Case Sensitivity

I read rants against Linux and other Unixlike operating systems, and one of the points that keep coming up is the supposed stupidity of case-sensitive filenames and commands.

I am convinced that these people are the same knuckle-dragging Neanderthals that type in either all lowercase or all uppercase, use text/”leet”speak like “OMG UR KEWL”, and generally groan every time they have to touch the keyboard. There is a Shift key on your keyboard for a reason, you know. If you’re too lazy to use it properly, perhaps you need to sell your computers and return to your previous job flipping burgers for McDonalds.

Is it really that difficult to use proper case? I realize the Windows operating system has probably dulled your senses, but I mean, come on. “I tried to open /etc/x11/xorg.conf but it said file not found OMGWTFBBQ!” That’s because the X in X11 is a capital letter, you know.

Yeah, these people really bug me. Sorry.

Gah.

On second thought, who is Microsoft to tell me I can’t use their precious technologies? I’ll keep FAT32 and Wine around. FAT32 has a single purpose now — my USB Flash Drive. Compatibility with just about everything, and I can even rescue files from poor, crappy Windows systems. Wine I won’t use for anything serious, just if I’m forced to run something, or just to play around with.

I truly believe that Codeweaver’s Crossover Office is about the best version of Wine we have available right now. They’re allowing downloads of a testing version of Crossover 6, and it is quite good. It runs a lot of stuff from the Windows world, even games. For example, it ran Half-Life and Counter-Strike 1.6 (from Steam) better than either Wine alone or Cedega could do. I would advise giving it a try.

But no, I haven’t weakened on my position with Microsoft enough to even consider returning to Windows. Never again. Their choices with Vista and the Novell deal prove that I cannot trust running their closed-source code on my machine.

Flash 9 Beta 2

Flash 9 Beta 2 is out.

I, unfortunately, had to stop using Beta 1, since it had problems with freezing, especially on videos from Youtube/Video Google. It would either freeze the video (complete with audio shriek) for a few seconds or just completely lock up the browser. I found that dealing with Flash 7’s problems was better than this, regardless of how good 9 was otherwise.

I am happy to report that Beta 2 works much better, and I think I’m going to keep this one. There is still the occasional quick freeze, but it only lasts for a moment, is much less frequent than the beta 1 freezes, and has yet to lock up my browser (crosses fingers).

I would still like to see this opened up, of course. Closed source, proprietary technologies do no one any good, but we can tolerate it if the company and technology do not cross the lines of evil that many have before.

Now to watch the next bizarre video on Youtube…

Again, the deed is done.

The magical feeling I got today from typing mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1 was great.

But the work had just begun. I had other fat32 partitions that I wanted to get rid of, but they held huge amounts of data (no, not porn!) that I had to shuffle around before I could do a mkfs on them, too.

But the deed is now done. I once again have a separate /home partition (yay!) and a couple of data partitions that I have just stuck onto a random, nonstandard part of the filesystem (I mean, really, where do you put your music collection and such on a Linux filesystem — besides /home, which I really didn’t want to put it?). FreeBSD is still lurking about, too, in its own filesystem. I plan to leave that be for now, and go into it occasionally to do some testing and learning. It’s quite fun to have yet another Unixlike OS to go into.

Next, I remove vfat and ntfs support from the kernel. Then, Microsoft, I won’t be using any of your precious so-called “intellectual property.” Not exactly an appropriate term when applied to Microsoft. I don’t see much intelligence coming from monkeyboy.

Wii

Edit – post doesn’t really belong on this blog. Removed.

FreeBSD, revisited

I’ve tried FreeBSD (and its easier-to-use derivative, PC-BSD) in the past with varying degrees of success — or should I say FAILURE. Trying to install FreeBSD alone has met with various failures in the way of 3d support, other hardware support, getting things to install and run, and other various problems, and PC-BSD, while easy to set up and install, was terribly unstable — X would crash after only a short time.

So I tried installing straight FreeBSD (6.1) again. Well, twice. The first time, the install didn’t go very well at all, since I was not able to boot back into my install after restarting (it couldn’t find the kernel for some reason). So I tried again, and at least got into the install. From there, it was quite a chore to even get X up and running properly — it did not support my mouse plugged into the USB port for some reason, so I found the USB to PS/2 adapter and used it. Even then, I had to figure out how to get the mouse working again since it wasn’t working before. After that, I finally got X up and running with Fluxbox as the desktop.

