Archive

Ok, so its unlikely I will post at this blog again, it will be left up for the old posts, but I have moved over to wordpress.

Visitors - please update your bookmarks!!

http://whyamistilltyping.wordpress.com

See you on the other side!

I finished CoD4 last night on veteran I am still blown away by a game which, paradoxically, is neither new nor revolutionary in concept or implementation. Full review to follow shortly. I am also in the middle of redesigning the site template and seriously considering moving over to a self hosted wordpress blogging system. Stay tuned :)

Graphical user interfaces have been around for a while now. In the last thirty years the available resolutions to the developers has gotten greater and this inevitably has spawned prettier and cleaner themes, however there is very little in the way of innovation Whilst looking into GUIs, the same tried and tested methods are there. They focus on chiefly on static, menu driven systems and desktops that vary in implementations and design, but rarely innovate.

The Early Years, between 1980 and 1990s was the .com boom for GUI interfaces. For us now its a fascinating time because its strange to think of Microsoft has being anything other than a massive monopolistic corporation that is shoving Vista down our throats. Sure we compute in a world safe in the knowledge that the 'cool' guys use Macs and that Linux is that sexy broad thats always just out of reach of the ordinary guy. But it was not always like this, in the very early years of command line interfaces and dodgy shells the GUI really started in earnest with the Apple Lisa Project. It featured drop down menus and desktop icon spaces and was definitely ahead of its time.

From 1984- 1988 the Operating system market was very healthy, with no fewer than 5 different Operating Systems being released and updated. In the few years since then, several contenders have battled it out trying to assert dominance over the Operating System scene. Some emerged 'victorious' (e.g. Apple, Linux, Microsoft) and others faded into distant memory (e.g. Geoworks, Amiga, IBM's OS/2, QNX, BeOS, Acorn, NeXT and others.) It is not until the early 1990s that things started to get interesting, Windows 3.0/3.1 and NT 3.1 were all released within a few years of each other adding a much need update to the old DOS mode graphics.

Throughout all of this, the basic way in which a workspace environment is structured had not changed, no new interface ideas come forth during this era. The operating systems were very different on a code and design level, but the basic menu / desktop point and click interface was well and truly established by this stage. Recently hardware 3D rendering has taken center stage and is most commonly seen with Vista's Aero Glass effects. Linux is the platform on which the greatest innovation is taking place and this of course is as a result of the openness of the platform - the ability to code / implement anything. Whilst the main two desktop managers (Gnome and KDE) are most widely known and recognized there are many fringe desktop mangers from minimalist (e.g. XFCE, flux/busybox) to the specialist (e.g. enlightenment). Whilst providing a great degree of flexibility and variety, they do not really innovate. An exciting project on Linux, originally started by Novel, forked in 2003 and in March remerged back into Compiz Fusion. This was the Linux answer to 3D rendering and whilst the variety and flexibility of Compiz / Beryl (now Compiz Fusion) are astounding, they still offer very little in the way of innovation, just a LOT of eye candy.

And now, finally, I get to the point of this article - desktop managers and the future (check back in five years for a laugh) of desktop interaction. There are three projects which potentially offer new ways to interact with the desktop are Bumptop's physics enabled desktop, Microsoft's Photosynth and Sun's Project Looking Glass.

Physics - on a desktop?!? Madness?

Bumptop is primarily a desktop icon manager, but its main selling point is that every icon (or groups of icons) can be moved / rotated / thrown around the desktop like a chip on a poker table. An obsessively neat person? No problem, stack your icons by file size, document type or by content.

Having a stressful day a the office? Throw your desktop clutter around until you feel better!

The flexibility of this manager is astounding, but whether it will need a new level of human-machine interaction before it takes off remains to be seen. If you have not yet seen their demo on youtube you definitely should.

Photosynth - Surprisingly innovative

Whilst not normally one to be particularly impressed by Microsoft and their 'technology', I am fascinated by Photosynth. The ability to create 3D objects from a series of photos is definitely an interesting concept, but its the way Photosynth presents the documents that could revolutionise the way we store and view documents in the future. To me, this is what I had in mind when Microsoft were talking about a journalised database filesystem back in the days of longhorn. Whilst this is the main focus of the technology, I was simply stunned at the way in which this project groups media. Regardless the size / dimension or media type, a 3D rendered wall is created of all your documents at the same time. Opening one is as simple as zooming into the image or pdf document. Of particular note was the ability to render books in their entirety and zoom from the outset into a single chapter.

