Published June 22nd, 2008
in Linux.
WINE (Wine Is Not An Emulator) is an open source implementation of the Windows API which lets you install many Windows applications natively on Linux. After 15 years they just released their first stable release, version 1.0.
Awesome.
Although most linux distros have been using versions just pre-1.0, I thought I’d give it a shot. I added the repository to my sources.lst and installed wine 1.0 on my Debian machine.
Although WINE has their own directx implementation which lets you play many Windows 3D games I thought I’d try with Civilization IV which required a few external dlls. So, after doing a little search I came across a post on how to install Microsoft’s DirectX and replace the one included with WINE.
I followed the howto, including some tips for installing Civ 4 and I have to say it was sweet! I just got a new computer, so it is hard to tell if it’s faster than it used to be under Cedega, but I can say that the game didn’t feel slow at all, even at a late stage in the game with dozens of cities. This was at 1280×1024 with all settings at the highest level.
If you’re a Civ 4 fan, give this a shot and let me know how it went for you!
-c
Published June 18th, 2008
in Tech.
The world’s favourite open source web browser has just reached version 3.0!
Download it today in your language and for your operating system.
-c
Published June 14th, 2008
in Linux and Tech.
Today I upgraded my computer.
I replaced my AMD64 CPU and NVIDIA chipset mainboard with an Intel CPU and Intel chipset mainboard. Everything except the hard drive and DVD burner were new - and not only that, but everything (including the sound card, network card, SATA and other controllers) have completely different chipsets needing completely different drivers. My new video card is still NVIDIA, although a different model.
So, how did Linux handle it?
I’m glad you asked. Here’s a complete picture of the steps I took:
Step 1
Turn off computer.
Step 2
Take out old parts (bar hard drive and DVD burner).
Step 3
Install new parts.
Step 4
Turn on computer and enjoy.
That’s it! Yes, no blue screen of death, no new drivers to install, no software activation, no hassles. It just booted as though nothing had changed, although of course it actually had entirely.
Ahh.. Linux 
chris@shem ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 23
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 2000.000
cache size : 6144 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 2
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 lahf_lm
bogomips : 6003.09
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:
-c
Published June 13th, 2008
in Uncategorized.
So I’m not a big youtube fan (not like _some_ people I know at work) but I came across this dude, Frezned, from Australia and I really like his sense of humour and style of video
-c
Published May 18th, 2008
in Tech.
Download it!
The scheduled release for 3.0 is September 2008. Go OpenOffice.org, go!
On another note, OpenOffice.org 2.4 under Linux has some cool 3D transition effects. I used them for the first time in a presentation the other day, they were impressive!
-c
Published May 6th, 2008
in Tech.
Arstechnica has an article on a user’s switch from Windows as a coding environment to OSX. Well worth the read, I especially like this quote:
This gives rise to particularly stupid things like the name of the “system” folder, where all the Windows libraries and programs are kept. In 16-bit Windows, it was called system. In 32-bit Windows, it was called system32. In 64-bit Windows it’s called, er, system32 again. Because although there’s an API call that programs can make to find out the name of the folder, there are enough programs that don’t bother using it and just blindly assume that it’s called system32 (even when compiled as 64-bit) that it was better for backwards compatibility to leave it, even though it’s chock full of 64-bit files.
32-bit files in turn go into a directory named syswow64. Right, it has 64 in the name, because it contains 32-bit libraries. Make sense? Only in Redmond. All these strange behaviors and clumsy APIs that they’ve built up over the years have just been plonked wholesale into 64-bit Windows. There’s no escape from them.
-c
Published May 6th, 2008
in Life.
“You have a girlfriend for nice words and friends to punch you in the ribs and laugh.”
- Jason
Published March 24th, 2008
in Linux.
With the release of KDE 4x, the project has adopted the freedesktop.org specification for naming icons. This means the icon names are the same as GNOME, which also uses the freedesktop.org spec.
I figured that if that’s the case, it shouldn’t be too hard to get the icons working under GNOME
I wrote a bash script which does this. Grab it, and make it executable.
wget http://smartclan.com/files/oxy-gnome.sh ; chmod +x oxy-gnome.sh
You will need both the GNOME icon set and the Oxygen icon set somewhere on your machine (the script will ask where they are). If you’re using Ubuntu Hardy, just run:
sudo apt-get install kde-icons-oxygen
Once you have these, run the script as your regular user and away you go!
./oxy-gnome.sh
The end result should look something like this:
It’s not perfect as not all icons match up and there are some missing but it’s pretty sweet. This can be fixed over time by adding some special cases, but I haven’t done it yet.
Enjoy!
Chris
Published March 23rd, 2008
in Linux.
The NVIDIA driver under Linux automatically detects and sets your DPI. But if you want to manually set it yourself you can do so by adding the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf under the driver section where your card is.
Option "UseEdidDpi" "false"
Option "DPI" "96 x 96"
Restart X and check your DPI with the command:
xdpyinfo | grep -B1 dot
-c
