The Linux Gaming Issue - Le vin

Within the last episode I gave you an idea what I (currently) think about gaming on Linux. So the next few will actually try to describe why I'm thinking that way.
By the way, it is possible that I'll finish The Issue soonest at Sunday, since I got some special stuff I may grab up (not sure though).

Anyway, let's take a look at Cedega/WineX/Transgaming's wine with licensed stuff and special focus on Linux gaming. The default solution for emulating Windows games to be played on Linux.
My personal opinion is that it might be better to use any Windows (however you got it) and use it for gaming instead of subscribe to Cedega. I don't think that Cedega/wine is bad software, I just don't get the point of emulation (though wine is not an emulator ;-)) with somtimes happening performance loss and restriction to commonly wanted games (which are sometimes not the most enteraining). Though if you doesn't have the possability to get an Windows installed, Cedega/Wine is a really great option.
About the performance issue click here
Short summary:
Cedega is actually having a sometimes evilish performance loss compared with a Win XP and it's even not faster than a native Linux port. So why pay for this? Yeah it's not very comfortable to reboot the machine when you wanna play some cool games. But it's cheaper, and also better performing. Whether it makes sense for you is your own decision.

Usability
In latest Cedega (5) the cedega core (formerly known as winex) and the frontend Point2Play got merged and therefore version 5 got increased usablity (though I think transparency has been lost there).
One deficit I have to tell is the mounting and unmounting of CD's/DVD's. Most current distributions (focused on usability) don't force a user to know what mounting/umounting means or what it does, therefore a lot of very "normal" users might be a bit confused at first, but this actually just a mather of time.
Actually I have to admit that Cedega's usability seems to be quite good (for an emulator ;-))

But this good usability doesn't change the fact that cedega might not be interessting for most people, since I have to aggree with any Windows user who says "Why paying for Cedega when I can get WinXP for a fixed price, or maybe a pirated copy" (yeah even this is an option, though I don't suggest to use it - MS developers are still developers with family and all).
Cedega does a great job in bringing awesome games, which are limited to Windows, to the free OS, although I don't think there's a major reason why one should actually _have to_ emulate a game to get it run on Linux.

So what do I get for my 5 EUR per month?
Cedega
Not being able to play any game with any version
Less performance compared with native version or Windows
A cool GTK (dunno if that is 2 at all) interface
Good usability
And working ALSA support (I also think dmix works with >=5)

Cedega is a really good emulator, though it's not the perfect solution, and actually an even worse solution if you think Linux should be used for everything, everytime, everywhere (like I do). And the better way howto play games on Linux will be reviewed

tomorrow on the geared apachelog: The Linux Gaming Issue - Patriot

The Linux Gaming Issue - Impressions

Let me first talk a bit about my over all opinion about commercial Linux games (since those are the main market, and I guess also the most used games in general) ... so we can also say the opinion of the main gaming market concerning Linux:
IT JUST SUX!
That's it, gaming on Linux (talking about commcercial offer etc.) just sux. The games that are available: egoshooters, multishooters and fun games (but those so called "fun games" mostly for a totally over-the-top price) not to mention the short-fun-open-source games (maybe long term fun games just need more time for development, and therefore OSS isn't that suitable?!).

Most known (and most played from the point of market segments)
Egoshooters:
Quake 4
Doom 3
...anything from Id

Multishooters:
Nexuiz
Enemy Territory
...anything from Id
Unreal Tournament XXXX

Over-the-top priced:
anything older than 2 years what's price is >20 EUR

You might think "those aren't all available games", in fact there is quite a big list of games, (somehow) available for Linux, commercial, noncommercial and open source, but in general they are all not "awesome" games.
Nowadays one doesn't even buy entertainment, like it was back in Mario's time, but also grafic and athomsphere.
Card games for example are missing this. No doubt that it's fun to play them for 5 minutes, maybe up to 20 but they get boring. People want to be involved, they want to be part of the game. Linux is not missing such games, most just not entertain that much as they should.
We have games like Id's developments (Quake, Doom...) but they miss the point of entertaining, they get boring after some time, repetitive etc.
They aren't bad games they are just not awesome games.