The presentation is ten minutes long and there is no excuse for not watching it! :)

Project Looking Glass - Beware on a Sun-ny day.

I came across this project today and was quite taken with it. Initially it looks like a series of snazzy extension to Compiz, however when you dig a bit deeper you find that there are a handful of rather cool features. Rather than windows minimising to a taskbar, they rotate and stick in a 3D fashion to the sides of the screen.

This gives you not only a stack of windows occupying the minimum of desktop real estate, but a preview of each window at the same time making it the ultimate cross between Alt-Tab and the 'live' preview that hovering over the window gives you in Windows Vista and Compiz Fusion. Whilst the taskbar is used as a window dock, rather than being docked as tabs, widgets with window previews are used to further add to the experience.

Also demonstrated is a media player that allows track / album selection through a slew of rotating CDs with cover art. This looks a really clean way of quickly and easily selecting your music rather than searching through a long list.

Another interesting feature is wallpaper that is different on each desktop space (but part of the same overall picture). In the youtube video, the default deskspace is in the center, when you look at the left or right screens, you see the left or right part of the panoramic wallpaper, a very neat feature.

Credit: Some images from http://toastytech.com/guis/

I previously wrote a brief article about gOS - the new cheap FOSS pc that brings Google Apps combined with Linux to the masses. Interestingly today I came across the 'dev kit' version, for $60 you can buy the motherboard and processor out of this PC which normally retails for > $200. This is a hackers dream as the main criticism with the initial gOS was the fact that it came in a shockingly large ugly case for the size of the internal components. I was sorely tempted to buy it in order to harvest the internals and build it into a slim client. This dev kit would make it a lot easier (and cheaper) to do however its only available in the US at the moment.

An enterprising student from Norway has been coding a top-down view RTS version of VALVe's hit, Half Life 2. It is only in a very early state at the moment, although there is a download (how many mods can claim that ) available along with some screen shots. This initial release is mostly a tech demo demonstrating the developer's idea and hints at how the sides will be split. The UI looks lifted from CoH, so I hope he does not get into any legal difficulty as a result. The overall idea is quite good, but by no means unique as a Halflife 1 mod called Natural Selection combined the best elements of RTS and FPS as early as 2002.

Even still I am curious to see which direction this game will go, however in a market flooded of late with RTS games, it makes me wonder whether being HL2 themed with be enough to maintain peoples' interest past the initial wow factor. On the plus side, Half Life 2 has a great story with a variety of well defined characters which will bode very well for this mod. I am excited at the prospect of commanding squads of rebels and or combine soldiers and it could work out very well even if the game play only mimics Company of Heros in style.

So... the iPhone, a product that has evoked a mixture fanatical praise and unrelenting critism in recent months. I am not one to jump onto trend bandwagons and am a firm believer that early adopters either have unusually high stress tolerance or are so obsessed with being ahead of the curve that they don't mind being the corporate guinea pigs that frequently get screwed over. This is a story that has repeated itself time and time again, the Xbox360, the PS3, the Nokia N95 etc. Equally the early iPhone adopters discovered not only a fairly rapid price drop but discovered at their expense the ruthless tactics Apple was willing to adopt to deter what they say as illegal modification. It has been suggested that apple had to act to curb to unlocking, not only to protect their activation and monthly income streams but also as a contractual obligation towards AT&T who paid for exclusivity.

But anyway this is old news, today I spent about twenty minutes playing with an iPhone at an O2 store and I must say I was impressed. My first thought was that is was a lot smaller than I thought it would be. One of Apple's strongest achievements has always been selling a lifestyle. The cornerstone in this is simplicity and ease of use; a mantra Apple customers have come to expect from Apple's hardware line. In this the iPhone does not fail, from simply outstanding looks and build quality, to a gentle gliding interface which just makes it feel like the UI is gliding on air. The integration with Google apps is also impressive as noted by several reviews. Whilst this is true it is important to note apple are not the first to do this. Infact java based midlets have been available do a while for a variety of platforms. An important caveat to note is that there connectivity features work brilliantly in the confines of the O2 store whilst served by their wifi. Real world performance and charges cannot be factored in but invariably the essential bandwidth required will not always be available and where it is it is likely to be costly, especially given the rather limited data plans included in the contract price.

