BSD & Gaming

Yes you heard right Star Trek Online is now FREE to Play! [LINK]

There are differences between Gold (subscribers) and Silver (Free Accounts), get the details on the F2P Charts. [LINK]

Klingons, Humans, Ferengi, Vulcans, and Bajorans, oh my!

Download the game for Free! [LINK]

Just released, PC-BSD 9.0 [Isotope Edition] go get it now!!

PC-BSD 9.0 changes include the following:

• Based upon FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE
• Support for installing a variety of Window Managers, such as KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE and more!
• Improved networking utilities, including wifi quick-connect
• Support for UFS+Journaling out of box
• New graphical boot options page
• Improved PBI system, allows library sharing, binary diff updating, custom repositories, digital signing and more!
• Support for “freebsd-update” via the System Update GUI
• Enhanced “Life-Preserver” utility for doing off-site rsync backups of user data.

Read the release notes here – [LINK]
Download your free copy here – [LINK]
Download via BitTorrent here – [LINK]

(For a full list of changes in this release refer to the changelog.)

I’m still alive and kicking, just took some time off for xmas & new years. I’ll get back on track soon, thanks for hanging in there! Hope everyone had a great holiday!

NEWS ALERT!  The powers that be in Washington D.C. are doing their best to destroy the last vestiges of Free Speech online under the false pretenses of preventing stolen intellectual property.

Read all the gory details about this farce that is attempting to strip away one more layer of your personal rights – [LINK]

If you already know about SOPA and want to do something to stop this insanity go here [LINK] to contact your Congressmen.

There is also some good stuff covering the topic over at this [LINK] and here [LINK].

Fight for your rights before they are gone FOREVER!!

TIME IS RUNNING OUT !!

Last year I stated [link] the disappointment of Fallout 3 from 2008 left me in no hurry to pick up a copy of  New Vegas. The initial reviews for FO3:NV looked promising but that quickly changed with a barrage of negativity about the game’s technical problems. To make things worse, I also had an aging computer setup that would have left me running the game on mid-level or low end graphics settings, yet one more reason buying this game quickly got filed under the “why bother” category for me.

…Fast forward one year and mix in a new pc.. Booyah Babuh! FO3:NV rocks like nobody’s business! Since I took forever to get my hands on a copy, it appears the developers had time to patch all the technical issues everyone complained about. So far I have had zero problems. The quality of the storyline and general content of FO3:NV is ridiculously better than Bethesda’s work on Fo3, it really shines with competent story telling from Obsidian Entertainment. I would love to have seen what these guys could have come up with for the Capital Wasteland, I imagine it would have been light years better than anything Bethesda squeezed out.

Naturally it still wouldn’t be a great PC Game without a lot of mods from the community to make it ever so much better, stock games are usually bland at best.

Finally! At last a new system. I was recently able to get enough cash to build a new computer, and with frugal shopping I came up with really decent hardware. I also had in mind a goal of future expandability instead of needing to build a whole new computer later on.

ASUS VW246H 24″ 2ms(GTG) HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor
IN WIN Dragon Slayer mATX Mini Tower -Great looking case IMO!
OCZ ModXStream Pro 700W Modular Power Supply
Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
EVGA SuperClocked GeForce GTX 560 1GB GDDR5 HDCP Ready with SLI
GIGABYTE Intel Z68 Micro ATX Motherboard
SAMSUNG 470 Series 128GB SSD – dual boot Win7/FreeBSD
SAMSUNG 1TB 7200 RPM HDD – storage

It’s been a week now and compared to what I was working with it’s a huge leap in performance and capability. It’s taken every program and game I can throw at it with the highest settings and responded ” Is that the best you got? Bring it on!”. Wow it’s been a long time since I could build a system like this for myself. I know there are bigger and better builds, but for me… for what I was able to spend this leaves me grinning from ear to ear.

Future expansion capabilities include:
- unlocked cpu for overclocking
- motherboard setup for overclocking and includes beefier components such as solid core capacitors instead of liquid electrolytic capacitors.
- 2 more slots to double the ram
- another slot to pair up a matching video card and run in SLI mode
- tons of room for more drives

FLOSS Weekly had a very good episode taking an in depth look at PC-BSD with a Q&A session involving one of the developers and FreeBSD Girl, Randi Harper.

If you want to hear what PC-BSD is all about and what changes are coming in the new version then go take a look – [LINK] Definitely worth watching!!

Just watched the new episode “Heart of Archness” and it was pure awesome! I was in kind of a crappy mood but this was the light moment I needed, go watch and have a laugh.

Let’s face it no matter who you are, you have your preferences about what operating system you like best, we all do. Some are so fanatically driven that they will go into a frothing rage fit when they find their opinions challenged. I try to see things as a learning experience and hopefully take away some useful information from. I even admit Windows has it’s place in the computing world, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it!

Despite the fact that BSD has been around in one form or another since 1977…. Linux based operating systems have always gotten the limelight in the press. From my observations I think this is mainly due to BSD getting tied up with IP fights in the courts [USL v. BSDi] as well as the fact that  for a long time development was focused on servers not on the desktop. In fact Linus is even quoted as saying in an interview that “If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.” In my mind linux and BSD devotees should consider themselves on the same team rather than at odds.

With all that said, many Linux fans have poo-poo’d BSD for the desktop as long as I can remember, while controversy one way or the other will never truly be put to rest because of emotional zeal, Phoronix has a nice article detailing a default install of PC-BSD 8.2 vs a default install of Ubuntu 11.04 with an eye focused on gaming. The end results were a respectable show of performance by PC-BSD that took the win. To me it’s not proof of who is better…. it’s simply one more statement in a long line of examples over the years,  that there are other choices for your desktop besides Linux based distributions if you don’t want Windows.

Read all about FreeBSD’s results here at this link – [LINK]

The new game coming out for linux based OS’s  and Mac OS X called Oil Rush looks like a lot of fun! It is currently in beta testing and if you want to pre-order you can have instant access according to their web page.  The graphics look really good and that’s a huge treat since most games playable on something other than windows look like they escaped from 1982.

While PC-BSD (FreeBSD) is not specifically supported chances are it will run just fine if you have the required hardware and drivers setup. Unfortunately my system is old enough that is doesn’t quite meet the minimum requirements, bummer. Even though it might not work on BSD or my system may be too slow, I’m considering buying it anyway just to help out game developers that support alternative platforms. Hell the current pre-order price is only $19.99 and I’ve wasted more than that on a bad meal dining out.

If you are a BSD gamer and like real-time strategy games you should check it out !  [LINK]

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