted in an unusable system, once again I decided this must be the upgrade that was the problem, so I did a fresh install of 8.10 in the VM instead, hoping it would produce better results, it did not. After install things were flakey to say the least, once I had installed the VirtualBox drivers I could no longer get an X Server at all. Numerous other problems seemed to plague this release so I decided I would wait until bugs had been fixed with it and I might install it then, only to remember I still wasn’t keen on KDE4.1 and just had a general feeling of not wanting this upgrade, so I have decided to skip it.
The IRC Chatrooms
I spend a fair bit of time in the Kubuntu and Ubuntu IRC chat rooms, I don’t use it for help but I offer what help I can to the users who frequent it and maybe don’t have the knowledge that I do. In the week that followed the release of 8.10 I spent most of my time in that chat room, trying to refer back to a VM install of 8.10 to help people that were having numerous problems after upgrade and/or fresh installs of the release. The problems were so abundent that I can honestly say it didn’t seem like a release of Ubuntu/Kubuntu at all, but more like a release of Fedora Core with people new to Linux trying to feel their way through in the dark. People were complaining their X server no longer worked, or they couldn’t install Nvidia drivers, or what happened to KDE3? Now don’t get me wrong “Cutting Edge” is good, but cutting edge to me is brand new stuff, that works. That’s why we also these days have “Bleeding Edge”, which is basically what distributions like Sidux, Fedora Core and the current bleeding edge version of Debian (Sid) are for, they introduce these new features that don’t quite work yet and they have a good following of dedicated users, who will test this software for them and report bugs. Installing things like an X.org server that doesn’t support Nvidia drivers yet just seems more like Bleeding Edge than Cutting Edge, or is it just me?
My love for ubuntu still holds
Never have I liked a distribution more than Ubuntu, for ease of use, friendlyness to new users and popularity in general, and that still holds true for former releases of the distribution, but 8.10 has yet to earn that love. I would still highly recommend that any new user install Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu on their system, so long as they use 8.04 and not 8.10. It seems a crying shame that the so dubbed “darling of Linux” seems to have fallen so short with this release, but I am confident that 9.04 (Jaunty) will redeem itself.
Conclusions
So in conclusion I feel I should coin the words of Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) when he said people should skip Vista, and suggest that most people skip the 8.10 release of Ubuntu and use 8.04 until 9.04 is released. The difference being, the users of Ubuntu only have 5 months to wait instead of a year or more, and more to the point it probably hasn’t cost anyone using Ubuntu a single cent to do so and it won’t cost them anything to upgrade either. I am hopeful that X.org will have fixed any issues with the current release of the X server by then, Nvidia drivers will work properly, KDE4.1 may have become KDE4.2 or even just KDE4.1.something.that.works.better and with any luck the next release will be much better put together, thought out and more stable.
Linux itself is very much on the rise now, the desktop market is being blown wide open by MS cock ups, awareness is being raised by companies like Canonical, Dell, HP, IBM, ASUS etc and the world economy crash couldn’t have come at a better time for Linux to really thrust itself out there and say, “Hey I work perfectly on 99% (Figure I made up but it can’t be far off these days) of hardware and I won’t cost you a penny”, which is exactly what it’s doing. Symsys Ltd as a company is doing it’s part, trying to push the use of Linux and increase it’s awareness, but other companies are joining the fold too, Adobe is releasing more and more software for Linux and talks of open sourcing some of it, IBM are now evangelising Linux more than ever, HP have decided to start OEMing it, Splashtop has become all the rage in new formats like “Fast Boot” and with the trend of things like Googles Android phone and the general concessus, even that admitted by MS themselves, that Windows has turned to turd (Face it XP WAS a good release eventually), all we need to do now is make the people who have no technical interest in Linux and don’t care about the freedoms of it, aware that it exists, it’s a LOT better than it ever was before, it STILL doesn’t cost anything, oh and it works on everything from your toaster to your server, whilst being able to talk to anything MS you might still have in your network as well.
To close then, I urge Canonical to make the 9.04 release more stable than 8.10 was/is, I urge X.org to make things like the Nvidia drivers work so I can maintain my dual screens and other features that require them and I’ll simply coin another phrase which comes from the opening credits of my favorite TV show while growing up in the U.K. and demonstrates effectively my feelings on Linux today, “Power to the People!”
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A Linux Laptop in every home by the end of 2009?
