What are you currently installing/playing?

[Stephen Morgan]

There's a lot of talk of highbrow things like books here, not so much about things that are more broadly relevant, like TV and computer games.

Obviously a lot of people here think TV is the devil-tool of corporate brainwashing. Whereas it is in fact there in inform, educate and entertain, as the BBC charter says. Nonetheless I've gone for video games. And other software. Anything that looks cool is welcome in this thread, along with anything with decent gameplay.

Here's one for starters, the old Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure. You don't see many text adventures these days, of course, and this is an old one. Still, the books seem to have lasted well. Also I think it's technically illegal in that I downloaded it off the internet at some point in the past and just found it on my hard-drive and had to install a Z-machine interpreter (widely available, I'm informed, on all systems) to play it.

I've included a screenshot:



So please recommend any other programmes or games you like, preferably free in that I am morally opposed to parting with money, but other people might enjoy more expensive selections.

[82_28]

I'm currently playing Dragon Age Origins on my PS3 and got a pre-Steam version of Half Life 1 running on wine on my laptop.

I spent three hours on the phone yesterday talking my dad thru a clean Ubuntu install on his desktop. He likes it! I gave him the grand tour and everything.

[82_28]

BTW, here's an excellent source on getting Hitchhikers Guide on your machine from December at Metafilter.

http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Pos ... y-Go-Wrong

[NaturalMystik]

Hah, classic! I remember playing lots of these txt adventures back in the day, and they also go well if you work in an office and need to kill time! I played an HP Lovecraft one called "The Lurking Horror".

These days I can't stop playing Dungeons and Dragons Online. It's free to play but of course you can buy points or a subscription if you want more content or twinked out gear for your character... It's a lot of fun to play but highly addictive...

[82_28]

Say, Stephen, what's that system status and monitor widget you got running? I want that. I'm ubuntu and running gnome too.

[justdrew]

ahh Zork.

how about Inigo Gets Out? Anyone seen a hypercard emulator?

I tell ya, apple really blew it with hypercard. they coulda started the web with it if it had been developed properly.

and speaking of, any of the old Bill Atkinson games are always fun.

[82_28]

Lady just got me Mass Effect 2 for Valentimes day. Looks like it's no 82_28 for awhile on RI if it's as good as they say. Sorry.

Installing now. We'll see how it goes.

I don't understand how she can bitch at me for lack of sex and then buys me video games on holidays. Believe it or not, I think this means she's a keeper and I also need to step it up a notch for her. You know you're yolked when you start talking like that!

[Stephen Morgan]

Say, Stephen, what's that system status and monitor widget you got running? I want that. I'm ubuntu and running gnome too.

sudo apt-get install conky-all
wget http://gnome-look.org/CONTENT/content-f ... 2-2.tar.gz
tar xzvf 92328-conky_colors-5.0b2-2.tar.gz
cd conkycolors
make
sudo make install
./conky-colors --ubuntu --cputemp --swap --cpu=2 --battery --proc=4 --clock=off --calendar --hd=meerkat --network --rhythmbox=simple
conky -c ~/.conkycolors/conkyrc

Obviously you can add it to startup-programmes if you want, too, so it starts when Gnome does. Theres a thousand page thread at the Ubuntu forums website about .conkyrc files, if you want to enhance it a bit. Can do weather forecasts and that sort of thing, but I use the gnome-panel applet for that. Can check gmail too. It's quite simple to get it to execute terminal commands and show the result, too, so I have a second .conkyrc which displays premier league tables grabbed from an xml feed on the internet, one which shows mythtv-status output, that sort of thing.

As we're talking about games there's also the bsdgames package for ubuntu, which contains the text adventures "adventure" and "battlestar", as well as programmes like fortune and wargames. All command-line, mind.

For Ubuntu I would also recommend installing Nautilus-elementary, global menu bar, window applets, the New Hope theme, Dockbar X, the firefox add-ons Flash-Aid, NoScript, AdBlockPlus, Video DownloadHelper, eFirefox, and Tubestop. And gloobus-preview.

[82_28]

Thanks, Stephen.

All I can say is poor Windoze users. Gnome on Maverick Meerkat is absolutely beautiful. I've been using various distros of Linux exclusively for 10+ years. It has never ever been this good and seamless. It finally detects SD card slots, utilizes the stupid manufacturer buttons (my VAIO has a "web" button -- it works). My lady has a macbook pro and in my opinion, Gnome on Ubuntu's optimized for user friendliness iteration is the best desktop interface hands down. I have a small Win 7 partition which I've booted into once or twice and I cannot believe the shit people put up with and think this is the way computing just is. Drives me nuts. Then if something goes wrong they pay Geek Squad to come "fix it" or take their Mac to "Applecare".

I just taught my dad how to apt-get frozen bubble yesterday over the phone. He "can't believe this is all free", works and looks good too.

Anybody on a PC who has not tried it yet, get thee to ubuntu.com and download it and try it. Seriously. There are folks here at RI who will help you too. I'm one, Gnomad (penguin), justdrew and Stephen. I'm sure there are a few more.

[Stephen Morgan]

Thanks, Stephen.

Might need to install lm-sensors for the CPU temps.

All I can say is poor Windoze users. Gnome on Maverick Meerkat is absolutely beautiful. I've been using various distros of Linux exclusively for 10+ years. It has never ever been this good and seamless.

