Slashdot Mirror
Indrema Announces Partnership With Red Hat
Jacek Fedorynski writes "Indrema (the Linux gaming console guys) and Red Hat have announced that they have formed an alliance to "jointly manage branding and distribution" of DV Linux, a Linux distribution for gaming consoles."
I figure they'll use the same plan as Microsoft with their X-box, whatever that plan happens to be.
The X-box seems to be using off-the-shelf components (IIRC, which I may not), which lowers the construction and R&D price. As stated in another post, you don't have to open source the development kits. Some may scream bloody murder at that, but in my mind, it's no different from selling some other piece of software to run on linux. The profit may come from using an online network (much like the game NeverRest) or by selling other online services (email, what-have-you). Since it wouldn't take too much (I would think) to add on a web-browser, it could become something like WebTV.
Now there's a scary notion.
nVidia's drivers actual did quite well on Toms Hardware, though the Windows drivers seemed to be better in almost every case.
But they are working on it...that is the important thing
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
The gaming market is all marketing and hype. Yes, there are technological innovations every day, but what consoles are about is marketing, marketing, advertising and more marketing-just note how the ages old R3000 Playstation keeps selling billions of titles against the technologically superior N64 and Dreamcast. All about ads on TV, gaming magazines and viral marketing intended to get youngsters into buying more.
Worse, there are no developers. If you look at firms that failed like Atari (Jaguar), Commodore (CD32) and 3DO, all had put in significant developer relations in SDK's, copublicity, etc. Hell, CD32/CDTV had the fscking Amiga to copy games off.
Put Indrema into this market without the developer support of hundreds of games, plus no marketing engine the way Sony, Sega, Nintendo or Microsoft have, and that's the end.
Unfortunately, most Linux firms these days don't seem to get the idea of marketing, period. They take great software technology, throw it into commodity hardware and watch it flop. You can't keep selling to the converted!
This is exactly like the Amiga market about five years ago. Applications like the Toaster, go BEYOND and open new markets up. Linux vendors have to really start building something more than what any guy would run make on some beat up old box in his closet...especially with early adopters who will tear things apart and judge value on sight of the thing :)
--Calum
Traditionally, console manufacturers have dervied a large portion of their revenues from the sale of development kits and development licenses. Since all Linux-based console OSs have to be released under the GPL, it would no longer be possible for Linux console manufacturers to sell their consoles as loss leaders. They will either have to build less-powerful consoles and sell them at the same price point, or sell their units for significantly more than competing systems. Could the restrictive nature of the GPL end up preventing the development of competitive Linux consoles?
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
I don't think it will help much. With poor support for newer video cards Linux isn't going to get much in the way of gaming.
Also, from what I have seen from the Xbox so far it will likely be the crushing blow for Linux gaming (with Linux's adoption on the desktop soon to follow). The Xbox can run 6 monitors for crying out loud! It has full screen texture rendering, surface mapping, and will likely have the most stunning array of games for any console ever produced. (Look at Age of Empires...)
Linux isn't going to be able to keep up, it is fighting wars on too many fronts: servers; desktops; console; handhelds; etc.
..................................
Cunning linguists
Perhaps so, but to me, the term "user-friendly" has been mutilated to mean "usable by people who don't know computers". The term "user-friendly" really should mean "easy to use by people of all skill levels".
Windows may be more "user-friendly" in the sense that it lets newbies get things done easily. This is a good thing, but one peeve I have against Windows is that its so-called "user-friendliness" gets in the way of people who know what they're doing. If you know how to write shell scripts, a complex task can be done in a minute or two. But in Windows, you've to pray that the UI designers have thought of the possibility that you actually want to do such a task. Otherwise, you'll be doing it manually, navigating around all kinds of multi-level menus just to do one thing. This isn't exactly the most efficient way to specify the equivalent of a shell script.
Now, I'm not saying that we should forget the newbies and force shell-scripting down the throats of all computer users. I'm saying that UI's that are boasted to be "user-friendly" are friendly only to newbies, but are actually unfriendly to experienced users because it gets in the way of what they want to do.
A real "user-friendly" UI should be one that is conducive to both beginners and advanced users. I know that it's probably not possible for one UI to integrate both of these aspects; but at least the user should be given the choice. Linux GUI's may not be as good as Windows yet, but Linux at least gives the user the choice of what interface is most efficient for him/her. Windows shoves a GUI down your throat. Guess which one wins when Linux GUI's catch up to Windows.
---
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
I love linux, but do you really think Indrema has that much of a chance in such a crowded console market where the other players are throwing as much as $500 million dollars into the marketing blitz for launch? (As X-Box is doing).