I was impressed with the iPhone but there is no way I would buy one. Whilst the clean interface and the quality of the engineering may be enough to detract from a lack of more advanced features, it is Apple's policy of stifling F/OSS development coupled with a very poor security model (root/ring0 privileges anyone) which put me off. Apple will continue to develop this young product line and like many I am looking forward to revision two. It's a great looking product, but like a cheap commercial printout, look closely and you are going to see imperfections.

For my readers who do not own a PSP or have not been following the PSP homebrew scene, I should explain this, rather absurd headline. For a few months now, an exploit that allows the downgrading of the PSPs internal software (the firmware) has been in circulation after the accidental inclusion of a 'Pandora' battery by Sony. It would appear that Sony's solution to bricked PSPs would be to flash them through software which puts the PSP into a pseudo development mode. A Sony technician accidentally sent one of these magic batteries back with a customer's PSP and this exploit quickly became viral.

Now anyone can potentially unbrick a previously dead PSP - makes you wish you bought all the cheap 'bricked' PSPs on ebay. People who did must be happy now at the prospect of selling them and making a ten fold profit. But I digress, it would appear that new Sony batteries have been altered so as to stop them being modified to trigger the service mode. Should be interesting to see how they achieved this.

Like the majority of the connected world I carry around at least one USB stick with me. Since I use several computers on a day to day basis, I found the portable apps project an excellent way to take versions of popular programs around. This could be done before although it was very dependent on the types of programs you wish to carry around with you. For example, by default, popular programs such a firefox / thunderbird save their data in the root:\Documents and Settings\Konrad\Application Data\*Mozilla folders*. This clearly would not allow an app installed on a USB stick to be utilised at a different computer because the key information would still be stored on the first system. Its not just mozilla applications either, more programs would rather save data to the application data folder or to the registry than use the old style ini or xml type files. Portable versions of popular apps do just that, they have been modified either to allow data to be stored locally (i.e. in the program directory on the USB stick ) or modified to use xml type data encapsulation again on the local disk.

Enter Portable Apps.com, a central nexus of not only applications but a great little installer and management system. U3 disks are gaining traction despite some worry about the security vulnerabilities they potentially expose. With PortableApps you can use a regular USB stick and have a simple interface that pops up when the disk is mounted providing you with a list of available applications. This system suited me for a while as it was convenient and simple, however as time progressed I found a few key applications missing and the lack of custom launching distinctly annoying.

Quite by accident I found PStart. Whilst not graphically as polished as the PortableApp Suite however it offers a lot more flexibility including simple search and PIM functions. It is also possible to make custom launchers with a plethora of options.

For those who like the functionality of the PortableApps coupled with the flexibility of being able to launch anything with a variety of options, I highly recommend the freeware PStart, I just hope they offer skinning in a future version.

People who have not played Anarchy Online will not get this reference although I still recommend reading it as you will certainly be able to pick up on the nuances. Its a comical take on what each class will learn (usually painfully at someone else's expense) when they get to the Temple Of Three Winds. Enjoy :)

Source Thread.

I found on the VALVe software shop two of the coolest products possible from the VALVe franchise.... a head crab and a vortignout in cute plush fun furry form!! Ideal presents for a geek? I think so...

But enough of the alliterations, I also found plans to make home made headcrabs. At the moment the VALVe store is soldout and whilst we wait in hope for more stock, feel free to try your hand at this.

I have been browsing game retailers today making a list of games I want to play. Its not fair - there are some excellent titles just over the horizon and do I have the time to play?!?!? Bah as if :) To make matters worse, my gaming rig needs to be retired. A complete upgrade has been on the cards for a while but I have been umming and ahhing trying to decide what to buy into. I first started thinking about this a year(!) ago but have been delaying and delaying, there has always been something exciting on the horizon stopping me. Whether is was the release of Dx10 cards, the Dx10.1 revision, Penryn, 1333 MT/s FSBs, ATi/AMD X2xxx series and now (finally) AMD's purported Core 2 Duo Killer and the x3xxx. At the moment a G0 Stepping Q6600 looks like a great buy along with a 8800 GT but it would be sheer lunacy to dive in with AMD releasing its products in just a few days. It has come to a head now as I can't play recent games at my native monitor resolution (1280x1024 - its a 17" and I will likely upgrade that as well.) I don't really want to ruin games like Crysis or World in Conflict by playing them at their minimal settings so I have been holding off. It is a double edged sword however, since there is so much being released soon and so much good hardware already available, its hard to know when to take the plunge and hand over your hard earned money....

