And, like him, I still don't know how to get OOffice 3.0 installed.
Run Synaptic. Under Repositories -> Third-Party Software, add: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu hardy main. (Or intrepid main, or jaunty main.) Then reload. Then upgrade OpenOffice.org to 3.0.1. That should do it.
Actually, when I go to http://openoffice.org/ I'm offered to download an installer. And they've got.deb packages too, which I think is how I originally installed it.
The Ballblazer and Commando cartridges for the Atari 7800 (1987 and 1988) had the Atari home computers' POKEY soundchip to add to the 7800's limited built-in audio capabilities... though "influential" isn't a word that comes to mind there, I suppose.
so I still have to edit xorg.conf by hand, forcing lower, "game-friendly" resolutions to go single-head with metamodes like "CRT-0: 1280x1024, CRT-1: NULL".
Actually, you can do that in the nvidia-settings GUI, too.
Hm. When I use nvidia-settings to configure a TwinView setup, the window managers/desktop environments all* become aware of the situation; the *desktop* stretches across both screens, but panels and maximized windows don't... as it should be.
Now, fullscreen *games* do tend to end up split across my two monitors... so I still have to edit xorg.conf by hand, forcing lower, "game-friendly" resolutions to go single-head with metamodes like "CRT-0: 1280x1024, CRT-1: NULL".
It's been working fine so far, with or without Compiz. But then I only have two plain old CRTs to juggle. Perhaps I misunderstood your problem.
I did combine a Twinview setup with a leftover PCI card into a triple-head Xinerama setup once and that worked too (although I'm not sure I still had 3D acceleration).
(* except KDE 4.1. It doesn't seem to handle TwinView *or* separate X screens correctly here.)
-Some of the advantages are useless. Why do I care about installing a driver by dragging and dropping files?
Actually, that was the bit that got my hopes up. Now, I've never used BeOS (except very briefly back when R5 ran on top of Windows) -- but one thing I miss about AmigaOS is knowing, at least superficially, what went where: a ".device" goes into "devs:", a ".library" into "libs:", a script into "s:", etc. Of course none of my Amigas, nor their OS's, were as capable as this "unfriendly" PC. And I don't know if things like these can be both simple and feature-rich. So as a "desktop user" type I rely a lot on installers and wizards and GUIs. Automation is definitely appreciated -- but part of me still wishes it weren't also *necessary* (for the unschooled, anyway). I wish the filesystem yielded its secrets more willingly! There's probably a reason there are, for example,/usr/local/share/mime,/usr/share/mime-info,/usr/share/mime,/usr/share/mimelnk,/usr/lib/mime, ~/.kde/share/mimelnk, ~/.local/share/mime,/etc/mime.types and who knows what other mimey things, but it's rather inscrutable how, if at all, they correlate, or, say, what exactly you need to back up if you want to preserve some laboriously customized K-menu. Or perhaps I should stop displaying all those dotfiles, they're obviously making me nervous:)
Nah, it's a fan site. But since I can't get Arthur, Beyond Zork, Enchanter, and Planetfall off the various non-PC format floppies I bought them on, I may start feeling somewhat entitled...
How many hours have you spent playing Infocom games like the "Zork" series and "The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy"? No graphics, just text adventures with great stories and puzzles that required a good imagination.
I liked the ones with pictures - but then, I played them on an Apple II even before I knew how to go "east" in English. That was a bit of a problem.
I wonder how something like that would fare these days if you added something like a more complex language interpretation algorithm?
TADS 3's included parser seems capable of handling, say, "put everything from the bed except for the pillow, the threadbare sheets, and three of the counterfeit Mona Lisas in the suitcase that's on the tacky yin-yang table then leave", or to figure out what "either" or "any" refer to. But even that is still just the same old "verb, direct object, preposition, indirect object" kinda syntax that experienced players expect to be able to rely on most of the time.
