Sometimes I wonder why I get so late in trying certain things, even though I know about them all along. One of such things is "Wine". I have been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for around 3 years now. I used to play PC games on Windows before that. After switching to Linux it became an occasional affair on a dual boot system. And lately (for around year or so) it has completely stopped.
But last night, out of the blue I decided to give Wine a try to play some of the games I have. I have played three games halfway through their storyline - Halo 2, Warcraft III - Reign of Chaos, Need For Speed - Most Wanted. I installed Wine on my Fedora 8 system last night and installed Warcraft III with it. It installed alright and started smoothly as well. However the scrolling around the map was very sluggish and made the regular tasks very difficult to perform. I applied the registry tweaks suggested in WineHQ, but no help. Only today when I read the WineHQ forum posts again, did I find the -opengl option. When I ran War3.exe from command line with -opengl option, the map scrolling became smooth. The map still doesn't scroll smoothly when mouse pointer touches the edges. However I have a hunch that it might have to do with me using Compiz. It's not a big problem, I liked using keyboard. Sound also doesn't work right now. I could successfully complete one campaign. Unfortunately it crashed while saving the game state.
But overall I am glad I can play games again without rebooting into Windows. Another cool thing was I could start playing from the stage where I left it on Windows. I just had to copy the "Program Files\Warcraft III\save\Profile1" folder from Windows partition to the new Wine installation. I love it when software programs don't unnecessarily complicate things under the name of sophistication. I couldn't have restored my old game data if Warcraft creators had decided to encrypt or mangle this data and save in some non-intuitive location deep down the directory structure.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Today's slashdot and open source
If you read today's slashdot, you couldn't have missed these two news being posted one after the other. It supplements my previous post on open souce.
Two biggies of the industry opening up. Cisco's news isn't that big, these days it doesn't make sense to develop protocol libraries behind high walls anyway. This however shows that the big companies will be seeing the value in open source; or the futility of keeping the source closed.
There is another news on slashdot that is an interesting read: The Rise of Geekdom.
I think the following para from the article describes the geek phenomenon very well.
Two biggies of the industry opening up. Cisco's news isn't that big, these days it doesn't make sense to develop protocol libraries behind high walls anyway. This however shows that the big companies will be seeing the value in open source; or the futility of keeping the source closed.
There is another news on slashdot that is an interesting read: The Rise of Geekdom.
I think the following para from the article describes the geek phenomenon very well.
But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Cost of Open Source
Recently there have been couple of news regarding Open Source, and it forced me into thinking about it.
Bill Gates, at some event said
Then there was a report saying
That's one interesting (up-side-down?!) way of looking at the phenomenon of open source. I never thought of it like that. Coming to think of it, it is absolutely true if you have a traditional businessman hat on your head.
Today one can fulfill all their computing needs - from web browsing to photo editing, from instant messaging to corporate email - by paying absolutely no money. For every computing activity there are free software tools available. One can argue, that if Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds (and countless other geeks like them) hadn't happened and everyone had written programs to make money, then maybe all of them would have earned those $60 billion.... Economics has never been my strong point, but I don't think economies run by so simple additions and subtractions.
Also there is another dimension to this argument. The above argument won't hold good if one looks back 50 years, instead of last 20 years. No one would have believed 50 years ago, that you could make big bucks just by sitting in your garage for few months, punching some keys and creating nothing but a photo editing program. But the advancements in computing showed that you can do that. The computing revolution opened variety of venues and making money by selling software was just one of them. For obvious reasons that became the most attractive route; and to some people (traditional businessmen) it appeared to be the only one.
If one expands the scope of this argument beyond just decades, then I think the phenomenon of open source is creating enormous amount of wealth that we may haven't yet recognized. Also I don't think anyone could have stopped it from happening. It happened because it was the very natural thing to happen with software. And if it was something as bad as mentioned in above quotes, then by laws of evolution it would have died by now. (Taking my own advice above, I shouldn't jump to theory of evolution based only on last 20 years. But we will see.) On the contrary, there are predictions (from reputed sources) that open source is going to thrive and will overtake the proprietary world in near future.
I think Bill Gates is an admirable personality who will be noted as one of the smartest businessmen in the history of world, but I don't think he or M$ has done much good to the history of computing (their recent tactics undoing whatever good they might have done in their early days). There is something about people who fit in M$ culture. Their achievements or visions sound so wrong to me, even before I know they are affiliated to M$. I had read about Ray Ozzie and his startup Groove in Jessica Livingstone's "Founders at work". Almost every chapter of that book inspired me one way or the other, but I didn't get Ray Ozzie's story. His approach to technology - described in sophisticated business lingo - just bounced off me (call it my incompetence, but that's the way it is). I wasn't sure about my gut feeling, until recently I found it echoing in Joel Spolsky's post (Yes, joelonsoftware fame). He describes Ozzie (who is now M$'s Chief Software Architect) as Architecture Astronaut, analysing Hailstorm project, or recent Live Mesh project. The whole article confirmed my views.
