Gamers like to be able to play all their games and get right to gaming instead of messing with configurations. Even if their games were available for Linux, switching to Linux seemed like a bad choice until recently, as only a very small amount of commercial games have official Linux-support. Even though getting the not officially Linux-supported games to run by other means, it would be far from easy. Sure, for Linux there’s free games like Frozen Bubble, Tux Racer, FreeCiv etc., but the big commercial titles are rarely released for Linux.

The company TransGaming Technologies tries to fill out this need for commercial Windows-games by having created an application called Cedega, which makes it possible to play such games without official Linux-support regardless.

There’s a lot of controversy in the free-software community though. Cedega is based on an old version of Wine (a project aimed at making Windows-applications run on Linux) from when Wine it was still under the MIT License, which meant that anybody could take what they wanted from the project without contributing the changes back to the original authors. Because of this, this (fully legal) ‘theft’, the Wine-project choose to release future versions under the LGPL, which does not permit changing the code without releasing the source-code. Cedega can therefore no longer tailor newer versions of Wine to suit their needs, as the project is mostly closed-source.

Another point against Cedega is the principle that Linux shouldn’t run Windows-games in the first place, the authors should write the games for Linux.

Cedega has added many unique features not found in Wine, like compatibility with most modern copy-protections and a Games Disc Database in which profiles optimized for each of the games in the database are available, as well as a GUI for managing installed games.

Cedega costs only $5 month, but you have to sign up for at least 3 months, yet trying it out is not a budget-killer - you can always cancel your subscription.

Expectations
I expect my Windows-only games to run just as well as they would do in Windows. I expect both Cedega and the games to be easy to install.

The website
Registering is a three-step procedure, which went flawlessly. Included with the product is access to future updates and you get to vote each month in surveys on what the Cedega-developers time should be spent on.

The website (www.transgaming.com) is a little special, it looks undone. You see, when you just browse around the pages, you see a design with a white background, but if you try hit the “Login”-button (regardless if you have a login or not), you’ll get redirected to a page with a totally different design, but basically the same content and basically the same structure. Take a look at the screenshots just above to see what I mean.

Anyway, both versions of the site are easy to navigate through, so no problem, it just doesn’t seem very professional.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some interesting stories and some good points were pointed out in the debate following my review of openSUSE and some extra notes was added to the review because of the comments. I’ve decided to highlight some of these good points and stories in this follow-up:

The installation does potentially dangerous things without warning the user

…Something you didn’t mentionned enough : by default, SuSe is setup to shrink windows partitions, without asking or even warning enough the basic user ! Very dangerous I think, considering Windows file systems don’t like these kind of operations if they haven’t been defragmented first !…
Pointed out by Nikoo

Unofficial, but highly thought of repositories for media-support

… Concerning your fears about 3rd party repositories: Packman’s and Guru’s repositories have a long standing and high reputation. They became almost an integral part of Suse. Otherwise it is true that some 3rd party repositories have to be treated with care, not so much for possible spyware but because they might have some very buggy packages lying around. And generally I find 3rd party repositories still much more secure than just downloading programs somewhere on the internet. If there should appear a repository with viruses or spyware it would be banned very quickly by the community…
Pointed out by Patrick

Storry from a happy openSUSE-user

…I am a Computer Programmer/Analsyst, of approximately 7 years in the programming field. I mainly program in C++/C#/Visual Basic. I have very minimal Linux experience I have tried many distributions over the past 10 years… …Open Suse is great combination of power and simplicity. the way I look at it is this. you can either choose a distro that is super power user, and get overwhelmed by all the technical options you know nothing about, or you could choose a super simple distro that has next to nothing with it. or you can pick a distro like Open suse 10.2 and get the perfect medium…
By Peter

Thank you all for a good debate!

Teaser: If you’re interested in playing your Windows-games in Linux through Cedega, then you should check in tomorrow the 28th, at around 9 pm CET/3 pm ET.

openSUSE is a widely known distribution for its huge array of unique tools for managing virtually every part of the system, without having to even think about using the console. It’s also known for the stability of the official packages and releases, and it’s known for a very stable package-system.

SUSE was acquired in 2004 by Novell, which meant a significant change in the future development of the distribution. From now on it would be an open-source project for everybody to help developing, while Novell kept maintaining a commercial pay-only edition, focused mainly for corporations.

As it’s a free project it’s available for download, both via torrents and using one of the many mirrors available. openSUSE comes in both CD-editions and a DVD-edition. It is not a necessity to download and burn all 5 CD’s if you don’t have a DVD-burner, as there’s also a network-boot-CD available, which is only capable of starting the installation, while all the packages will have to be downloaded from the Internet (or the LAN if you have a server available with the installation-sources).

Expectations
Knowing that this distribution has a long history and has siblings sold for commercial usage, I expect a lot of this distribution. I expect it to be very user friendly - I expect to not ever have to touch the console, even for rather extraordinary tasks not usually supported by a GUI front end.

I hope it to include all necessary packages for all the tasks needed for general usage, or at least easily, safely and officially available.

Test-system
The test-computer used in the article is my parents workstation, so the specifications are not very impressive (they use the computer for word-processing and mail-checking only). The final set-up which was created during the research for this article, is actually what they’re going to use when they come home from the vacation they’re currently having. Because they’re going to actually use it, the need for the distribution to get up and running perfectly, as they’re used to a stable and responsive Windows XP, is critical. The hardware is as follows:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2200+
RAM: 256 MB Kingston DDR (PC2700)
Harddrive: 40 GB Maxtor (7200 RPM)
Mouse: Logitech MX 700-mouse
CD-writer: Teac CD-W512EB (12x CD-R)
DVD-ROM: NEC DV-5700A (using a flashed firmware for region-unlocking)
Ethernet: RTL8139B-based on-board
Audio: VT8233A-based on-board
Graphics: S3 Trio3D/2x AGP-graphics card
Printer/scanner: Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 3210 All-in-one Network-printer/scanner
Read the rest of this entry »

I have done multiple websites for myself in the past and one of the major lessons I’ve learned, is that planning ahead is really important. That’s why I’ve created a new page for upcoming articles, which lists all the future subjects I’m going to touch on this page and when.

Click here to go to the “Upcoming”-page.

Introduction
When doing documents using general-purpose word-processing software like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, you are capable of doing just about every formatting you’d feel like and add just the type of content you would like, where you like. These editors are fine for most purposes and they are indeed often quite powerful yet easy to use. Also doing math and physics in such editors is surely fine, because these applications are for most uses very easy and intuitive and also rather fast to work with. With all this freedom, people tend to format documents, sometimes a lot, even though it’s just basic content, instead of relying on the default settings because, hey, they’re just dull. Having to even consider how to format a document, is what LyX is all not about!

LyX calls itself a WYSIWYM-editor (What You See Is What You Mean) which will get explained further below, while OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word are WYSIWYG-editors (What You See Is What You Get).
The thing is that most documents do not need all this styling and formatting. In fact, wouldn’t it be nice to always just get right to the content? Wouldn’t it be right if the default styling and formatting were just plain and beauty, and wouldn’t it be nice with an editor built for equations and formulas? LyX is giving the powerful LaTeX-suite a user friendly and intuitive interface.
Matthias Ettrich, the computer-scientist who founded the KDE-project which today is one of the major desktop-environments for Linux and Unix in general, started developing what eventually became LyX back in 1995. It is released under the GPL-license.

Expectations
Knowing that this application is using the mighty powers of LaTeX and knowing it has a 10+ year history, and also knowing who’s behind is also behind one of the most user friendly desktop-suites for Linux and Unix in general, I expect this application to be very user friendly (perhaps even a bit too much, like too many wizards?). I expect the resulting documents to be of a very high quality due to the LaTeX underneath and I expect it to be rock-solid stable.

First impression
LyX starts really fast (in less than 2 seconds), compared to what I’m used to from OpenOffice.org which takes around 30 seconds to start (can be reduced to maybe 5 seconds with the sys tray-quick starter which in return eats quite a piece of RAM while just sitting there) is nothing.

The first time you start LyX you will be greeted with an introduction to the program, explaining the major differences between it and other word-processing software. This page highly recommends you go read the documentation, which I must agree with - you will see that this program is not intuitive at first, but actually takes a little while to get used to. If you don’t feel like reading a few pages of tutorial, you might as well not start at all.
Well, I guess I should just start by digging right into it, starting with the “New document”-button. Read the rest of this entry »