It would certainly be keen to be able to enter just about anything: "Ask him why he wasn't at the party yesterday", maybe, or "use the cheese to wedge the door shut", or "throw a temper tantrum" or "offer comfort" -- but I'd not want to have to write the game/story that could anticipate and defend a meaningful plot against that much player freedom!
It's sad, though, that character interaction takes such a backseat to object manipulation. You unlock and examine and screw and dial and wear and smell and knock and drop -- but you don't, usually, console or chide or apologize or plead or threaten or tease. But then, characters are much harder to model than boxes, and messing with them might have much greater ramifications.
Hmmm.
All that said, interactive fiction isn't dead. Some of my own recommendations: "Anchorhead", by Mike Gentry; "Savoir-Faire" and "Metamorphosis", by Emily Short; "Hunter, in Darkness" and "Shade", by Andrew Plotkin; "Varicella", by Adam Cadre; ""Rameses", by Stephen Bond; "Winter Wonderland", by Laura Knauth; "My Angel", by Jon Ingold; "Kaged" and "Exhibition", by Ian Finley; "Whom The Telling Changed", by Aaron A. Reed; "Worlds Apart", by Suzanne Britton. IFDB is a good, IIDB-/Amazon-like place to start looking, if you're interested. It's all freeware, too. Mostly.
Or what if there were an "audio book" version of such games where the only way to interact would be to issue commands via microphone?
That would be neat. Would that require new games, though, or rather a new interface? I've never really bothered with speech recognition. Since the vocabulary would be known in advance, it might be doable? But I imagine you'd have to have good voice-actors, too.
Freespace II Source Code Project: Maybe one of the "total conversions" that do not require the original game data. Not sure the hardware can handle it, though
Freedroid Classic: a remake of the addictive Commodore 64 classic Paradroid
Vega Strike: a game in the Elite/Frontier/Freelancer tradition
Oolite: Elite with textures, by the look of it
Nethack, Slash'EM, or Vulture's Eye/Claw for graphical versions. Curiosity and a full manual required: I can't imagine anyone trying to #rub, #dip or #force "intuitively", or realizing what else can be read, eaten, written with, thrown, cast spells at, turned to flesh,...
Legerdemain: looks like an imaginative, even somewhat poetic roguelike RPG; needs Java
Gargoyle: a sparse but "typographically attractive" interactive fiction interpreter for most of the relevant modern and historical systems from TADS 3 and Z-Code/Infocom to Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9. Include some of the top-rated games from http://ifdb.tads.org/ or http://www.wurb.com/if/ (I would advise against the "include everything" approach). Not sure the Windows version has a file-selector or front-end, might be best to throw one together yourself or at least prepare the relevant filetype associations
Flight of the Amazon Queen, Beneath a Steel Sky, and other adventure games for the SCUMM VM
Not sure my Linux unbeard helps my credibility -- just love how current Nethack builds *still* believe themselves _more_visual than "most adventure games"... there, I'm forgoing HTML formatting just for you:)
We're using the same repositories as non-K Ubuntu 8.04 so I'd think so. Of course "all the updates" will be bug/security related except for what makes it into the (unsupported) backports. So I've started poking around getdeb.net more (and the Intrepid repositories for some stuff). Can't really go to 8.10 if there's no real-time kernel. Not interested in destroying everything in a patching adventure right now.
I have no idea what's up with your off-the-mark glyphs, and my Unicode needs never really extended beyond phonetic symbols and "pretty" punctuation -- I'm guessing (feebly) that whatever tries to pick the ideal font for some unicode range may have less of a chance to err with as few Chinese fonts as I have installed... maybe?
(Then again, isn't that exactly what should not happen with Unicode? Never mind me...)
I have no idea what's up with your off-the-mark glyphs, and my Unicode needs never really extended beyond phonetic symbols and "pretty" punctuation -- I'm guessing (feebly) that whatever tries to pick the ideal font for some unicode range may have less of a chance to err with as few Chinese fonts as I have installed... maybe?
