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Hikarunix: The Go Distro
LGRiske writes "In this day and age of the Unreal Final Fantasy of Doom 3 it's nice to see a 4000 year old board game keep up the pace. There's now a whole Linux distribution dedicated to learning, playing and studying the oldest strategy game in the world, Go/Baduk/WeiQi. Named Hikarunix it is based on DamnSmallLinux, the Live Linux CD, and is small enough to fit on a 3" (80mm) miniCD. It is meant for Go players of all levels whether you've never even heard of the game or have been playing for decades."
Yeah, but it wouldn't be a small distro designed for playing Go. Celebrate diversity!
I have tryed to play for hours but I never understood what the point was any why could the computer do stuff I couldn't and beat me every single time.
I'm not too sure a dedicated distribution is such a good thing. Wouldn't have packing it with Knoppix be more useful? Booting a PC to play a game isn't the kind of thing I do every day anyway.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
Come on, that doesn't seem right. The whole idea of community driven design is to stimulate innovation. A big ass monolithic linux distro would be about as innovative as Windows.
...I have to ask: isn't learning Go from a computer sort of like learning sex from a porn site? You can pick up some basic concepts and maybe even some effective strategies, but until you have a real, live, flesh-and-blood human partner you're just not getting the full effect and are never going to be truly good.
This is actually a great idea and could be the basis for further innovation/exploitation of Linux or alternative and free OSs for distributing products sans the Windows / Direct X / permissions / general configuration headaches. You wouldn't have to worry about what media player or APIs are present on a user's system, instead focusing on creating a robust, stable, and boot-able platform to showcase your wares. Anyone know of any current projects bent towards this goal? Once the work was done, it could be applied to a variety of software products.
Go is perfect. Perhaps your perceptions are flawed.
Chess is not better at all. Go has simple rules, yet deep strategy. Chess has silly rules with every piece moving different and no strategy at all, you only have to memorize openings and count many moves ahead, thats all there is to chess (besides it will die because too many games end in draw and computers will find optimal strategy (not to talk about huge advantage of first player))
Excuse my non-Linux-user question, but:
What's the advantage of having an entire distro built around this game, rather than just having an application for the game and all its training stuff built into the app?
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
There are many Go players who want to see/try all the different Go software but would never try working with Linux. Now they can, and find out that Linux is pretty nice.
Thanks for putting on the feedbag. Thanks for going all out. Thanks for showing me your Swiss Army knife.
Last time I had to reboot my PC whenever I wanted to run a new program was... 1983 or so with my Apple II. This is an awful idea.
I dunno, while it would awfully tedious to reboot into this thing every single time you want to play Go, I don't think that's really the point.
This seems like it would be great for a Go beginner to be able to get up and running with tons of Go utilities and resources with a minimum of fuss. Once you get things figured out, then install the programs on your regular OS, no big deal.
And while this doesn't apply to this CD in particular, there can be other reasons to use a boot CD for a game. The Gentoo folk (and probably others) have made LiveCDs for popular graphics and CPU-intensive games. The enitre mini-distro is optimized solely for this game, right down to kernel tweaks and patches. For those of us who don't have outrageously expensive gaming hardware, this can squeeze a considerable bit of performance out of a box.
I'm not sure any game is perfect, but Go does come damn close. I'm pretty sure that any sentient aliens will play games, and I'd be surprised if they didn't have games of the "move pieces, capture the special piece" vareity (like Chess, Shogi, etc), those games won't be Chess or Shogi, but I'm sure they'll be similar. But I'm pretty sure that they will play Go. Not a "Go like game", but Go, the utter simplicity of the rules ensures that if they evolved a game along the lines of Go it would be Go. Which is pretty neat, when you think about it. The Go problem you worked this morning was probably being worked by beings with tentacles hundreds of light years away too.
As for a Go based Linux distro, I do have to admit to asking "Why?" Obviously, why not, but still, it seems a bit too specialized.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
The simplicity of Go actually makes it seem a bit inelegant when people play it--namely that it is not self-evident when the game is over. I'm not necessarily saying that this is a flaw, although people sometimes continue playing games whose outcome is already decided. I think the most "natural" way to play would be to use Chinese scoring rules, and keep playing until every space is filled up, but that would be tedious and unnecessary.
English is easier said than done.
Parent has it exactly right. It's just another distribution modality, folks, one you've seen before, that just so happens to fit quite nicely into a particular niche: Making it way stupid-easy for noobs to get introduced to and enthusiastic about a game.
Nobody said it was The One Size Fits All Way To Go For All Software Everywhere (sheesh). Is this some kinda Software Panacea syndrome peculiar to Linux geeks, that they have to announce the Next Big Thing every 10 minutes?
If anything, it *might* be a great way to introduce niche markets to other Linux apps. It certainly gets users over the Fear of a Bad Config problem.