Since I’ve caught up on all my upgrades I’ve finally gotten back into some gaming. Especially of the Skyrim persuasion.
But I’ve also been playing some other games too. I already wrote about my Shadow Warrior adventures, and I’ve also been playing some of the Portal 2 fan games like Portal Stories: Mel, and Thinking With Time Machine which is an interesting concept of portals and a portable time machine.
Later today I’ll be bringing my laptop for an hour long lunch. Wonder what I’ll wreck. 😛
Wow, two days off for a second week in a row. 😀
I went out for Pad Thai yesterday, they had some awesome noodles and iced tea. Then I also watched some anime that I haven’t seen before. The 1995 Ghost in the shell movie, and then Ghost in the shell: Solid State Society. I was overdue for those considering I watched Stand Alone Complex and 2nd Gig, all in all they were entertaining.
Oh, and today I actually beat a game; Shadow Warrior. I’ll need to go back and play it again sometime so I can find all the secrets and more achievements. That and my big collection of games should tie me over until the sequel arrives. 😛
My laptop arrived yesterday! The moment I got off work I went home, sat down for a moment and took to my old and new laptop with a couple screw drivers (not the ones with orange juice and vodka, although that could have been interesting). I installed one of my 1 TB drives and the SSD for my OS. So far everything has been humming along with no issues. Installed Windows 7 with all the drivers and updates. Tonight I finished installing most of the important softwares, and copied some games over. I’ll probably do some tests with it tomorrow. I’ve burnt most of the midnight oil, and I have some things to take care of before work which requires me to get to bed a bit earlier than usual. Either way, next time I have a long lunch at work I’ll have this thing happily at my side.
I also got my Linux install on my main desktop working the way I want it. I decided to experiment with Mate desktop because while I like xfce, it’s a slight pain when it comes to dual monitor setups. Mate is basically a less graphically intense version of Classic GNOME, and it handles 3D games just as well as xfce. The less going on in the background the better the framerate, especially in FPS games.
Might have to do some serious gaming when I get home. I can tell I’ve been busy with my upgrades lately, my Steam hours have dropped quite a bit. 😀
I spent most of my day outside yesterday due to the extremely nice weather. I managed to take some cat pics of Morty.
I could only get one photo of Stewie… He spent most of his day wandering around the neighborhood being alpha cat.
I decided to give CentOS a try, and so far I haven’t had any issues or regrets. If I can’t find anything I can easily find it on a repo, this includes proprietary video drivers and mumble. I couldn’t find seamonkey but that’s a no brainer to install even without a repo.
Last night I burnt the “Everything ISO” onto a dual layer disc and tore into it today. It came with Gnome classic, which I always enjoyed before Gnome 3 came along to be the Metro interface for nix.
After the install I tried to download yumex, but no avail. A small interwebz search pointed me to a handy repo where it’s installed, followed by another search that lead me to video drivers. Then I installed Steam and did a test launch with Half Life 2. I was happy.
I see that my library expanded quite a bit since I’ve last played games under Linux. I’m up to 87 total out of the huge collective.
All my ducks tux seem to be in a row at this point.
New motherboard is installed. So far everything seems to be working great apart from Fedora. I decided to try Fedora 22 and I’m not really impressed with it, nor am I impressed with the direction the Distro has taken. Their website friggen sucks these days.
They’ve taken to streamlining everything. I like downloading one ISO and being able to pick and choose what I want to install within the installation, and being that I used Fedora between my desktop and game server I liked having just one disc. Now they’re putting people into groups like “workstation”, “server” and “cloud”. And apparently the hip thing these days is to install from a live CD rather than just run anaconda directly…
In Fedora 20 and backward you could choose which main desktop environment you wanted to install, now you’re forced into GNOME unless you burn a spin. I don’t mind GNOME on tablet interfaces but for the desktop it just flat out sucks. The first thing I did was install xfce and uninstall GNOME… only to have Linux shut down, restart and enter linux at the terminal level. Amazed and pissed at the same time I tried to launch X only to find it had been uninstalled along with GNOME. I couldn’t help but laugh. Usually when you uninstall something that would cause something like this to happen you’re met with SOME KIND of warning. But no. Even though I had xfce installed after the fact it would rather flip me the bird and leave me at the terminal.
I was going to reinstall GNOME and X via Yum but decided that I’d rather throw this DVD in the trash and opted to go back into Windows and burn a spin with xfce on it. I still had to use a live CD but at least I was rid of an ugly tablet interface I would never use.
