Though I haven’t gotten it to work yet, it is nice to see that Valve is working on SteamVR for Linux. I’m looking forward to trying it out. At the moment it looks like it’ll take a bit of tinkering, but it should be usable in the future.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux
Over the last couple of months I have had a bit of … fun. My new computer started restarting randomly more and more often until it suddenly wouldn’t start up, it turned out to be a failed BIOS chip on the motherboard, so I have been going through the RMA Process. Aside from that I haven’t seen anything too newsworthy. On this last Monday, the Oculus Touch controllers went on sale for $199, They should come in December. I hope that Oculus does better this time with their shipping estimates than they did last time. On the upside, only people who already have the Rift should be ordering the Touch controllers, so there should be a reduced number of people ordering the device.
On the Vive side, Valve is talking about bringing SteamVR (And the Vive) over to Mac & Linux/SteamOS, which is very nice for me, I’d love to be able to use Linux to play VR games. Also new motion controllers for the Vive have been showcased, much smaller than the ones that came with the vive, and with a strap that goes around the hand, along with the wrist strap. From what I have been reading, the new design is to keep themselves compeditive with the new Touch controllers for the Rift. I’m looking forward to seeing what is coming down the road for VR.
Ian Murdock, the person that founded the Debian Linux distrobution of Linux, and the creator of the apt-get program has passed away at the age of 42. It is a sad day when a person that has made a popular distro of Linux passes away. I use Ubuntu as my primary distro, which is based on Debian, and has worked very well for me over the last several years.
As of now, the cause of his death is unknown, his twitter account announced that he’d be commiting suicide, though some people believe that his account was hacked. The account has been deleted since the tweet was posted.
To read more on this, click on this link. You can also click here to view a webcache of his tweet. It’s worded very … strangely. I can see why people are thinking that the account was hacked, though it’s a possibility that he did also make it himself as well.
There are some more… interesting tweets from him as well, click here to read about them. Evidently he had a run-in with some angry police, ended up in the hospital and ended up having to post bail for ‘assulting a police officer’. This story keeps on getting stranger and stranger.
This isn’t a very nice to end the year, hopefully there will be better news coming soon.
I’m happy to see that the Oculus Rift will soon be released to the general public, sadly they put Mac and Linux support ‘on hold’, which means that Windows will be a requirement to use the Rift. From some of the articles that I’ve been reading, thanks to a partnership with Microsoft (Which is probably the primary reason that Mac/Linux support was put on hold) the Oculus will be natively supported on Windows 10, and it’ll be possible to play XBox games on it.
In the end, I’ve become partial to the HTC Vive headset, it will have similar specs to the Oculus, but is being made with a partnership between HTC and Valve. I think that Valve will want the Vive to work on their Steam Machines, which hopefully will mean Linux support.
A game that I’ve been having quite a bit of fun with has had a major update, it does break some things, but for the most part, the new features are very nice.
The biggest new feature is tunnels, which I haven’t seen in a city sim since Sim City 4. This is very nice, since tunnelled roads appear to work in the same way as surface roads or bridges (except without those blasted support pillars) allowing you to hide some of the messes that can come up as you upgrade the roads throughout your city.
They also added an European map theme which allows you to have more interesting looking cities.
Overall it’s a very nice update, it fixes many bugs, such as ships glitching over land, and adds a few new features.
If you want more information about the update, Click Here.
Twenty years ago, Linus Torvalds first announced the creation of the Linux operating system, my we have come a long way since then 🙂
Here’s a full article on Linux, past and present.
So, within the next few years, you could see a new version of Windows on all of the computers at the local computer store…
Microsoft has officially unveiled some key new features of its forthcoming operating system. The next-generation OS, which may or may not be called “Windows 8” (its “internal code-name”), delivers a completely re-imagined user interface, with a heavy emphasis on touch-based functionality that takes a hefty helping of inspiration from the Windows Phone UI.
They even have a video on it!
Hmmm… I’m not sure how I like the ‘Tablet’ interfaces on many of the new operating systems today… Ubuntu 11.04 has changed it’s interface a bit too.
Well, I’m glad that I use Linux…
The next time a website says to download new software to view a movie or fix a problem, think twice. There’s a pretty good chance that the program is malicious.
via Microsoft: One in 14 Downloads Is Malicious – Yahoo! News.
I don’t download many programs from random websites, as Ubuntu has a large repository of applications that are legit. I do reccomend being careful on where you download applications from, only download from places that you trust.
For me it also helps that most viruses are made for Windows, and thus won’t work on Mac or Linux (though I have heard of a few Mac viruses recently too…)
A group called the Raspberry Pi Foundation is working on designing a computer that’s the size of a USB stick…
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity Registration Number 1129409 which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.
Man I would love to own one of those, In the UK, it costs £15, which is around $25.00 at this moment. If it becomes available outside of the UK, I probably will try to get one.
Have a good day! 🙂
I wonder how this new version of Ubuntu will work, I haven’t had time to get it running on one of my machines, and that testdrive feature only allows ~ 15 minutes before it logs you out, and as far as I can tell, I cannot try it again.
I’m planning on using the new Ubuntu in a VirtualBox Virtual Machine before I change any of my main machines, as I need them for business.
As I said, I ran the online Ubuntu yesterday, and it looked nice, although it was quite slow, that can be explained with the fact that my network isn’t as fast as I may have thought…
A lot has changed in this version, the main change is the fact that it doesn’t use the GNOME desktop anymore, but a newly developed environment called Unity. Unity seems to have a base in the old GNOME, and as such, some of the interface features haven’t changed much from the previous version of Ubuntu. Other changes include, Maximised windows have their controls move into the top bar, and the top bar also has a Global Menu. Very few of the Ubuntu applications still show the menu on the window anymore, but a few do still (All Wine applications, Libre Office, and it appears that QT/KDE apps may not use it.)
All in all, I’ll need more than fifteen minutes to test it out to get a full opinion on the new version of Ubuntu. It looks nice, and a lot has changed. Though I’m fairly sure that I’ll have to disable the global menu, I have a dual screen machine, and if I have to go back to the main screen to select from the menus, well it would not be very fun…
Have a good day!
