BSD & Gaming

August 2011 BSD Magazine is now available! Go to http://www.bsdmag.org and download your free copy.

.

.

Last xmas my family was generous and got me the little 10″ Zt-180 tablet I wanted. It’s been a lot of fun to use especially since this little “hu flung dung” epad has more features than many pricier alternatives, and does everything I want with a price tag that was well under 200 bucks. Gotta love it!!

It originally came with Android 2.1 1030 but the good news is I finally got around to upgrading the firmware to Android 2.2 0603! It’s fast and has flash support. I haven’t messed with it much to check on the actual performance but it seems pretty good so far. When I make the time I’ll put together detailed info on the upgrade and how I made it work for me.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I really hate so called ‘reality tv shows‘ as they are not in my opinion real or even remotely entertaining. With that said…. I do enjoy the show called “Ice Pilots”. The show has been out for two seasons already with season three in the works, however it is a new discovery for me.

Ice Pilots seems more of a documentary than a ‘reality show‘, it does have a little too much drama for my preference but I can get past that watching them fly and maintain the old planes… that aspect I love!  It amazes me the amount of effort and skill needed to keep planes like that going. I really enjoy seeing them fly but would have zero interest in the work involved.

If it is available from your tv provider,  it’s really worth a look for those who like vintage aircraft.

With the launch of the final Shuttle flight by Space Shuttle Atlantis, we also get the bad news that at least 7000 people will be looking for new jobs due to D.C.’s lack of support for the agency . How ridiculous is that??

It never made any sense to me that NASA has been underfunded for so many decades. NASA has been the ‘goose that laid the golden egg‘ in terms of technological payoffs that have touched almost every aspect of our lives, and instead of feeding the goose, D.C. bureaucrats have decided to cut the head off…. way to go dumb-asses!

SGU seemed to get a lot of negative reviews from viewers, which were in my opinion really unwarranted. I really hate to see it go, for me  it was an enjoyable series where I cared about the characters and the actors made me believe that on some level they liked what they were doing – far too many series cannot achieve either of those necessary components.

I’ll never understand why the masses seem to prefer crappy tv & movies so much. The amount of absolute garbage these days is staggering, yet a decently engaging show like SGU gets canned…. sigh. Firefly, Jericho, all the good stuff goes and the junk stays… the heroes will fall and the idiots shall inherit the airwaves.

The April Issue Articles Include:

• Interview with Dru Lavigne

• Why You Use FreeBSD Just May Start With A ‘Z’

• OpenBSD improves upon /etc/rc.d/

• DragonFly News

• Package Management for the upcoming PC-BSD 9

• Converting a Physical Partition with FreeBSD to a vmware Image

• Build appliances with QEMU and OpenBSD

• Drupal on FreeBSD part 5

• Mutt On OS X part 2

• Realtime Weather Data EMWIN on FreeBSD

• Benchmarking Different Kind of Storage

• Content Management Made Easy The Open Source Way!

Get it fresh off the press by going to BSDMag.Org for your free copy now.

.

.

Just released, PC-BSD 8.2 [Hubble Edition] go get it now!!

PC-BSD 8.2 changes include the following:

• FreeBSD 8.2-Release
• KDE 4.5.5
• Added ability to select file-system type and encryption during auto-partitioning
• Able to toggle between MBR/GPT partitioning
• Various bug fixes to the wireless / network managers

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.)

<rant>

I’ve been dying for some decent programming lately. Remembering that SGU should be coming up sometime soon I researched it only to find out what many of you probably already know… it’s been canceled with the final ten episodes to be aired starting March 7. Great…just great! Firefly, Jericho, and anything of even the smallest amount of quality goes down the tubes and yet the bilge I wouldn’t force on my worst enemy is on year after year, what the hell is wrong with network executives?!?

There has been very little worth watching on television in the last handful of years. Most of what is broadcast is craptastic in the extreme. Take for example the vast majority of these so called reality shows.. complete.. utter.. shite. While I’m complaining about tv if I see one more dam law enforcement/cop/court room related show or one more doctor/hospital/nurse themed show…. well I don’t know what I’ll do but it’ll be bad… very bad….. probably involve lots and lots of swearing…

For another thing, even though it’s old news I still need to get it out of my system…. you went from ‘SCIFI‘ to ‘SYFY‘ really ?!?!? Really?!? Someone there thought that was a good idea?!? Are you stupid?!? Hmmm first SYFY then canceling SGU… yea lot of winner ideas going on over there lately…. lotsa luck.

</rant>

So I was watching the U.S. version of the show Being Human, and all of a sudden this great tune came on and I had to find out more about it. A search for the lyrics located it right away. The song was called Wolves And Werewolves from The Pack A.D. ‘s album entitled Funeral Mixtape.

I’m not much of an audiophile or even general music enthusiast so I don’t keep up with the industry or any specific groups, hell I stopped listening to broadcast radio years ago and when I need to have something on in the car I mix my own cd. However once in a while something stands out for me like this song did and I have to track it down. If you are into anything at all that has a jagged bluesy riff sound give it a listen sometime, these girls rock!

Back in 2000 when Red Alert 2 was first released I fell in love with it immediately.
While I enjoyed the previous C&C game Tiberian Sun very much and still play it occasionally, it just didn’t capture the imagination like Red Alert 2 did.

Growing up in the last gasp of the Cold War I can still remember doing Civil Defense safety drills in elementary school. Those years made a strong impression on me, the fear of war with the Soviet Union weighed heavily on everyone’s mind and even though as children we may not have understood all the details we knew it would be something bad. In fact to this day any book, movie, or game that reflects the feel or imagery of the Cold War era still evokes an emotional response and fires my imagination. That connection has even led to a need to collect some Civil Defense relics in recent years… go figure. There is something about that iconic CD logo that I’m drawn to. Anyway enough of that I’ll get back on track about playing Red Alert 2 on BSD using WINE.

The ‘Good News’ :

Playing Red Alert 2 on BSD [ FreeBSD or PC-BSD ] is possible and it seems to run well now that I actually have it installed.

The ‘Bad News’ :

I have not been able to get RA2 to install easily. I still don’t know what the issue is but for whatever reason trying to get RA2 to install properly straight from the CD just isn’t happening. I keep getting errors preventing it from completing the install. I won’t go into all the gory details but basically I gave up and did what the Ubuntu Linux folks did, installed it on a Winblows box – then copied it to my WINE drive.   @*&# !!! Bah!

Once the installation ‘goat rope’ was over I ran into issues with the damned cd copy protection crap, I hate games that insist on the CD being in the drive in order to play – it doesn’t prevent piracy it just exposes the original install cd to potential for damage. Needless to say I had to continue to take the Ubuntu communities lead and follow their advice on countering that nonsense.

Red Alert 2 is over a decade old, but I think it is still a great game and worth the effort to install. I realy prefer RA2 versus what I consider to be the ‘over the top’ cartoon graphics and general silliness of RA3. If anyone ever finds a ‘finished’ conversion mod making RA3 into a likeness of RA2 please let me know. I found a few mods that are or were being worked on but found nothing complete.

WineHQ’s information about Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Ubuntu documentation for Red Alert 2 under WINE – [LINK]

Wikipedia information on Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Red Alert Den’s custom maps, missions, and misc. files – [LINK]