Just yesterday I read about this entrepreneur 'Nathan Myhrvold' on slashdot. This guy has come up with an innovative (?) idea of a company with bunch of smart people who just think about wildest ideas they can and patent them. His company doesn't plan to implement or manufacture them, but just accumulate patents and then sell them to other big companies. I was just stunned. The idea is indeed innovative ... a novel way of being as evil as one can imagine (in software industry perspective). Patent system is one of those systems that were conceived in the past for doing good in certain cases. But because these systems aren't revised with time, evil doers use them for doing anything but their original good intent (like the reservation system in India). Patent trolls are exploiting this system to the disadvantage of innovative startups. The above mentioned company is just an "uber patent troll". And yes... the guy is an ex-Microsoft CTO. What's interesting from yesterday's slashdot post is: there are links to two stories on same topic - one from NewYorker which cheers this new idea and another from an IP law firm which analyses the questionable intent. The contrast is noteworthy.
... so much for Microsoft bashing.
Check out an update to Altpublishr I released last week.
Bill Gates, at some event said
"there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with." Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.[full article]
Then there was a report saying
[original news]
"Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA
That's one interesting (up-side-down?!) way of looking at the phenomenon of open source. I never thought of it like that. Coming to think of it, it is absolutely true if you have a traditional businessman hat on your head.
Today one can fulfill all their computing needs - from web browsing to photo editing, from instant messaging to corporate email - by paying absolutely no money. For every computing activity there are free software tools available. One can argue, that if Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds (and countless other geeks like them) hadn't happened and everyone had written programs to make money, then maybe all of them would have earned those $60 billion.... Economics has never been my strong point, but I don't think economies run by so simple additions and subtractions.
Also there is another dimension to this argument. The above argument won't hold good if one looks back 50 years, instead of last 20 years. No one would have believed 50 years ago, that you could make big bucks just by sitting in your garage for few months, punching some keys and creating nothing but a photo editing program. But the advancements in computing showed that you can do that. The computing revolution opened variety of venues and making money by selling software was just one of them. For obvious reasons that became the most attractive route; and to some people (traditional businessmen) it appeared to be the only one.
If one expands the scope of this argument beyond just decades, then I think the phenomenon of open source is creating enormous amount of wealth that we may haven't yet recognized. Also I don't think anyone could have stopped it from happening. It happened because it was the very natural thing to happen with software. And if it was something as bad as mentioned in above quotes, then by laws of evolution it would have died by now. (Taking my own advice above, I shouldn't jump to theory of evolution based only on last 20 years. But we will see.) On the contrary, there are predictions (from reputed sources) that open source is going to thrive and will overtake the proprietary world in near future.
I think Bill Gates is an admirable personality who will be noted as one of the smartest businessmen in the history of world, but I don't think he or M$ has done much good to the history of computing (their recent tactics undoing whatever good they might have done in their early days). There is something about people who fit in M$ culture. Their achievements or visions sound so wrong to me, even before I know they are affiliated to M$. I had read about Ray Ozzie and his startup Groove in Jessica Livingstone's "Founders at work". Almost every chapter of that book inspired me one way or the other, but I didn't get Ray Ozzie's story. His approach to technology - described in sophisticated business lingo - just bounced off me (call it my incompetence, but that's the way it is). I wasn't sure about my gut feeling, until recently I found it echoing in Joel Spolsky's post (Yes, joelonsoftware fame). He describes Ozzie (who is now M$'s Chief Software Architect) as Architecture Astronaut, analysing Hailstorm project, or recent Live Mesh project. The whole article confirmed my views.
Just yesterday I read about this entrepreneur 'Nathan Myhrvold' on slashdot. This guy has come up with an innovative (?) idea of a company with bunch of smart people who just think about wildest ideas they can and patent them. His company doesn't plan to implement or manufacture them, but just accumulate patents and then sell them to other big companies. I was just stunned. The idea is indeed innovative ... a novel way of being as evil as one can imagine (in software industry perspective). Patent system is one of those systems that were conceived in the past for doing good in certain cases. But because these systems aren't revised with time, evil doers use them for doing anything but their original good intent (like the reservation system in India). Patent trolls are exploiting this system to the disadvantage of innovative startups. The above mentioned company is just an "uber patent troll". And yes... the guy is an ex-Microsoft CTO. What's interesting from yesterday's slashdot post is: there are links to two stories on same topic - one from NewYorker which cheers this new idea and another from an IP law firm which analyses the questionable intent. The contrast is noteworthy.