So short sum-up of this (messy) episode:
Commercial games:
mostly only shooters which aren't anything else, just shooters
all others are unfinished ports or just stupid games which are neither entertaining nor good looking

Free and Open Source games:
they are great fun for some minutes, but not that "big entertaining as people want it today" (even though I know people playing thoose all day long ;-))

Don't damn me because of this first impressions, you might get an idea why I think so by the end of the week, so keep tuned for my tomorrow's "semi-professional" review of cedega and (if I have enough time to do some late minute testing) wine.


Next time in the geared apachelog: The Linux Gaming Issue - Le Vin

The Linux Gaming Issue - Intro

As pronounced in my last post I'll now take a view at gaming on Linux.
Surely one of the most reviewed and most discussed topics in "normal" userspace websites. But because they aren't very good and somtimes too much focused on a special game or a special game genre, I started writing some kind of review which shall do it better.
It's actually finished as I'm writing this, but Max (classmate of /me) meant it might be too long so I'll post everyday a single episode and release the whole review on next saturday.

So let me start with the information that I'm not a pro gamer (I probably wouldn't have enough time to, at all), but I like to play games on the PC, and I actually prefer the PC over any console.
Who would have known, I like to do this in my native environment - Linux.
If it is possible and how well it is possible will be told in the next episode :-)

Btw, feel free to suggest stuff I should mention.

Next time in the geared apachelog: The Linux Gaming Issue - Impressions

klik it, babe!

Well, as amaroK 1.4 beta1 is out, pipitas now tried to get a binary (since I only provide nightly's for SUSE 10.0 I wasn't very helpful in that case). But mighty eean got the time to fix the daily amaroK-SVN for debian and therefore the amaroK-SVN klik package is back in blue.

Some information about klik:
Actually you _should_ know klik, since it is an awesome way to easy install software, plus you can try software without messing-up your system (which is useful for amaroK's daily klik package, later about that).
Klik runs on most distributions (actually should on any debian based), see the klik homepage for a list of tested distros.
To install the klik client, just run:

wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh

For any further information see the klik page.

So because this post is about the amaroK-nightly-svn-klik-package, lemme tell you some important things about that.
It's based on deb's made by eean and (should) get updated everyday. The actual cool thing is, that you can try latest svn without messing-up your system and or configurations. The klik-package uses (in difference to a default amaroK) the directory $HOME/.amarokklik so everything is seperated, and therefore no risk to make a stable amaroK unusable or something.

So if you got klik installed, just run:

klik://amarok-svn-nightly

via the "run command..." feature

You can get any information at:
http://amarok.kde.org
http://klik.atekon.de
http://amarok-svn-nightly.klik.atekon.de/
http://amarok-svn-nightly.klik.atekon.de/comments/
http://amarok-svn-nightly.klik.atekon.de/wiki/index.php/Wiki_page_for_amarok_klik
http://www.google.com

Next on apachelog|gear: linux gaming

Kubuntulogger

Not that I changed my nick :P
But I just joined the deep fovea of Kubuntu's magic, with other words: I built an official deb.

Well, fist I built some unofficial debs, just for getting an idea, then Raphaël Pinson (Kubuntu MOTU) sent me a mail and asked for join the official builders, to provide somewhat useable/secure packages for the masses. So I started make the package first package be a official.


Parenthesis

The first application I built a deb for was KBlogger, a really awesome piece of software (though a bit buggy with blogger.com, as I discovered lately). Anyway, it's a easy to use kicker applet, which adds a little button, called "blog", to kicker and opens a very minimalistic blog window if you click on it. The window actually consits of a title bar a text box and a send button, that's it. Making it a deb, wasn't that easy as I though. The latest tarball was 0.4 which was bad packed due to a broken packing feature in KDevelop, so Christian Weilbach (that's the author) packed it manual, and left all "~" backups back, but dpkg - debian's packagemanager - doesn't really like those files. And since there were some other issues, like wrong makefile argument and damn wrong desktop file, I patched version 0.4, wrote a release script and Christian released 0.4.1 (which is the current version).
Think that's enough for me? No! KBlogger hasn't had a icon, so I went over to the kde-artists team and ask for anyone who wanna make a icon. But, I haven't got anyone, I've got Kenneth Wimer (kwwii) and therefore KBlogger's next version will come with an awesome looking icon in oxygen style, details are secret for now :-P

