Linux

This looks like it’ll be fun.

by

I’m sure quite a few of you heard about the second steam announcement today.

In case you missed it here’s how you can (hopefully) participate in the beta.

THE HARDWARE BETA ELIGIBILITY QUEST:
Before October 25, log in to Steam and then visit your quest page to track your current status towards beta test eligibility
3. Make 10 Steam friends (if you haven’t already)
4. Create a public Steam Community profile (if you haven’t already)
5. Play a game using a gamepad in Big Picture mode

I’d say this is definitely worth signing up for. Especially for people interested in the hardware aspect or people who would like a more current gen gaming system. SIGN UP NAO DAMMIT!

Steam gets their own OS. Cool!

by

All the fun stuff always happens when I’m at work. 😛 Apparently Steam announced today “SteamOS” their own Linux Operating System. Making it easier for people to create their own Steam based entertainment systems if they so choose to.

This is an excellent idea and Valve doesn’t really have anything to lose since this is a free Open Source platform that anyone could jump into. Unfortunately I don’t have any TV in the house to run Big Picture Mode, but that might change this winter. And when it does I’ll have to install it on my laptop along side my Win 7 install to test. 😛

Gabe Newell: Linux and Open Source are the future of gaming

by

Gabe Newell made an appearance at LinuxCon in New Orleans:

In the video he makes an interesting point about today’s users being more like developers. Thanks to Valve people can make their own games with the Source Engine, game modes, game content for their favorite Steam Workshop games and of course videos with Source Filmmaker. Valve is an open minded company, and open minded companies benefit from Open Source programs. This is where Linux comes into play. At this point it has more of a future than Windows. Hell, even the Playstation 4 will be using a modified FreeBSD Linux distro. This could leave Microsoft at a bit of a disadvantage. If they’re not careful there is a large possibility that more developers will pull their focus towards OpenGL over Direct X. However, only time can tell us how that will pan out.

Back on topic, Gabe Newell also announced how Linux will be making it into our living rooms. Won’t that be kewl. :3

Valve proves once again how awesome they are.

by

There has been quite a bit of controversy regarding the Tux item released to people who use Linux distros. People have been “faking” linux installs to get the item and Valve is paying attention.

Well I didn’t personally but, this is something that I was curious about and, a friend just confirmed it. I offered him the use of my Linux machine via Teamviewer to get his Linux Penguin. He said he was uneasy about doing that and, said he was gonna look and, see if there was another way on Youtube.

Okay, whatever, it’s no skin of my nose. He came upon a video about changing what TF2 reads as your OS and, I guess he did it because I later saw that his name changed to I cheated for a tux. I thought he did it himself so I didn’t press the issue but, we started talking about the penguin like 30 minutes ago and, he mentioned that Steam changed his name on it’s own.

I wondered why and, then it hit me. It had to have been because he didn’t get it through the correct means and, the outcome made me laugh. I did a search for the name “I cheated for a tux” and, this is what I saw “Showing 1 – 50 of 3,884” amazing, huh.

That is hilariously awesome.

Early Morning Open Thread

by

Been having one of those sleepy days today. Pretty much just played around in Ubuntu seeing what I could install via synaptic. I decided to install DOSBox since I know I’ll have multiple uses for it. Then I installed a game called OpenArena which is Open Sourced Quake 3 basically. I think I’ll actually install it under Windows and see how it works. It ran fine under Linux other than for whatever reason it wasn’t recognizing any of my sound devices.

Now I’m looking into downloading a screen capturing program similar to FRAPS called glc, which is basically video capture via a command line. If I can get that up and running I’ll see how well I can capture and encode TF2 videos (or any other Linux testing I decide to capture).

But for now I think I’ll grab a pot of tea and head off to sleep.

Oh, and on another note I preordered the new Tomb Raider. Had some extra money so figured why not. 😛

Getting my penguin on some more.

by

Been kicking it with Linux a bit more since I’ve gotten my DAC working perfectly. Last night’s stress test was Serious Sam 3, which was pretty laggy in some places compared to my Windows 7 install of it. TF2 was more optimized but still had a bit of trouble on 2Fort near the water ONLY if other people were nearby, after awhile it would subside at least.

Also got my mp3 player working under this. I did find out why I wasn’t getting any sound under World Of Goo. I noticed I had the same problem under other programs like VLC Media Player. Turns out they were stuck on the audio codec for my Sound Blaster XFi and they weren’t using the USB Dual Pre. Changed that and it worked perfectly. So now I’m gaming, blogging, reading and listening to 80’s death metal under Ubuntu with KDE workspace.

Steam to have closed beta in October for their Linux platform.

by

If you like the idea of gaming under linux you may want to consider reading this article.

Things have been going well. We will be having an internal beta starting next week, and a private external beta for 1,000 users sometime in October.

The private external beta will include:

Steam
One Valve game
Support for Ubuntu 12.04 and above

It will not yet include:

Big Picture mode
Additional Valve games

For existing Linux users, the external private beta is a good release for seeing where we are in running our games on Linux. We will be using a sign up page for the external beta. Information about the sign up will be announced in a future post.

For those new to Linux, we recommend waiting for a subsequent release where more features are implemented along with improvements to the user install experience.

I’m more of a fedora distro kinda person, but I’d still be willing to hunker down and give Ubuntu a shot. With the rise of Windows 8 this will most definitely be a step in the right direction on Valve’s part.