... so much for Microsoft bashing.
Check out an update to Altpublishr I released last week.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Lions for Lambs
I watched this movie last night on DVD. It is a must-see if you are/were an idealist. It is a reflection upon the present US war politics. However, the core theme is far reaching.
The story unfolds on three plots in parallel in a duration of 1 hour - a US military mission in Afghanistan, an interview of the US senator with a long-time reporter happening in Washington DC, and a one-on-one discussion between a student and a professor of political science taking place in some west coast university. All three events address the same problem, but it is shocking to see what one hopes in an ideal world, what actually happens in the real world, and how one justifies it in a bureaucratic(!) world.
Every character in these story lines is deep. But all of them have something in common. They all show how a young one starts a career with the fresh ideas in his/her mind and how the harsh reality dries them away. What disturbs is the seeming inevitability of all this.
I think the disillusionment an idealist suffers along the progress of his career is irrespective of the profession. In political or social contexts however they have grave consequences because they can cost people their lives.
... Do watch it if you like thought provoking stories.
The story unfolds on three plots in parallel in a duration of 1 hour - a US military mission in Afghanistan, an interview of the US senator with a long-time reporter happening in Washington DC, and a one-on-one discussion between a student and a professor of political science taking place in some west coast university. All three events address the same problem, but it is shocking to see what one hopes in an ideal world, what actually happens in the real world, and how one justifies it in a bureaucratic(!) world.
Every character in these story lines is deep. But all of them have something in common. They all show how a young one starts a career with the fresh ideas in his/her mind and how the harsh reality dries them away. What disturbs is the seeming inevitability of all this.
I think the disillusionment an idealist suffers along the progress of his career is irrespective of the profession. In political or social contexts however they have grave consequences because they can cost people their lives.
... Do watch it if you like thought provoking stories.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Ubuntu reviewed
My home desktop is giving problems, probably because of some heat issues. So I cannot continue what I was working on over weekend. That gives me time to write about my review of new release of Ubuntu that I installed on my office machine.
Over a year I have been contemplating a shift from Fedora to Ubuntu. At the time of Feisty I took a step in that direction, but then I decided to stick with familiar Fedora little longer. Now I am more comfortable with apt and dpkg, thanks to Maemo. So I was eagerly waiting for Hardy release of Ubuntu.
As you can read everywhere else, Ubuntu 8.04 is impressive. I agree. I will rather write about two specific issues that were relevant to my environment.
For few years I have been managing the storage of my desktops using LVM. It's very handy for me. Unfortunately Ubuntu's Live CD installation method doesn't support logical volumes - something that Redhat/Fedora supported so easily. Probably, ubuntu's target audience would prefer minimum click installs to advanced tweaking of the system. The alternate CD discovers logical volumes, but it's very tricky. I don't remember exactly, but last time I tried it, the installer froze on me until I figured - by jumping to adjascent terminals - that scanning of each volume was taking too long. But this time, I found an easier way of using LVM while still using Live CD. As per the instructions, I installed lvm2 and inserted dm-mod into the Live CD kernel. But the article guides you on how to create logical volumes from raw discs and then install Ubuntu on them. In my case I already had volumes. The instructions given in above link are not sufficient if you want to reuse the volumes that you created with your old linux installation. However it is very simple, if you do it right.
Now a days, it's common to have dual monitor setups in workplaces. I have one too (I mean two :). I needed to use some nvidia specific utils to get dual monitors working. If you search for terms like "dual monitors ubuntu nvidia twinview" you will get lots of posts. I found and followed all those too. But all of them told me to do Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace to reload X, to test the changes in my x.org file. That just made the display more and more horrible for me. The resolution dropped to 800x640, nvidia's twinview utility was no where in sight. ... until I rebooted the box. Maybe it was little dumb of me to not have rebooted after I installed nvidia's driver. I don't know which of the changes found in all those posts worked for me, but I think the important thing is to reboot the machine after you install nvidia's drivers.
Monday didn't seem so boring because a brand new system was waiting for me at work today. I set things up to suite my needs - nis, automounter, users, firefox sync, mail setup .... Firefox 3 beta 5 is pleasant. Fast as advertised. But I still couldn't find compatible google extenstions that I am so used to (browser sync, notebook, toolbar). There are compatible versions available for Firefox 3, but for some reason they didn't want to get installed on my beta 5 build.