Also, both the PS/2 and X-Box will have a ton of games at launch, where as the Indrema will have .. ?
- My Celeron/466 Linux box boots in less than three minutes, and that's with Apache, Samba, Sendmail, and MySQL all starting up. Move the OS into ROM or flash, and you've got yourself a winner -- even without custom-tweaked drivers and hardware.
- Check out XFree86 4.0.1 -- the DRI and modularization redesigns for this version are really freaking impressive. AFAIK, the 3D is all done w/OpenGL, and quite a few cards already have accellerated support.
- Remember, we're talking Linux here. Assuming they're looking at using off-the-shelf hardware, coding for these consoles shouldn't be any more difficult than writing for a desktop machine. Game consoles are often incredibly difficult to code for because they don't follow any sort of industry standards for either hardware or software, and require a lot of low-level hacking to get good results.
Linux consoles could easily put the smack down on the X-Box and proprietary boxes, because they could have the same availability of development tools and a much more reasonable learning curve for new developers. However, they could also easily die a quick, painful death if the X-Box beats them to the punch with game support. That is the biggest problem I see dealing with, since the X-Box will already be largely Windows-compatible, and ports of old Win32 games will be trivial, if necessary at all.I have heard RedHat partner with AMD, Motorolla, IBM and the GNOME Foundation in the last week. While I am sure that stragetic partnerships are good for RedHat and Linux, I begin to wonder how much resources RedHat has to offer.
Do they have the manpower to effectively contribute to these relationships?
Why is Indrema using Linux as a console OS? On a console, you want the OS to be out of the way, providing as little interferance as possible. You don't need memory protection (landing at the command prompt instead of simply freezing is hardly an improvement, and it gets in the way of extremely high-speed code), daemons, a complex driver module, or anything like that. All you want is a tightly-coded microkernel written in assembly which provides the most rudimentary hardware abstraction and multitasking, and then hand off everything to the loaded game--something a lot closer to V2 OS than Linux. Linux just isn't suited for a console for the same reasons that it is very well suited for workstations and servers.
So the question comes down to: why are they using Linux?
Just listening to the old Geeks In Space episode 31, and according to what they were talking about in the broadcast, Linux didn't really have that good of a standard for video drivers (or something like that). It had a hard time with video, they talked about how it would be good to get a port for Quicktime, and one of the mentioned that they would like to play Quake 3 at a decent frame rate.
Has this all chanaged since then? I recently saw some benchmarks on Toms Hardware with Linux drivers...has it come that far along that we can do descent gaming now?
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
This sounds like really interesting news actually. Linux outperforms Windows in nearly every category *except* gaming. Many games have been ported to Linux, but all those I know of are at least fractionally slower (I'm sure someone can point out an exception).
If Linux were to become a good foundation for future gaming consoles, we would see a lot more attention paid to building extraordinary (as opposed to merely working) drivers for various video cards, etc. I know many people who use Windows for the purpose of playing games due to this fact.
Also, if Linux were to become more of a gaming platform, we might see more games being released for it, instead of someone having to hack out a port to nearly everything we want to play.
All in all, this has at least some potential. Oh, and for the sceptics that I'm sure are already popping up, making Linux perform better in these areas will *not* degrade its usefulness in all the areas it already dominates. I would even highly doubt that it will take away any of the motivation for progress in other areas. I'd even argue that this would bring more attention to Linux in general with the possibility of having more intelligent people working on some of the details.
Not everyone who uses Windows is lame. Some haven't been exposed to anything else, so how can we judge them? There may be another Linus out there dialing into AOL on his Win2K machine just dying to find something better...
Source code is a lot like a parachute; it needs to be open in order to function properly.
Linux DV won't take off as a console platform until the following happens:
I'm not saying that the X-box will be easy, but it will at least be easier for MS to port all the crap needed to the X-box's OS, seeing as it's basically a stripped-down Windows (9x? NT?)-based OS.
--
Kinda like the XBox will intorduce them to:
;-)
<BLUE_SCREEN>
*** STOP: 0x00000019 BAD_POOL_HEADER
(list DLLs here)
Please contact your system administrator.
</BLUE_SCREEN>
eh?
