Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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.
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.