But a major change I did was with my mail client, which wasn't planned. I don't remember if I had used Evolution any time in the past - not seriously for sure. But today I decided to give it a try, as it's the default mail client that comes with ubuntu. And within few minutes, I was a convert. I have stopped using Thunderbird. The biggest turnoff with thunderbird is its lack of calendar utility. Lightning is far behind alpha quality. That had forced me into using Korganizer on my Fedora 7 desktop. But this time I decided to give a shot to Gnome's PIM tools integrated into Evolution. Evolution has almost all the good things that thunderbird has (most importantly fast search), but in addition it has a functioning calendar program. I haven't tried to sync it with MS Exchange, but I doubt if any non M$ client will reliably work with MS Exchange calendars. I am happy with setting up my events and reminders manually, as long as basic functionality is there. Furthermore it was easy to import my mail folders from Thunderbird to Evolution, thankfully both use a standard "mbox" format to store the mails. Filter rules aren't compatible however, I will have to manually write them.
Fedora 9 is coming out in May. If you try it, let me know. I will skip Fedora this time though.
Over a year I have been contemplating a shift from Fedora to Ubuntu. At the time of Feisty I took a step in that direction, but then I decided to stick with familiar Fedora little longer. Now I am more comfortable with apt and dpkg, thanks to Maemo. So I was eagerly waiting for Hardy release of Ubuntu.
As you can read everywhere else, Ubuntu 8.04 is impressive. I agree. I will rather write about two specific issues that were relevant to my environment.
For few years I have been managing the storage of my desktops using LVM. It's very handy for me. Unfortunately Ubuntu's Live CD installation method doesn't support logical volumes - something that Redhat/Fedora supported so easily. Probably, ubuntu's target audience would prefer minimum click installs to advanced tweaking of the system. The alternate CD discovers logical volumes, but it's very tricky. I don't remember exactly, but last time I tried it, the installer froze on me until I figured - by jumping to adjascent terminals - that scanning of each volume was taking too long. But this time, I found an easier way of using LVM while still using Live CD. As per the instructions, I installed lvm2 and inserted dm-mod into the Live CD kernel. But the article guides you on how to create logical volumes from raw discs and then install Ubuntu on them. In my case I already had volumes. The instructions given in above link are not sufficient if you want to reuse the volumes that you created with your old linux installation. However it is very simple, if you do it right.
- Make sure you use "sudo" while doing pvscan, vgscan, lvscan. If you don't, these commands will exit silently, giving you the impression that they haven't detected your LVM setup.
- If you create new volumes as mentioned in above instructions, you will be able to see them as device nodes under /dev/mapper or /dev/
/, you can use them as targets of your favorite mkfs. utilities. However your already existing volumes won't show up that easily. If you want to see them, use "vgchange -ay". This will activate all your volume groups.
Now a days, it's common to have dual monitor setups in workplaces. I have one too (I mean two :). I needed to use some nvidia specific utils to get dual monitors working. If you search for terms like "dual monitors ubuntu nvidia twinview" you will get lots of posts. I found and followed all those too. But all of them told me to do Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace to reload X, to test the changes in my x.org file. That just made the display more and more horrible for me. The resolution dropped to 800x640, nvidia's twinview utility was no where in sight. ... until I rebooted the box. Maybe it was little dumb of me to not have rebooted after I installed nvidia's driver. I don't know which of the changes found in all those posts worked for me, but I think the important thing is to reboot the machine after you install nvidia's drivers.
Monday didn't seem so boring because a brand new system was waiting for me at work today. I set things up to suite my needs - nis, automounter, users, firefox sync, mail setup .... Firefox 3 beta 5 is pleasant. Fast as advertised. But I still couldn't find compatible google extenstions that I am so used to (browser sync, notebook, toolbar). There are compatible versions available for Firefox 3, but for some reason they didn't want to get installed on my beta 5 build.
But a major change I did was with my mail client, which wasn't planned. I don't remember if I had used Evolution any time in the past - not seriously for sure. But today I decided to give it a try, as it's the default mail client that comes with ubuntu. And within few minutes, I was a convert. I have stopped using Thunderbird. The biggest turnoff with thunderbird is its lack of calendar utility. Lightning is far behind alpha quality. That had forced me into using Korganizer on my Fedora 7 desktop. But this time I decided to give a shot to Gnome's PIM tools integrated into Evolution. Evolution has almost all the good things that thunderbird has (most importantly fast search), but in addition it has a functioning calendar program. I haven't tried to sync it with MS Exchange, but I doubt if any non M$ client will reliably work with MS Exchange calendars. I am happy with setting up my events and reminders manually, as long as basic functionality is there. Furthermore it was easy to import my mail folders from Thunderbird to Evolution, thankfully both use a standard "mbox" format to store the mails. Filter rules aren't compatible however, I will have to manually write them.
Fedora 9 is coming out in May. If you try it, let me know. I will skip Fedora this time though.
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