Oops; I just realized that it's really unicode.org, not unicode.com, of course.;-) To be more specific, the URL is "http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihan.html". Type in 2EA88 and press the Lookup button, to see if your browser can display the char correctly. I'd be most interested in ubuntu systems that display it correctly. Something's wrong here, and I'm not finding any useful clues.
U+2EA8 worked for me after installing the ttf-arphic-uming font collection. I don't have any other Chinese fonts installed; can't read them anyway. I've got Firefox 3.0.3 on Kubuntu 8.04.1.
(I wonder if there's a way to ask firefox or other browsers "What font are you using to render the selected text?"
Good question... there're Braille output devices that mechanically display tangible Braille characters by raising the relevant "pixels" in a matrix (or running them by your finger character by character, says Wikipedia). I suppose you'd have to use one of those, or a Braille printer.
I've not run any Windows "setup.exe" type things with this Wine installation yet (I have a lot of stuff on an existing Windows installation that runs ok with Wine without first installing it into ~/.wine/drive_c/...); it's Konqueror's refusal to run double-clicked.EXEs with the "wine" command that confuses me...
With the standard Ubuntu Wine package, you can double-click on EXEs to run them.
This hasn't been working for a while now. Konqueror shows.EXEs as Windows Executables... fine. Wine Windows Emulator is that filetype's Preferred Application... fine. And they run just fine from the context menu, too! Just not with a double-click. Dumps this in the console (for example): "run-detectors: unable to find an interpreter for/mnt/windows/Programme/firefox/firefox.exe"... as though I'd tried to directly run just firefox.exe, without wine.
According to Konqueror, properties for wine.desktop are:
Application: Wine Windows Emulator
Command: wine start/unix %f
Mimetype: application/x-executable, Description: Executable File
Mimetype: application/x-msdos-program, Description: Windows Executable
I removed x-executable from that because, well, it was leading to Konq offering me to run Linux executables with Wine preferably (but again it didn't run Wine for them when double-clicking them). No difference, put it back, no difference, removed it again, no difference.
Just in case you or anyone is reading this and has any idea what can be done here... it's one of several slightly odd annoyances with even a freshly installed stock Konqueror (it's missing its "Go" and "Window" menus, too), and I'm still more than a little lost in its configuration!
Slashdot Mirror
Run Synaptic. Under Repositories -> Third-Party Software, add: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu hardy main. (Or intrepid main, or jaunty main.) Then reload. Then upgrade OpenOffice.org to 3.0.1. That should do it.
.deb packages too, which I think is how I originally installed it.
Actually, when I go to http://openoffice.org/ I'm offered to download an installer. And they've got
Oh? Pitfall II did always seem rather more "musical" than most games...
The Ballblazer and Commando cartridges for the Atari 7800 (1987 and 1988) had the Atari home computers' POKEY soundchip to add to the 7800's limited built-in audio capabilities... though "influential" isn't a word that comes to mind there, I suppose.
Actually, you can do that in the nvidia-settings GUI, too.
Hm. When I use nvidia-settings to configure a TwinView setup, the window managers/desktop environments all* become aware of the situation; the *desktop* stretches across both screens, but panels and maximized windows don't... as it should be.
Now, fullscreen *games* do tend to end up split across my two monitors... so I still have to edit xorg.conf by hand, forcing lower, "game-friendly" resolutions to go single-head with metamodes like "CRT-0: 1280x1024, CRT-1: NULL".
It's been working fine so far, with or without Compiz. But then I only have two plain old CRTs to juggle. Perhaps I misunderstood your problem.
I did combine a Twinview setup with a leftover PCI card into a triple-head Xinerama setup once and that worked too (although I'm not sure I still had 3D acceleration).
(* except KDE 4.1. It doesn't seem to handle TwinView *or* separate X screens correctly here.)