So without further ado let me outline games which I am particularly excited about at the moment.

#1 In what looks like a cross between CounterStrike and Tom Clancy's GRAW, Call of Duty 4 looks simply stunning. If you have not yet seen any trailers / previews then I highly recommend checking out the following videos.

I simply cannot wait and am annoyed my current system wont let me play it properly....

#2 Whilst graphically Crysis looks amazing, I was rather disappointed to witness the strength of the Korean soldiers in the demo. I play all my games in the hardest difficulty setting (No HUD and everyone speaks Korean baby -oh yeah!) and whilst I enjoyed the feeling of vulnerability coupled with the god complex thats inescapable in Crysis's nano suit, it was disappointing that I could unload 10-20 rounds into the chest of a Korean soldier and have them not even flinch. The game is very much geared to getting up close and personal where you can either break their necks or sever their heads from close range (which works beautifully) but in light of this, the demo did indicate a lack of sophistication of medium range. The combination of exceptional cinematic atmosphere, graphics and physics should make this game an instant hit I just hope the 'body armour' the soldiers wear is toned down for the final release.

#3 Taking a break from the time honored mechanics of real time strategy games, World in Conflict is as refreshingly different as it is back breaking for modern hardware. The lack of traditional base building / micromanagement is refreshing if a little odd at first. Thankfully the bullet tracers that looked like Storm Troopers laser blasts have been fixed and now the game looks a lot more realistic, although I still am hanking for the first person view demonstrated in the early videos of WIC.

Watch the above trailer and tell me you don't long for a first person shooter that intense :) I played the demo (on 'low' settings - BAH) and this is a game I am definitely coming back to once I have upgraded.

#4 Spore. Does anything need to be said about this game? From the initial developers conference video that we all saw years ago (yes the fourty minute one) to the more recent videos, Spore looks simply fantastic and is beautiful in its simplicity and power. I simply cannot wait for this game to come out so that my weird guys can abduct your weird guys :)

#5 Medieval Total War II has been out for a while but I still have not had a moment to play it. I have put a lot of hours into Rome: Total War and really enjoyed it and the thought of an upgrade to that engine that applies per character details is very appealing.

#6 F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate is coming out over here in two days. I still have mixed feelings about it but I will definitely be playing it. I just hope its a lot better than the first 'sequel.'

#7 Prey came out a while ago and curiously its now available at the bargain price of just £5 from Game! Whilst based on the now aging Doom 3 engine, the game has a refreshing blend of old style puzzle solving that I found quite fun in the demo. That coupled with the brutal killing efficiency and the 'walking on all surfaces' seen in the demo SP mode made me thirsty for more of the same. Multiplayer was limited to classic deathmatch but was still worth trying out.

I have been playing around with Xfire recently as well - add me : T0TM5 is my username. Now I just have to figure out where on my site I stick the damn widget :)

In a refreshingly philanthropic move (especially historically when intellectual property has been involved) Will Wright has donated the original SimCity for the One Laptop Per Child project in the hope that it will inspire a generation of OOTB (out of the box) thinkers. This idea was born from the 'SimCity.edu' project by Don Hopkins, essentially making SimCity into a multiplayer game to help teach Civil and Environmental Engineering running on Linux/X11.

Also, while you are browsing, an old friend of mine told me about 'The Nites', an unsigned band that have some great music on their Myspace. I highly recommend listening!

... and to my regular visitors I promise, the next post will be original content rather than hotlinking. I humbly submit myself for your forgiveness.  

"Alex Taldren" has posted an interesting article comparing PC gamers to our console brethren. Call of Duty 4 is pretty much identical across the PC, 360 and PS3, however the user ratings on Gamespot vary slightly across the three platforms with PC gamers rating the game the lowest.