But at this point I have to thank Ken for the icon, and the work he put into it, because it took him quite some time to make such a (in my opinion) perfect icon. So:

THANK YOU KEN!

Parenthesis-End


KBlogger 0.4.1 finally now went through reviewing and has been inofficial backported to breezy by Marcus Czeslinski (czessi). Currently I'm working on the contacts menu for kicker, and for a very strange reason this package is also not very cute (not as in Qt ;-)). There is at least one file twice and something seems to be wrong with the Makefiles, though it's easier than KBlogger, because I learned a lot of stuff about basic deb packing while modifing KBlogger.

So finally I can say, most software isn't that hard to pack, because DEB in gerneral is damn easy. And as a person who knows rpm packing and deb packing, I tell you: basic RPM is a lot too complicate. Now I also see a reason why the City of Munich and the City of Vienna are using Debian with internal repos. And what DE they use, seems quite clear ;-)

K D E

amaroK - backstage

For all who don't know it already: amaroK 1.4 (codename fast forward) beta1 is out.

So there are now about 30 collections of hotest new features, but no background information. Might be something to change for /me, so here I go.

1.4's development started in november and was quite fast (forward) since first day after braching the 1.3 series. Most active within the first weeks: Martin Aumueller (not that this had change ;-)), he introduced a new dependencie against libgpod (as seen in gtkpod) and improved the iPod support immensly. Then sebr put iriver support in and blah blah blah ... finally Jeff Mitchell started working on generic media device support (as in "any vfat device") using the HAL backend. So that's about media device crap (still haven't got one :|).

While this, markey excluded the collection scanner into an own binary to increase stability (by no amaroK crashes because of collection scanner crashes). Then he took a shot at the lyrics sites (you might have heard that lyrics support in roK >1.3.8 is broken due to a change at lyric.com.ar), so he made the whole thing script based, and now anyone can write it's own lyrics-fetch-script for any lyrics site.

There is quite some other stuff, from other people, though I'm getting tired so: others also done awesome things, check svntalk

Derek Nelson (admrl) helped a lot with great artworks (really good to know a artist being around ;-)), he also polished the beta1 release pic (taken by firetech). By the way, we'll start a official amaroK artist team (with a sexy name, like roKymotion ;-))

Talking about roKymotion, we've made some cool stuff since foudning, actually every news posted at amarok.kde.org has been produced (and approved) by the roKymotion team and we've also made some internal proposals how to get amaroK promotion more efficient and funier done.

Last but not least:
We have two new official authors (named them already at the very top)
Martin Aumueller (aumuell)
Jeff Mitchell (jefferai)
for their awesome work at media device support and various other parts of amaroK.

----

And since I promised yesterday to tell something about irc: while amaroK is still not using konvi as a kpart, the amaroK bot got reseted (madpenguin8 [former hoster] suddenly disappeared so oggb4mp3 [new hoster] used a quite old backup) .. anyway, welcome back amaroK!! :-D

#amarok: the channel gets flooded by support from Christie Harris (dangle) (roKymotion member), so I now have to say "Awesome job Christie!" .... not that she'd be the only supporter, just the loudest ;-)
#amarok.de: well, sometimes less amaroK related stuff than overall opensource or KDE discussions (quite cool actually)
#secretamarokchannel: gets flooded by me with mostly bad ideas about reforming anything (wiki, site, team, project structure, etc.)

apachelogger: uses to be quite more often apacheLAGger than apachelogger (damn snow causes even worse internet connection)

So that's my short overview about amaroK and the other roKish stuff ;-) .... tomorrow: kubuntulogger