Beryl…!!! You’ve gotta see it to believe it~

I’ve heard of Beryl before, but didn’t know how cool it is until I see this video… that is sooooo pretty and even cooler than OSX.

http://www.queervisions.com/arch/2007/03/beryl_skydomes.html

Linux Gaming

I tried Google’s BlogSearch today with keyword “Gentoo Linux” just for the heck of it. Interesting, the result coincided with an idea I had in mind before. The first post is this article from TheInternetOne and it summarizes the idea of integrating Gentoo, Linux, and some other crypto architecture to create a secure platform to develop Gentoo Gaming environment. The logistics would be making the game CD bootable via Gentoo and this can turn our PC’s into console boxes.

I love the idea of being able to turn PC into a console. Back in 1995 I used to argue with my buddy whether a PC is cool or a console is cool, since I was a layal PC gamer, while he was fed with console games growing up. Nevertheless, we have to face the shortcoming of a console: they are only gaming machines, can’t do much elsewise (yes, I think allowing Play Station and XBox users to browse the internet is a great idea) Therefore I would say if the hardware resource is allowed, there should be an option when booting into the games, to allow users to do web-browsing also. The recent trends of technologies such as GoogleDesktop, blogging, del.icio.us, flickr…etc have demonstrate the posibility to eliminate the idea of “personal desktop,” instead, they successfully showed us how we can be living in a totally “virtual world” with all the data are available on line, with security.

Gaming and Multimedia have been tough spots for desktop users to switch from Microsoft to Linux. To make a long story short, Linux had not live up to the hype on hardware detection and user friendliness. But all these has dramatically changed in recent years. hardware detection has been improved drastically, while more and more desktop converts helped to get the latest distros more user-friendly. Just try the latest Ubuntu Linux if you are not persuaded yet. Also, Linux can be optimized so that resource usage efficiency can be much better than Windows. Plus Linux is more secured and less possible to get virus and spywares, at least for the time being

Behold, Microsoft and Console makers, Linux is coming to town.

[Update] This Article from SlashDot and GameSpot reminds me what I forgot to mention: The Linux Game Disk should be able to boot systems directly for browsing and gaming, and it could also be plug into a Windows or Linux system and start the game from there, probably through Cygwin, or chroot environments…

Ubuntu Linux 64bit multimedia desktop

I worked with Ubuntu today trying to get this machine to play all the media files. Very helpful resource is Ubuntu’s Wiki site. Another useful website, though a bit outdated, is Ubuntu Guide.
Good thing is that I am able to use xmms, mplayer, and totem-xine to play mp3, mpeg, avi, VCD, un-encrypted DVD, and other free formats that’s playable out of the box. The Wiki also provide nice resource on how to get iTune to work, this will make some iPod lovers happy (I am too busy to listen to that, though)

To play encrypter DVD such as my Star Wars Collection (I was ripped for $60 and bought it!!!) is a bit tricky and I haven’t been able to figure this out. I followed the Wiki page, and install the following before running the example script “install-css.sh”:

1. install fakeroot, dpkg_source, dh-make, (… and something else I forgot, but you will see it the error message if you try to run the install-css.sh script)
2. I tried to install gcc-4.0 for gcc compiler and created symbolic link in /usr/bin: “ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.0 /usr/bin/gcc” and chmod to 755
3. I run the script, it gets stuck at compiler’s output.

Anyway, also, I am not able to install Real Player (Helix), since it will requires me to compile it from source code, too busy for that today… maybe tomorrow~