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I've been looking at the X-Box and the Indrema and I've found advantages and disadvantages of both systems. First, let's look at selection of titles - X-Box will provide titles for a premium. Games will probably cost as much as PS games, if not more. That'll be $40 or something. They are guaranteed to be practically bug-free, as with the tradition of console games. With Microsoft doing quality assurance, bugs will probably be stomped from X-Box games before they're allowed to be released (although Windoze will continue to be buggy). Now, with Indrema, the PSX type of marketing approach is showing. There will be up to a hundred (if not more) games to play on the Indrema within the first 3 months because coders will hack up their own games for free release on the Indrema (with a free license). The selection of games will be huge, and that's what will draw the crowd - wide selection (ala PSX). Now, the only problem is that those games released by amateur coders will be buggy, and sometimes buggy to the point where it's unenjoyable. But that point I won't complain (I mean, it's free). The only thing is - who will pay for a game if they can get other games for free? Unless it's an amazing game, 70% of the target audience will avoid it like a plague because you have to pay for it. I mean, when was the last time millions of people flooded to a store to buy a Linux game or program? I hope that I don't get sued for this, but the only computer game I've ever bought in my life is Starcraft (battlechest). It's amazing (as most of the nation will tell you), and it's extremely replayable, so I bought it. Have I bought any other games of late? No. Hell, have I replayed any old games of late? No. I don't want to buy a game that I'll stop playing in a month. A month of playing ain't worth $60, and if you can play other games (without copyright protection) for free, why the hell not? I mean, if there are free games that will be better, if not on par with commercial games released for Indrema, who the hell is going to pay for a game? The only reason half-life is selling so well is because of counter-strike. How many people will actually buy TF2 now that CS is LORD of Internet Teamplay. Sure, CS boosted the sales of HL, but it also crippled somewhat the future sales of TF2 (then again, I heard a rumour that they'll make a CS mod for TF2). Indrema games will likely not sell as well as had hoped, and the machines will probably need to cost a tad more than the X-Box (which, because of the Indrema, probably won't sell as well, either, although the tekkies will like it). Brings me to another point - The X-Box has plastered hardware specs all over the wall for the past year, and those claims have been demoed to be pretty solid. Now, this NV20 (or was it 25?) chip has been much-touted - can the Indrema's GPU compete? Not knowing anything about Indrema's GPU specs (or even who's making it) scares me away from it. The X-Box is going with the KING of all GPU's, who's Indrema going with? X-Box will be for a market of kids who use both PC and Console to game (it'll be their new console) while Indrema will be for a lower budgeted gamer (kinda, considering the software doesn't cost anything) or the Linux tekkies.
...I am proof that intelligent beings are not always intelligent...
I simply don't think that Indrema can cut the mustard. They just don't have enough money. For a console to succeed, it needs several things:
/. readers) *are* affected by advertising. What are people going to buy - something they've seen plastered all over the TV and magazines, or something they've heard of once on a website?
a) Developer Support: Where is the developer support for Indrema? - even if you've got good hardware, hardly anyone will buy the system without some impressive games to play on it. I've seen hardly any developer support for Indrema.
b) Marketing: To get a new console going, you need a whole load of marketing bucks. People (even lofty
c) A viable business model: Most consoles make a loss on the hardware for the first year or two, making all their money on the royalties from the software. As Indrema will have an open system, developers will not have to pay them anything to produce software for it. They'll therfore have to make all their money on the hardware and be at a severe disadvantage to the discounted hardware of Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sega.
d) Brand: Even though Sony stormed the console market with the Playstation, they were still a well known brand. Most people will never have heard of Indrema and will go with a name they know.
Basically, Indrema don't have the money to compete with the other consoles in any big way. If they had vast amounts of money, they could pay developers to write games for them, but at the moment I doubt very many devlopers will. It's just a question of economics: Most console games nowadays require a team of at least 10 people at least 18 months to make. As a devloper gets about £5 for a £40 game, they'd have to sell at least a third of a million copies simply to break even. That's not counting advertising costs. I just can't see Indrema selling enough units to ensure a game could sell that many units, it's as simple as that.
My background: I work for Fiendish Games, which is the Games-Sold-Online division of Criterion Software, who also make cross-platform graphics middleware like Renderware and PC/Console games like Trickstyle.
Please Note: My opinions may not represent the opinions of my employer.
cheers,
Tim
Mail: tim@planettimmy.com
http://www.planettimmy.com/
This is great news, the more companies that back Linux as a gaming platform the better...games are the only reason I still have Windows installed, Linux does everything else better IMHO.
Perhaps for Linux gaming to go up to the next level we need some kind of common application/driver/hardware etc. interface like DirectX...every single game that comes out nowadays is "Direct3D", and only some are OpenGL. I know OpenGL can handle the graphics (better than DirectX at that) and there has been a big push for 3D graphics support under Linux...but what about 3D sound support? DirectX includes all of this together...it is a good idea even if MS wrote it (for once).
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about and there already is something like this...I just haven't heard of anything like it. It would developers some common ground though for sure...
Welcome to the club, kiddies!
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar