We Should See Other Blogs

I took the plunge this weekend. I was bored, sort of, while Laura was taking a nap and decided to tinker around on the computer. I looked for a bunch of new software, interesting ways to tweak my system, all that good stuff. I didn’t really find anything interesting to do.

Now, I’m aware what “beta” means. Not the Google Beta, which seems more a liability avoidance mechanism; the actual “beta” which means “this software is not production-quality, use at your own risk”. But I decided to upgrade my current install from Ubuntu 7.10 to the 8.04 beta anyways. I’m not running a production system in any critical context: if my computer goes down for some reason, I use an older box I have sitting around.

I’ll preface everything I say here with the understanding that every upgrade from Ubuntu release to Ubuntu release is fraught with difficulty. My installs often have custom fudgery hanging around, sometime in use, sometime simple cruft. When I upgrade following the apt-get upgrade path, I often get breakage. I find it almost easier to do a clean install, seeing as my home is on a separate hard drive from the actual system. This is not Ubuntu’s fault as much as mine, of course; I can’t expect the upgrade manager to handle every edge case I throw at it.

That said, the 8.04 beta broke a whole lot of things for me, all of them relating either X11 or the NVIDIA proprietary driver:

• Compiz doesn’t work (I confirmed this is a long-standing Compiz bug) properly, leading to massive corruption of window decoration elements.
• While three of my four screens are fine, the TV-out S-video refuses to show anything on the television.
• In Totem (or Movie Player), hues are way out of wack.
• PulseAudio won’t recognise my sound card, and doesn’t seem to offer a way to select it (I love PA, btw, at least with volume controls of some kind).
• The entire sound system seems to be in a state of flux, partially one thing and partially another.
• A bunch of applets disappeared from the default Ubuntu menu, and I can’t find them back again, nor can I locate the “unlock” feature integrated with PolicyKit.
• Firefox 3.0 Beta whatever worked for a few minutes and then decided to conflict with XULrunner. I had to install FF2 again, but none of my extensions worked. The next day I installed XULrunner again, this time with no problems. Firefox 3.0 installed fine as well, though of course my extensions still don’t work, this time, I assume, for a reason.
• GNOME is taking a stupid long time to display my desktop again, up to 10 seconds on one count. Last time this happened, I uninstalled the GNOME network manager and set up my network manually; I can’t wait to get to hunt down the random component that borks GNOME. I’m actually thinking about moving to KDE once they stabilise or get to 4.1 or something.

These are all I can think of off the top of my head, but I’m really looking forward to the release candidate and (hopefully) fixes for a lot of these problems.

I know, I blogged about Warsow and how amazing it was, but the game I’m most hooked on at the moment is Urban Terror. Seriously amazing game, great graphics, and some of the best gameplay I’ve seen this side of Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. It combines some of the movement techniques of twitch gaming (powerslides! whee!) with the more measured combat of Enemy Territory and Call of Duty. It also focuses more on urban and suburban environments than most games emerging from the Q3A scene.

Download it; it’s big, so please do everyone a favour and use Bittorrent. (I currently have a share ratio of 11; you’ll probably be getting some of your bits from me.)

Urban Terror runs on Windows (of all stripes), Mac OS X, and Linux (I currently have it set up in Ubuntu). It’s free. You don’t have to be a gaming genius to play it, either.

I don’t play a lot of games. Really, I don’t. Granted, when I go over to my parents’ place, I might play a spot of Call of Duty 4. At home, though, there’s not really a whole lot of time to play, and I don’t have any disposable income with which to actually purchase any games.

That said, I’ve found a game to play lately, Warsow. It’s free, available for a variety of platforms, and breaks nicely from the traditional Quake-inspired Gothic darkness with cell-shaded graphics and an overall different appearance.

It’s also ridiculously difficult (for me) to actually play. Warsow is clearly geared to gamers and their trix. I, on the other hand, am just a lowly married man with bad hand-eye co-ordination. When I type cg_showSpeedMeter “1″ into the console (yes, it had a console, just like every other game worth its salt), I rarely if ever get over 400. I suck.

Yet I still have fun… try it out. Seriously. I double-dog-dare you.