I first used Linux about that time, too. Slackware for me, which I still dual boot today. Installed off a series of floppy discs, of course. Windows 98 before that. X Windows was still in beta then, at least on Slackware. Red Hat was the big distro at the time. Always liked the command line, so I used to use the command line programmes, lynx for browsing, slrn for usenet, mailx for email. Still do with slrn and mailx. So when I came back to linux after several years without a computer, to find Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) as the main distro I was quite surprised by it all. My current computer has over a hundred times as much RAM as the last one I owned, mind.

It finally detects SD card slots, utilizes the stupid manufacturer buttons (my VAIO has a "web" button -- it works).

My Acer function buttons also work perfectly well. Even the wireless and USB DVB tuner cards work out of the box, for the last couple of versions. There is an annoying ACPI problem (a known kernel bug), but I found a very useful guide to patching and recompiling a kernel on the ubuntu forums so even that's sorted now.

My lady has a macbook pro and in my opinion, Gnome on Ubuntu's optimized for user friendliness iteration is the best desktop interface hands down. I have a small Win 7 partition which I've booted into once or twice and I cannot believe the shit people put up with and think this is the way computing just is. Drives me nuts. Then if something goes wrong they pay Geek Squad to come "fix it" or take their Mac to "Applecare".

It's just a pity almost all computers come with Windows installed. This computer originally had Vista on it, which I used to download Ubuntu and switched pretty much straight away. It was a revelation, to have a computer start in less than five minutes, then not continuously nag me about giving my e-mail to register the pre-installed MacAfee, the literally dozens of icons on the desktop for all the Acer shit installed. Kept it briefly for a couple of games, which turned out to work on WINE, so Windows went totally, recovery partition and all. Turns out I don't even need wine, as the games in question run natively on ScummVM.

I just taught my dad how to apt-get frozen bubble yesterday over the phone. He "can't believe this is all free", works and looks good too.

The great tool of the oppressor is ignorance. Americans don't have universal healthcare because, having never experienced it, they don't demand it. Computer users not using Gnu/Linux consider the OS an integral part of the computer, whether the utterly awful windows or the incredibly expensive Mac.

Anybody on a PC who has not tried it yet, get thee to ubuntu.com and download it and try it. Seriously. There are folks here at RI who will help you too. I'm one, Gnomad (penguin), justdrew and Stephen. I'm sure there are a few more.

Don't even have to install it, as it runs off a Live CD. Or can be installed on the same partition as windows using wubi. I'm going to post some screen shots because I like Ubuntu being pretty.

[nathan28]

So now this is a Linux thread?

I'm currently installing SoftWord2010(?), a proprietary program, because I need 100%, not 75%, not 90%, MS Office compatibility to share documents and don't get that with any of the open source office programs, especially not with the new-new .docx in MS Office 2010.

I prefer Gnome to Windows's "functionality" and Mac's kindergartenish condescension (though frankly I need to keep a Mac around here for use by people who have never seen a command line), but Linux also owns the worst of all GUIs, KDE ("Imagine if Windows 7 had a child through artificial insemination with its great-great-grandfather DOSSHELL, it was aborted, stitched back together, jolted alive again with Javascript and then put in a time machine and sent to run in a virtual machine").

[Stephen Morgan]

The Desktop, with CoverGloobus, Global Menu Bar, window applets, Docky, DockbarX and Conky.



The nautilus elementary embedded terminal:



The ne clutterflow:



Elementary Firefox:



A couple of screenshots from the ScummVM game Broken Sword:





And I also don't like KDE. Luckily I don't have to use it, even in Slackware (where KDE is the default DE) it also comes with Xfce, IceWM, and various others.

[Cosmic Cowbell]

[nathan28]

Hey, I'm not wearing glasses. Right now. And I am secretly ashamed to admit that I run linux or know what a command line is. I also do my most car repairs and maintenance that don't involve gear pullers and engine hoists, too, if that makes me seem more manly.


I installed ubuntu on an old laptop after it started taking an increasingly long time to boot up, and was amazed that it was possible to have a computer running in the year 2010 in under a minute, or that I could open a word processor in a few seconds as opposed to two minutes.

Then I bought a wireless router and found out that my personal machine, with Vista wasn't compatible with it if it turned on any encryption. I discovered that ubuntu's network manager was painless... Also didn't take five minutes to finishing booting up and logging in.

But really, it was the work laptop I had with XP on it. It took no less than an average of 12 minutes between turning it on and being able to open any program. Part of it was all the institutional software, but even when I pared that down it was still taking on average over 10 minutes. Yes, I timed it. I takes under a minute in to boot and log in on linux.

Of course, it also has intermittent keyboard freezes and other crap that prevent me from even getting out of X and require hard reboots. My iPod is six years old and only sort-of compatible. The video card on my work machine is only kind-of compatible.

OTOH, I can image a DVD, or burn video files to DVD, and not have a bunch of "WE HAVE DETECTED PIRATE ACTIVITY ON YOUR COMPUTER TRIANGULATING LOCATION AND CONTACTING MPAA NOW" messages and without having to download some highly questionable software some Russian dude wrote that has a weaponized version of ebola hidden in the program.

I'm not opposed to Mac in theory, but the premium on them is too damn high.

[Stephen Morgan]

Hi, me name's Dave, I've been Windows free for 488 days...