Because of the recent spate of linux threads, I decided to do some playing around myself. I sacrificed a second hard drive last night and set up my system to dual boot into win2k and mandrake 9.1.
It’s pretty damn cool. Not cool enough to make me give up windows, but it’s hella fun to play around with.
So, in your opinion, what programs are worth checking out? The only limitations are that a) I haven’t gotten linux and my radeon 8500 to play with each other fully yet (I’m forced to use the vesa driver because the radeon driver bundled with mandrake doesn’t work for me), b) it has to be bundled as an rpm, because, well, I’m not a masochist and c) I’m sick to death of rogue-likes, due to a zangband binge I went through a few months back.
I’ll start things off with an obvious one: Celestia, the 3d space simulator. Runs like a dog on my system, currently (see above), but still fun. For some reason, it didn’t come bundled on my disks (as far as I could tell). IIRC, Mandrake 8.1 had it…
Anyway, stuff I like (you’ve probably got it installed already) OpenOffice.org for office stuff, Mozilla for web browsing, kstars is fun if you like star stuff, knights as a front end for GNUChess, xmms for mp3 player, mplayer for video, everybuddy for instant messaging (though Yahoo have rpms for their messenger)…there’s more, but I can’t think offhand what else.
[sorta hijack]
I managed to convince our company to switch from MS Office to openofffice on their Win2k systems. They love it, huge cost savings and less downtime. now…trying to get them onto a *nix desktop…
Man, I forgot GIMP for graphics stuff…I like it because my graphics skills could squeeze between 0.999… and 1 so I just use the logos to make cool pictures from my name. Yeah, I’m sad.
Hint for using GIMP: Notice on every menu and sub-menu there’s a dotted line at the top of the menu? Click on this this and it lets you detach that menu. Try it. This works on all GTK applications (ie. GNOME stuff)
GIMP Hint2: To create a new shortcut key to a menu item, just highlight that item without clicking and press the shortcut key you want. Again, this is a general GTK thing.
Hm. Cool stuff. I haven’t had a chance to mess around with the Gimp yet.
I got the impression from the newsgroups that the linux drivers on ATI’s web site were oldish and the same as that bundled with mandrake. Have they updated recently, then? I’ll give it a shot anyway. It can’t work any less than the other drivers.
Maybe I’ll give ScummVM a run since I’ve got a few Lucasarts cd’s lying around. Fire up and play Fate of Atlantis, maybe…
I don’t know about the age of the drivers. However, there’s a install.txt linked at that site that has instructions on what to do if things don’t work right, so it might be worth a visit anyway.
Anyway, if you right click on the KDE taskbar and choose Add…Applets… then there’s a list of fun toys. I like Kweather (which tells you the weather in your area) and Knewsticker (or whatever it’s called) which can grab News headlines from various sources.