Well not quite, but I think it’s going to be close. From what we’re hearing and reading every day now, it seems that more and more laptops are being shipped with a technology called “Fast Boot” or “Instant On” or “Latitude On” etc depending on which manufacturer is implementing it (Purely for the purposes of typing I’ll refer to it as “Fast Boot” for the rest of this post). This is something that allows a laptop to boot up, almost immediately, with no need to go through all the POST procedures and boot up time for a full operating system. To do this, it uses Linux. Some systems boot the “Fast Boot” Linux first, (within 5 seconds) whilst booting the main operating system on the laptop in the background and then giving the user the option to switch between the softwares, others simply boot the “Fast Boot” Linux within 5 seconds, if you tell it to and won’t boot Windows at all unless you request it.
Benefits to Linux :
So with this now a reality, it should be also very obvious, that seeing as so many new laptops are being shipped with “Fast Boot” on them, that this means every laptop sold with “Fast Boot” will have Linux installed, even if Windows is the main operating system. Hold on to that thought and think a little further and it stands to reason that sooner or later, “Fast Boot” will be like Wireless, something that comes as standard on EVERY laptop sold, which in turn of course means, every laptop sold will have Linux on it.
This is absolutely excellent news for Linux. I mean sure, it would be better if Linux installed laptops (As in the ones with Linux used as the main operating system) were outselling or even selling the same number as Windows installed ones, but this is a pretty close second and could lead to just the previous statement being a reality.
Benefits to the User :
If you’ve got an option to boot up in 5 seconds flat, view your web mail, load up a couple of web pages or just make a VOIP call (That’s right some will include VOIP technology in the “Fast Boot” OS. Or you have another option, wait for 2 – 5 minutes, (depending on how cluttered your system is, how powerful your machine is with it’s hardware etc), just to check your web mail, or have a quick look at a website, which option are you going to take? You’ll take the faster one of course, everyone does. If you’re going to sit at your desk for the next ten hours, you’re probably going to let the full OS boot no matter what, the 3 minutes is worth waiting if you’re going to be at it for hours on end. If you’re on the go though, which is what Laptops are for really, then why wait?
The end results expected :
So once people start using Linux on a regular basis with “Fast Boot”, because it’s so much quicker to boot up, they’ll get used to it and let’s face it, this is the hardest part for new Linux users, getting the Windows flavor, out of their mouth, and tasting the fresh freeness’ that is Linux. Once they realise that this operating system they’re using every day, has a more feature rich version available, at no cost, and isn’t made by Microsoft, they’ll start looking to have a full install instead/as well. It’s like when someone gets a new mobile phone and it uses Linux, they don’t know it uses Linux, because unlike Windows Mobiles which come with Windows logos all over them to make sure everyone knows it’s Windows, Linux mobiles don’t come stickered up. The thing is, as soon as you tell them that this phone they love because it has SO many features, never crashes on them (Unlike certain Windows Mobile devices I’ve used which crash constantly), has great looks and is really responsive, is running Linux and you can get that on the PC, they ask for a demonstration. So out comes the USB stick, boot up their PC and bingo, another convert. This might not be neccessary anymore.
Summary :
With modern Linux Distributions getting easier and easier to install, configure, set up and use, all it needed was a way to tell the masses how great it had become, how easy they would find it and how much they would love it. I believe this “Fast Boot” technology is going to be the way in for Linux in the desktop market. Too many people, normal consumers and I.T. professionals alike, think of Linux as something that is popular with geeks, but hard to use for “Joe User”. It isn’t, the problem is, telling these people this doesn’t cut it. People have to see things with their own two eyes to believe it and that’s just human nature. Getting someone to see it with their own eyes, sometimes means employing Microsofts own tactics and installing the software on their laptop by default, even if they still buy a Windows laptop.
Whether this technology increases the number of Linux users or not, the fact still remains, if this technology becomes implemented in every laptop sold before the end of 2009 (Quite likely according to the press hype around it), then Linux will officially be shipped on more laptops than Windows. When you think about it, if you’ve got something available to you, while you’re not doing anything else (Waiting for a machine to boot up) why wouldn’t you try it out? Of course you would, and if you try one of the more user friendly distributions of Linux these days, you don’t tend to go back to Windows willingly. I recently did a dualboot of Ubuntu 8.04 with Windows XP for a customer, he very rarely ever boots Windows now, for one thing because he loves the way Linux looks and works, but something else he pointed out was just how fast his Linux installation boots in comparison to Windows, and that’s a full installation. Imagine how impressed that customer would have been if he could boot one Linux installation in 5 seconds flat, use it to surf the web for a minute or two while his full installation of Linux booted and then switch to the full installation once it was booted up.
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