BSD & Gaming

Photoshop is a really powerful application, and the recent versions have some pretty amazing capabilities. The downside for somebody like me is the cost of it. While many software applications give discounts to students, that doesn’t help me because my student days are long since over. Even if I had a student discount it still requires an investment which I need for other things given the state of the economy. If I was a professional in a position where the expense was necessary it’d be worth it. However I’ve been using a free open source alternative that does everything I’ve needed so far.. The Gimp.

The Gimp has been around a really long time, I’ve been using it off and on for ages now. While I love the fact that there is a version available for FreeBSD, PCBSD, or the various linux flavors, there are even downloads compatible with Windows making it available to a huge audience. It is a quite powerful image manipulation program in it’s own right with plenty of free plugins, filters, and brushes to suit your needs.

The Gimp’s layout can throw people off balance if they are used to photoshop. Even though many of the features and tools are the same in function, they may have a different name or place to find them that can be confusing for photoshop users. There is a version available that tries to ease that learning curve with a more familiar layout called GimpShop. Since I am not a photoshop user I’ve never tried GIMPshop, but for someone interested in trying an alternative or wanting to transition over to free software it might be worth looking into.

The Gimp definitely has a slot in my “must have software” list and I think if you give it a shot I believe you’ll like it as well.

The Gimp – [LINK]

GimpShop – [LINK]

FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE is available.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

-zfsloader added
-zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14
-NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities
-UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support
-SMP support in PowerPC G5
-BIND 9.6.2-P2
-sendmail updated to 8.14.4
-OpenSSH updated to 5.4p1
-GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5

Announcement – [LINK]

Release notes – [LINK]

Download via official BitTorrent – [LINK]

Download via FTP mirrors – [LINK]

The O’Reilly folks put out a nice little article covering PCBSD’s ease of installation. I myself used FreeBSD for years compiling everything by hand contending on occasion with “dependency hell”.

Today I am definitely a PCBSD convert. PCBSD’s simple gui installer makes upgrading or new installs a snap. I also love how easy it is to install new software or upgrade existing programs using the PBI system.

Read the article here – [LINK]

Get your July issue now! It’s becoming a free monthly magazine and you can download your copy in PDF format directly from their web site.

Get the July issue here – [LINK]

Back issues are available as well – [LINK]

I finally got around to typing up what I did to get STO running on my BSD laptop. It’s quick and dirty but covers the basics.

If you want to get the details just click on article #5 to the right or click on this – [LINK]

According to the mailing list and the News section on FreeBSD.org the final release candidate for 8.1 is out. Check out the two links for details.

[link1]

[link2]

As promised I put together the details of my FO3 adventure and what it took to get it running. The WineHQ page had tons of good info on it, many of the people there had already done the hard part of figuring out what was needed. I just had a few minor changes for my hardware and that was about it.

I’m hoping Fallout: New Vegas will also work when I get my hands on it.

Details here – [LINK]

Ok I finally got it up and running, it’s far from ideal, there are definitely some bugs but it is running. I’ll put together and post the full details in a few days once I’ve had time to tweak it some more and see what I can accomplish.

Basically a combination of following the details found on WineHQ [LINK], some hacks, and lots of lost sleep. The sound or lack of it is the one major hurdle I’ve hit so far, the game doesn’t think there is a sound driver/card setup. However if you check the details on the WineHQ link above you will see it is a WINE bug not specific to Fallout 3 that I hope they will remedy in the not too distant future.

I have to say I’m thrilled just to have it running at all. Now if I can load up all my favorite mods and have them work I’ll be a happy post-apocalyptic camper! Say that three times fast and you get a free box of ‘Cheesy Poofs‘!

Time to sleep – g’night!

I eventually plan to move to a more rural area, but this has a serious downside. By that I mean having very limited access to the internet. The area I want to live in some day is currently saddled with only one real option and that is mobile broadband. Almost all of the plans I see are capped around 5gig a month depending on the provider. If you’re a serious geek a mere 5gig per month is nothing. Hell just thinking of chopping my access down that much makes me feel panicky and claustrophobic!

There doesn’t really seem to be much choice but to learn to live with the 5gig and adjust my net habits – ugh it’s a damned depressing thought. Maybe by that point I’ll have a real life (whatever that is) and won’t care, or perhaps the zombie apocalypse will occur and I’ll be too busy reloading to worry about my internet connection. Who knows.

I did think of one small thing to help cut back on bandwidth, instead of browsing with Firefox which sucks down tons of flash, pictures, and various other media… I could use the browser called Lynx.

For those not familiar, Lynx is an old school text only browser that won’t hog your bandwidth so much. It’s not pointy clicky,  but if you just want to surf, read the news, or check blogs it works great. It’s available for just about every OS (FreeBSD, linux, Windows, etc).

If you want to check it out take a look here – [LINK]

I tried, I really tried with Firefox 3 to learn to like the “Awesome Bar“. To begin with, the name bugged me, “awesome bar”… really?

Ok be good, that voice in my head told me in that sickening patronizing tone that is so prevalent in today’s politically correct culture.  The voice continued to badger me with guilt saying – just give it a try and stay open minded.

Grumbles…. fine fine whatever.

I’m a card carrying member of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t goddam fix it!” and the “Keep It Simple…ya Stupid idiot!” groups. SO, needless to say every time I hear about how someone somewhere gets what they think is a bright idea, usually in my world….it ain’t.

Well here I am many many, months later and my final conclusion? It sucks the big one. It almost never gives me anything related to what I want. Instead of saving me time it wastes it by feeding me useless crap to look at.  I end up typing the URL by hand if I know it or hitting up a search engine to find it.

Fine… it’s faster that way anyhow… so how do I get rid of it? Ahhhh the ever helpful about:config

Search for browser.urlbar.maxRichResults and change the value to “-1“, you can change it to “0” which most sites suggest, but I find it creates a slight flicker at the bottom of the URL entry field. By using a value of “-1” that flicker does not appear for me.