Actually, that was the bit that got my hopes up. Now, I've never used BeOS (except very briefly back when R5 ran on top of Windows) -- but one thing I miss about AmigaOS is knowing, at least superficially, what went where: a ".device" goes into "devs:", a ".library" into "libs:", a script into "s:", etc. Of course none of my Amigas, nor their OS's, were as capable as this "unfriendly" PC. And I don't know if things like these can be both simple and feature-rich. So as a "desktop user" type I rely a lot on installers and wizards and GUIs. Automation is definitely appreciated -- but part of me still wishes it weren't also *necessary* (for the unschooled, anyway). I wish the filesystem yielded its secrets more willingly! There's probably a reason there are, for example, /usr/local/share/mime, /usr/share/mime-info, /usr/share/mime, /usr/share/mimelnk, /usr/lib/mime, ~/.kde/share/mimelnk, ~/.local/share/mime, /etc/mime.types and who knows what other mimey things, but it's rather inscrutable how, if at all, they correlate, or, say, what exactly you need to back up if you want to preserve some laboriously customized K-menu. Or perhaps I should stop displaying all those dotfiles, they're obviously making me nervous :)
Nah, it's a fan site. But since I can't get Arthur, Beyond Zork, Enchanter, and Planetfall off the various non-PC format floppies I bought them on, I may start feeling somewhat entitled...
When was Zork ever "casual"? Cruel is more like it.
(Correction: I meant IMDB. IIDB are the Internet Infidels.)
I liked the ones with pictures - but then, I played them on an Apple II even before I knew how to go "east" in English. That was a bit of a problem.
TADS 3's included parser seems capable of handling, say, "put everything from the bed except for the pillow, the threadbare sheets, and three of the counterfeit Mona Lisas in the suitcase that's on the tacky yin-yang table then leave", or to figure out what "either" or "any" refer to. But even that is still just the same old "verb, direct object, preposition, indirect object" kinda syntax that experienced players expect to be able to rely on most of the time.
It would certainly be keen to be able to enter just about anything: "Ask him why he wasn't at the party yesterday", maybe, or "use the cheese to wedge the door shut", or "throw a temper tantrum" or "offer comfort" -- but I'd not want to have to write the game/story that could anticipate and defend a meaningful plot against that much player freedom!
It's sad, though, that character interaction takes such a backseat to object manipulation. You unlock and examine and screw and dial and wear and smell and knock and drop -- but you don't, usually, console or chide or apologize or plead or threaten or tease. But then, characters are much harder to model than boxes, and messing with them might have much greater ramifications.
Hmmm.
All that said, interactive fiction isn't dead. Some of my own recommendations: "Anchorhead", by Mike Gentry; "Savoir-Faire" and "Metamorphosis", by Emily Short; "Hunter, in Darkness" and "Shade", by Andrew Plotkin; "Varicella", by Adam Cadre; ""Rameses", by Stephen Bond; "Winter Wonderland", by Laura Knauth; "My Angel", by Jon Ingold; "Kaged" and "Exhibition", by Ian Finley; "Whom The Telling Changed", by Aaron A. Reed; "Worlds Apart", by Suzanne Britton. IFDB is a good, IIDB-/Amazon-like place to start looking, if you're interested. It's all freeware, too. Mostly.
That would be neat. Would that require new games, though, or rather a new interface? I've never really bothered with speech recognition. Since the vocabulary would be known in advance, it might be doable? But I imagine you'd have to have good voice-actors, too.
Also, of course, The Ur-Quan Masters ~
Freespace II Source Code Project: Maybe one of the "total conversions" that do not require the original game data. Not sure the hardware can handle it, though
...
