Linux

Linux reaches a two thousand game milestone

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SteamOnLinux

Over at Gaming On Linux they have determined that there are over 2,000 games that run natively on Linux! Things have come so far since the Steam beta, really great to see.

People (who use Windows exclusively) say that Linux isn’t great as a gaming platform, or it isn’t ready. Granted it does have a ways to go, but they forget that Windows had to grow too. In the realm of PC Gaming Linux is getting more attention, and Microsoft is just starting to come back to pretend that they always loved their PC Gamer base… right.

Running Ubuntu on Windows 10 will be a thing

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Winbuntu

I thought it was already a thing if you bothered with VM’s and were curious to see what Ubuntu was like, but apparently Canonical and Microsoft are partnering together to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10, no VM required.

With this new addition, Ubuntu users will be able to run Ubuntu simultaneously with Windows. This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10.

Ok, so why exactly are they doing this?

Canonical and Microsoft are doing this because Ubuntu on Windows’ target audience is developers, not desktop users. In particular, as Microsoft and Canonical continue to work more closely together on cloud projects, I expect to find tools that will make it easy for programmers to use Ubuntu to write programs for Ubuntu on the Azure cloud.

So is this MS-Linux? No. Is it a major step forward in the integration of Windows and Linux on the developer desktop? Yes, yes it is.

BS. People have been saying for years that Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux, this just confirms it. 😛

It also seems unlikely that Ubuntu will be bringing its Unity interface with it. Instead the focus will be on Bash and other CLI tools, such as make, gawk and grep.

lol yes. Unity and Microsoft’s new definition of the desktop would go hand in hand actually In the sense that I hated Unity with a passion, and despise Microsoft’s hardon for tiles. ffs they still exist in Windows 10’s start menu. I think I know why they’re saying this will be the last Windows, they’re going to call their next OS Microsoft Tiles, and Ubuntu will be there to help make it shittier with Unity.

Vulkan 1.0 arrives.

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This will be good news on the Linux front (and for a bunch of people overall). Vulkan 1.0 released today!

Khronos’ aim with Vulkan is implementing a low-level API that is simpler and more efficient than its predecessor. The company says that “simple drivers allow for low-overhead efficiency and cross vendor consistency,” and that there is “layered architecture so validation and debug layers can be loaded only when needed.” Another benefit over OpenGL is Vulkan’s ability for multiple threads / cores to handle graphics work.

The Talos Principle has already called dibs as the first game to have implemented Vulkan support.

WBpMvLa

I think Vulkan is the kick in the pants needed to start off a proper competition between Linux and Windows, because unfortunately OpenGL as it stands is not up to par with Direct X. And I want to see Linux succeed as a gaming Operating System. Once things start to move I might have to open up Talos Principle under both OS’s and see how well things handle.

Open Thread

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So far I’ve just been taking it easy. On my first day I slept in quite a bit which I didn’t want to, but I was more tired than I realized. I’ve had to fix the TF2 servers then test them along with the Gmod ones. Spent a good amount of time on some of them today with Yutram. We destroyed n00bs and then chillax’d in the cinema watching some YouTube.

The next thing I should take care of should be the TF2 MOTD’s so that they point to the group page. Our group has expanded quite a bit since I’ve had the group page appear on each server’s message of the day.

We haven’t started working on the new hardware yet but will soon. We’re waiting for a couple RAID cards for additional storage, once those arrive we’ll be ready to install CentOS 7 and get to work adding all the servers to the new setup. Maybe even some new servers since I have plans for a few more.

Fedora is dead, long live CentOS

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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.

Setting my Fedora on fire.

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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.

A serious problem under Linux regarding Steam

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A friend of mine shared this with me yesterday. PC World even picked up on the story.

If you’re a Steam fan running Linux, the last thing you’ll want to do in the next few days is mess with your Steam files. Users on Valve’s GitHub Steam for Linux page are complaining about a nasty bug that has the potential to wipe out every single personal file on your PC. Even worse, users say the bug will even wipe out documents on USB connected drives. So much for local backups.

That’s a pretty serious bug. I hope Valve gets on that ASAP.