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.
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.
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!
Conical has added a new feature to it’s website, you can try Ubuntu before you download it, and see if you like it. (You can also do this while downloading) I know that I’m going to try it out, I’ve heard a lot of good, and bad about the New Ubuntu.
You will have ~15 minutes, depending on your network speed, the slower your network, the less time you’ll have, as you will have to download some software on the first run, I had about 13.5 minutes on my first run. I’ll be making a short review post later…
To try it out, go to http://try-ubuntu-beta.ec42.net/
It appears that this feature will only be available for a short time, but I guess that it’s something that might become a bit more common…
Also, 2 days until you can download the full 11.04 version of Ubuntu, so two more days until I try it out on my own machines. 🙂
Have a great day!
I’ve been having some issues with a Windows Vista install that has gone on the fritz, which is why I took so long to post this…
Well, here is Part 2 of my History with computers.
Now, somethime between 2001 and 2002 we got a Windows XP E-machine, it ran well, but my mom thought that Windows XP looked too much like a clown to be good in business :), E-machines was a good company … at the time.
After that one I got a Windows XP Compaq desktop. Once again it ran well, though fairly slowly, it was eventually pointed out that I had gotten a computer with a slow CPU, so this wasn’t Windows XP’s fault.
One of my aunts had also just married a European man (From the UK to be specific) and he brought some disks with Mandrake Linux 9 on them. This is what started me onto Linux, I installed it on the Windows 98 E-machine, and ran it for a fair amount of time. It wouldn’t update due to the company behind it changing the name to Mandriva, which broke the older updaters. I ran it off and on for a while, but stuck mostly with Windows.
Around this time is when I started to see problems with some of our computers. My mom had gotten another E-machine around the time that I got the Compaq desktop computer. Her E-machine computer started randomly re-booting, and crashing. we took it into the Geek Squad… for a whole week, and they gave it a clean bill of health. it died two days after, motherboard failure. She got a HP Desktop from Walmart with Windows XP Media Center Edition. This was just before the release of Vista, so it had one of those ‘Windows Vista Capable’ labels.
The HP Machine ran very well for over a year, then it got a Virus which wasn’t detected by the Virus checker, it did a lot of damage to the OS before I installed AVG Free Antivirus to replace the older, paid, program. The viruses were detected and removed, but the computer was far too unstable for work. My mom needed that computer running well within 24 hours, and she didn’t trust the Geek Squad since the last machine. I decided to try out Ubuntu Linux. The machine was running by the next day, able to boot between the unstable copy of Windows XP, and Ubuntu 7.04. In retrospect, this was the first step to our ongoing removal of Windows from our main machines.
At this point I got a new E-machine, which had a very badly bugged copy of Windows XP (Last XP Machine at Walmart, everything else was Vista) The copy of Windows XP could not run any Full-screen programs, even though I installed a high-end graphics card. It was soon running Ubuntu 7.04, and it got upgraded to 7.10 in October of that year.
Whew, that was a lot of text 🙂 Tune in tomorrow (I hope…*) for the third part of this series! Windows Vista, and Beyond!
*My Windows Vista/7 Laptop just died, time to put Ubuntu 10.10 on it 😉
Use BleachBit to remove your files.
Bleachbit is much like CCleaner, which I recommended for Windows users a while ago. I still recommend CCleaner for Windows Users, but since it’s Windows only, it isn’t useful for Linux users. You can remove files, shred files (Completly wipe them) and wipe the free space on the disk drive.
The reason that you would want to shred a file is to make it impossible to recover later. There are programs that can recover files that have been deleted, which is why you would want to ‘shred’ your sensitive documents.