Freedroid Classic: a remake of the addictive Commodore 64 classic Paradroid
Vega Strike: a game in the Elite/Frontier/Freelancer tradition
Oolite: Elite with textures, by the look of it
Nethack, Slash'EM, or Vulture's Eye/Claw for graphical versions. Curiosity and a full manual required: I can't imagine anyone trying to #rub, #dip or #force "intuitively", or realizing what else can be read, eaten, written with, thrown, cast spells at, turned to flesh,
Legerdemain: looks like an imaginative, even somewhat poetic roguelike RPG; needs Java
Gargoyle: a sparse but "typographically attractive" interactive fiction interpreter for most of the relevant modern and historical systems from TADS 3 and Z-Code/Infocom to Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9. Include some of the top-rated games from http://ifdb.tads.org/ or http://www.wurb.com/if/ (I would advise against the "include everything" approach). Not sure the Windows version has a file-selector or front-end, might be best to throw one together yourself or at least prepare the relevant filetype associations
Flight of the Amazon Queen, Beneath a Steel Sky, and other adventure games for the SCUMM VM
The Mana World: console-style RPG
Because they weren't breaking the law at the time. (Short version)
Not sure my Linux unbeard helps my credibility -- just love how current Nethack builds *still* believe themselves _more_visual than "most adventure games"... there, I'm forgoing HTML formatting just for you :)
Unlike most adventure games, which give you a verbal description of your location, NetHack gives you a visual image of the dungeon level you are on.
:)
Sigh.
I'm bad at both... and I keep trying to save and quit Nethack with a ":wq".
We're using the same repositories as non-K Ubuntu 8.04 so I'd think so. Of course "all the updates" will be bug/security related except for what makes it into the (unsupported) backports. So I've started poking around getdeb.net more (and the Intrepid repositories for some stuff). Can't really go to 8.10 if there's no real-time kernel. Not interested in destroying everything in a patching adventure right now.
(Then again, isn't that exactly what should not happen with Unicode? Never mind me...)
I have no idea what's up with your off-the-mark glyphs, and my Unicode needs never really extended beyond phonetic symbols and "pretty" punctuation -- I'm guessing (feebly) that whatever tries to pick the ideal font for some unicode range may have less of a chance to err with as few Chinese fonts as I have installed... maybe?
U+2EA8 worked for me after installing the ttf-arphic-uming font collection. I don't have any other Chinese fonts installed; can't read them anyway. I've got Firefox 3.0.3 on Kubuntu 8.04.1.
So do I.
Good question... there're Braille output devices that mechanically display tangible Braille characters by raising the relevant "pixels" in a matrix (or running them by your finger character by character, says Wikipedia). I suppose you'd have to use one of those, or a Braille printer.
And I'm the sixth smartest person on MySpace. Woe!
I've not run any Windows "setup.exe" type things with this Wine installation yet (I have a lot of stuff on an existing Windows installation that runs ok with Wine without first installing it into ~/.wine/drive_c/...); it's Konqueror's refusal to run double-clicked .EXEs with the "wine" command that confuses me...
Well, yes, it's a Konqueror problem, not a Firefox or Nautilus problem...
This hasn't been working for a while now. Konqueror shows .EXEs as Windows Executables... fine. Wine Windows Emulator is that filetype's Preferred Application... fine. And they run just fine from the context menu, too! Just not with a double-click. Dumps this in the console (for example): "run-detectors: unable to find an interpreter for /mnt/windows/Programme/firefox/firefox.exe"... as though I'd tried to directly run just firefox.exe, without wine.
[Desktop Entry] /unix %f
Type=Application
Name=Wine Windows Emulator
Exec=wine start
MimeType=application/x-ms-dos-executable;application/x-msdos-program;application/x-msdownload;application/exe;application/x-exe;application/dos-exe;vms/exe;application/x-winexe;application/msdos-windows;application/x-zip-compressed;application/x-executable;
NoDisplay=true
According to Konqueror, properties for wine.desktop are:
Application: Wine Windows Emulator /unix %f
Command: wine start
Mimetype: application/x-executable, Description: Executable File
Mimetype: application/x-msdos-program, Description: Windows Executable
I removed x-executable from that because, well, it was leading to Konq offering me to run Linux executables with Wine preferably (but again it didn't run Wine for them when double-clicking them). No difference, put it back, no difference, removed it again, no difference.
Just in case you or anyone is reading this and has any idea what can be done here... it's one of several slightly odd annoyances with even a freshly installed stock Konqueror (it's missing its "Go" and "Window" menus, too), and I'm still more than a little lost in its configuration!