Things have been going pretty smoothly since — I have accelerated 3d using the nvidia drivers, Unreal Tournament (through Linux emulation) and Quake 3 are running well, sound works, and things seem pretty snappy and stable. I’m still missing quite a bit — there’s no native FreeBSD Flash plugin so I’ll have to figure out how to get it working through Linux emulation, I can’t get Doomsday to compile, and I haven’t even explored some of my other peripheral’s compatibility (like gamepads). But I’m working on it, and hopefully I can get it up and running really well, to have yet another alternative to Windows, and experience in another Unixlike OS.

I love Free software.

Argh, Microsoft.

The final straw has been broken. No more will I sit on the fence and make excuses that I need Windows for gaming. If game developers don’t come to Linux, forget them.

Ballmer doesn’t want us using their precious technologies? Fine. Out goes Wine, Samba, the vfat kernel module, and Mono. Out goes the fat32 partitions. Out goes my Microsoft mouse and gamepad. And out goes anything else Ballmer can dream up that we stole from them, within reason. If they say we stole their very notion of what an operating system should be, then it’s time for Ballmer to visit a psycho ward. Hell, he’s already mostly there.

I’m done with you. You make me physically ill.

[Footnote: I have edited this post to remove vulgar and hateful comments in an attempt to clean up the content of this blog.]

Beryl

Out of complete curiosity, I unmasked and emerged the Beryl Window Manager to see what all the fuss about pretty 3d interfaces was about. I replaced KDE’s window manager with Beryl’s, started it up and watched the pretty effects take over.

Immediately I had windows that wobbled, menus that shimmered in and out of existence, and a workspace changer that acted like faces on a rotating cube. Nice, but ultimately worthless. I guess I can kind of see the appeal — desktops are a bit boring, and this is a neat way to spruce it up.

There was a ton of customization that one could do thanks to a little GUI config panel, like customize how menus and windows faded in and out (or not, if you disable the effect), how certain effects behave, and so on. So it seemed like it was a very capable and complete (or at least, nearly complete enough to count) 3D system, and it didn’t require horribly ridiculous system requirements like Vista’s effects will.

However, the whole thing was very buggy — several times the whole thing crashed on me, leaving me with a desktop without a window manager. Fortunately, a system tray program was running by default that allowed me to either restart Beryl or switch to another window manager. Worse, however, was attempting to play a 3D game in this environment — after going fullscreen into the game and it running slower than usual, trying to leave the game locked X and disabled my keyboard. Being lazy, I just reset the system.

So Beryl has some work to be done on it, but it does look sort of neat. I am not very interested in it, however, since I feel that these effects are pretty much worthless and bog down one’s system. But for those who like desktop eye candy, it seems Beryl will become the de facto 3d window manager for Linux when its stability issues are resolved.

Ah, fine Wine.

Removing myself from Windows is easy when I don’t have a craving for a game that won’t work in Linux (or doesn’t work well enough via various methods). Still, I enjoy trying to run Windows programs now and again. Not only games, but normal Windows programs. It is interesting how well Wine can work sometimes, and makes me appreciate all of the hard work put into this neat little program by its developers.

So, screenshots. Wine running several plain Windows programs, not really complex games (I’m sure you don’t count Minesweeper as a complex game. And boy, do I suck at it). I have unfortunately had less success using it on actual games — they all seem to have various problems with handling fullscreen mode (it acts like it doesn’t exactly know how to just pass everything on to the game itself, instead treating it like just another window, or not able to give it focus). But then again, this is why I have Windows a reboot away — the difficulty in running such programs in Linux.

Ah, well.

Java, Opened.

Bah, politics. Democans and Republicrats, it’s all the same.

So on to actual news.

Sun is going to open-source Java under the GPL. Wait, what? Really?

This could be really good. Sun, if you do this, and do it right, you could win some big support in people’s eyes. I still see Sun trying to keep control of the language specification itself (I really wish someone else would since the language itself has many things that truly irritate me, the biggest of which is its use of try/catch blocks on everything), but maybe in the open-source world, some people can address some of the technical issues many have with Java (namely speed and memory issues in complex applications).

Myself, I’d love to just take Java and put a big ol’ fork in it. Make a language based on Java, call it Tea or something (yeah, I’m bad with naming things), take out all of the garbage and poor language choices polluting Java, and have a true cross-platform language that is the best of all worlds.

Okay, it probably won’t happen. But what can ya do but dream?

(And incidentally, Novell, please go away. Your deal with Microsoft to become their pawn in a patent war with Linux disgusts us all, and makes you just as bad or worse than SCO ever was in most people’s eyes. I hope you are all begging for change on the street next year.)