So I finally made it through the install. The first thing I did was run all the necessary updates. I was disheartened to learn that Mumble was no longer in the repositories as of Fedora 21 for some stupid reason, but at the same time it wasn’t like I never compiled a program before. So I decided to save that task for later and went straight to installing seamonkey, then downloading my GPU drivers.
I opened my terminal and ran super user so that I could do the install, and I couldn’t because I was missing two dependencies. gcc was uninstalled and so was kernel headers. How could you not include these? I mean I like lean OS’s, but c’mon… gcc, kernel headers and module packs are a must.
It had just enough for me, and what it didn’t have I could eventually find with experimentation and research. It wasn’t like Ubuntu where it included a bunch of stuff I would never use.
Anyway… I installed the dependencies and gave it another shot, it still kept telling me that it couldn’t find the kernel headers.
fglrx installation requires that the system have kernel headers. /lib/modules/4.0.8-300.fc22.x86_64/build/include/linux/version.h cannot be found on this system.
I decided to follow the pathing and got stuck at “build” which for whatever reason was a dead symbolic link.
I’ve given up for now and have been doing a little bit of research. But I have a feeling that I might have to retire Fedora regardless. I’ve liked it since early Red Hat, and I’m one to roll with changes… but this streamlining and lack of choice isn’t something I particularly care for. You can’t just put me into one of three boxes.
Here’s another thing I don’t get. Why is it that in this day and age of fast internet we have these minimalistic installations? I find it funny that in the early days of the internet you had to download what was a giant distro that gave you choices over what you wanted installed, and now here we are with high speed internet connections, with these minimalistic installations… Something… seems off.
Woke up yesterday to an auction for a laptop, unfortunately I lost… Decided to shake it off and wander into town to do some errands. It was nice n’ sunny at least. Finally scheduled a hair appointment at a new place, hopefully it goes well next week. Also made a deposit then went out for some sushi that I owed myself. It was called The Samurai and it had cucumber, some tempura prawns and it was topped with crab and a spicy teriyaki sriracha sauce.
Then I came home and backed off the rest of my files so I could prepare for the new motherboard. So far it’s been pretty smooth, other than the front USB ports are acting strangely. I’m hoping it’s some driver issue. I still have a bunch to install. I’ve only covered the Win 7 install, some drivers and other refinements. I still have plenty of programs and organization to take care of, then I can install Fedora 21 and get that setup. I’ll probably be distracted for awhile. Not only with that, but with an auction I actually won tonight. 😛 I’m going to be the proud owner of an ROG G750JS-TS71. I also ordered a Samsung 256 GB SSD, and hopefully I can find a regular 2 TB drive later on for the 2nd drive bay. In the meantime I’ll rough it on the 1 TB.
So all in all I had a very relaxing day off, probably one of the better ones I’ve had lately. Oh, and I saw the new chatroom a certain someone made in Mumble… All I have to say was that I got more done on my mask today. One more coating or two and I can add some straps for my face.
I’m gonna go try to not dream about things relating to that set of stuffs.
First Google had to be the ones to set the bar when they started targeting people with special ads in gmail. Now, being as innovative as Apple can be, they’re rolling out this.
Just when you thought Apple wasn’t integrated into your life enough, the company just won a patent for a system that targets ads based on how much money people have. This is the same Apple that’s promised not to monetize your data. As Tim Cook said last year: “You’re not our product.” Until you are, apparently.
Heh, next thing you’ll know they’ll be copying spotify…
Oh, right.
It seems I’ve found someone who wants to buy a gaming laptop, so I spent the entire night researching a worthy upgrade. I looked between Asus and MSI and have come to the conclusion that Asus would be the better one to stick with for now. While I don’t like how I can’t take out the GPU and upgrade it to a different one the ROG series laptops run much cooler. Asus ROG series laptops have good vents in the back of their laptops whereas with the MSI ones tend to be on the sides. Some of them are on the back and the sides, but the vents are smaller.
I’ve also decided that at the very least I’ll invest in a laptop that has an NVidia 8xx GPU or higher so that I’ll have DX12 support. Although I don’t see myself using Windows 8 or 10 anytime soon it’ll at least be nice to futureproof myself a bit. The G74SX held up more than awesomely over these last couple years, definitely got my moneys worth out of it. I only have to lower my settings in a few of the newer games. That 560m was a great card.
So between the new motherboard and new laptop I’ll be busy for awhile.
With all the reported issues regarding performance and lacking of details that the console version came with I’m surprised they’re aiming for September. Seems like a small window for repairs.
Fixes for the problematic PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight will not be available until September of 2015, according to Australian retailer EB Games.
I wonder how many people still want this game…
