Posts Tagged ‘free’

Nice 2-D Linux Game, Aquaria [ Free full download for 2009 ]

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Independent game publisher, Bit Blot, has released their public beta of the linux port of Aquaria.

Originally released commercially for Windows and Mac platforms, this game is now downloadable for “free” to all linux users.
Free full version available for download only until January 2010!

The game, Aquaria, has won some awards and gets praises for its intuitive gameplay and graphics.

More description of the game here.

See video of gameplay below!

Download before 2009 ends to get the free Full version of Aquaria!

Now who says gaming isn’t for linux users?

Thanks for WebUpd8.org [News Source]

PS : If you are having problems with the display resolution resulting in your monitor/LCD not being to support and showing a blank screen, open terminal mode

Press “Ctrl-Alt-F1″ on your keyboard

Login with your username and password and Stop GDM

sudo stop gdm
or
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

Copy the default-1.xml over to the Aquaria settings/preference folder as usersettings.xml [ overwriting the original]

cp ~/aquaria/default-1.xml ~/.Aquaria/preferences/usersettings.xml

Edit the xml file

nano ~/.Aquaria/preferences/usersettings.xmlusersettings.xml

Edit the video section so that full screen mode is disabled, set to 16bits mode, turn off framebuffer and turn resolution to 1024×768.

<ScreenMode resx=”1024″ resy=”768″ bits=”16″ fbuffer=”0″ full=”0″ vsync=”1″ darkfbuffer=”1″ darkbuffersize=”256″ />

Start GDM again

sudo start gdm
or
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

This time the game will run in windowed mode. Change the video settings within the game until it works to your desire.
Or you could also manually adjust the parameters within the ~/.Aquaria/preferences/usersettings.xml file

Linux Kernel in a Nutshell

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

The kernel is the core of the linux operating system.

Most linux distros come with prebuilt kernel that aims to support as much hardware as possible and kernels are constantly evolving and upgraded with new inclusions to support for latest hardware.

The updated linux kernel sources are kept and maintained by www.kernel.org.

Though most distros include a prebuilt kernel to support most desktops, laptops and servers, there are ways whereby the kernel can be optimized by tuning it only to support the hardware that the linux OS will be installed in. This will increase performance and boot time of the system.

To learn more about configuring and building the kernel, there is a very good book about linux kernels and it is published by O’Reilly. The title of the book is “Linux Kernel in a Nutshell” by author Greg Kroah-Hartman. And in line with the idea of opensource and GPL, the author has made his book to be free for downloading online and has declared it under the Creative Commons license such that anyone can download and redistribute it. For those whom still prefer to hold a physical book in their hands, they can still purchase it from their local bookstores.

To configure and build kernels more easily, SGLNX recommends Kernelcheck, which is an automated script with an easy user interface. “Linux in a Nutshell” can be used to compliment Kernelcheck when configuring and understanding the kernel parameters and options.

Wikipedia’s entry on Kernel(Computing)
Ubuntuforums Kernelcheck HOWTO thread
Kernelcheck’s blog

Download the “Linux in a Nutshell” ebook here

Can we use Firefox please? It is safer!

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Some interesting news for leisure.

Last week in Washington DC, a staff from the State Department requests permission from Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to use Mozilla Firefox instead in the office..

He says it is safer. And free! [ That did raise some laughter ].

A snippet of Hillary Clinton’s reply

“….. help us save money on stuff that we shouldn’t be wasting money on, and give us the chance to manage our resources to do more things like Firefox, okay?”

If the US of A is encouraging towards open source, why not us too?

Respect to Jim Finkle whom raised this suggestion in the DC Town Hall Meeting!

News source : Boing Boing
Actual Release : USA State Government QDDR Hillary Clinton’s remarks dated 10th July 2009