It makes for a great read although maybe ~17 & 26 (PC & PS3 ratings) is too few statistically to compare to 96? (360) It is refreshing to see this data included in the comparison rather than being omitted in order to artificially give the story more authenticity and I do have to give AT praise for this!

Whilst the games themselves are likely to be similar in terms of content and graphics (at stock), the fact is that the PC is a heterogeneous platform unlike the two consoles. As a result, the gaming and graphical performance can and most likely will vary from setup to setup. Also of note will be if any nasty DRM / Copy Protection is used in the PC version as this can have a detrimental effect in some cases - Starforce anyone? This is about the only way in which I believe consoles to be superior to the PC, simple, quick, homogenous and playing perfectly out of the box. It will be interesting comparing these numbers again in a few weeks to see how they change as more people rate the games across the platforms.

Woohoo! The eagerly awaited Daedalus R13 is here after a four month break between releases! Here is what StrmnNrmn had to say today:

Whilst StrmnNrmn has not been working on increasing compatibility, he has been working on optimising the dynarec stack which should allow for a 10-20% fps increase in exisiting games. I have downloaded it and will post feedback when I have had a chance to get to grips with this new release.

Download 1.0 , 1.5 source for R13.

Found a simply great video on youtube today - "blah blah blah Mr Freeman" !! Anyone who has played both halflife games will understand it immediately despite the fact some of it is in German. I am not normally one for simply posting videos or links to things I find, but I felt this warranted it! :)

I would also like to thank my friend Simon (Gingerbreadman) for taking the time to write the previous post on my site. It is a good summary of a simple method of checking the integrity and stability of the RAM in your computer. Bad RAM has a habit of generating strange and unusual errors which sometimes makes it difficult to trap the source of the error. Read more.

RAM, all computers need it, and there are more types of it than you can shake a stick at (excuse the pun), and people often take it for granted, however faults with RAM are one of the quickest ways to screw up your computer, more so than almost any other component except perhaps a dodgy power supply (QTech anyone?). I have personally busted entire Operating System installs with bad ram overclocks- times like that you better pray you weren't stupid enough to leave your valuable documents ect on the same partition as Windows.

So RAM stability is the cornerstone of a reliable computer, and whether or not you overclock your components, knowing that you computer is stable is peace of mind that you can't put a price on, but how do you go about testing your system to see if all is running well, or if you have hidden faults waiting to surface and destroy your valuable data?

In fact with a little know-how you can do it totally free if you have a spare hour or two (mostly unattended), and this brings us to the topic of this brief(ish) article....... MemTest and Memtest86+, the only RAM testing software worth talking about.

MemTest is a tiny windows exe that allows you to input the amount of memory that you wish to test, and then chuggs away happily testing it, telling you its progress by a % of the RAM you have assigned it, while you do other things (though beware it will use up a substantial amount of CPU power as well), leave if running for a hour or two, and if it has any errors then your RAM is unstable. There are fundamental limits on the reliability of this though, as the amount of RAM being tested by a single occurrence of the program is 1184MB (this can be circumvented by running two versions at once however), and also as the program obviously cannot access RAM being used by the Operating System, or by the user, you may miss "Bad" sectors of your RAM by the fact that they are being used!

Memtest86+ is the bigger brother of MemTest, and treats the testing with a rather more serious approach. Rather than a Windows program, you have a bootable CD, or a USB/Floppy EXE for use from DOS. This more rigorous approach allows you to test the entire RAM (bar the few kb in takes up), rather than the small amount you assign MemTest to use, as there is no Operating System or other programs running. Memtest86+ also has a series of different "Tests" that it runs, of differing complexities, in each "Pass". To make life even easier, many Linux CD's carry a copy of Memtest86+ accessible from the boot menu, so there really is no reason why you shouldn't have a copy close to hand. If you don't have a linux live/install CD handy then you can obtain via a small download a version to run from a floppy or USB key from the official site.

RAM that produces ANY errors on Memtest86+ is faulty and should be removed from the system ASAP, and preferably returned for replacement. Leaving it in the system can cause problems varying from occasional program freezes and crashes, through to corruption of files and total Operating Systems. Most RAM has an extensive if not lifetime warranty, so there is no reason to run the risk of running faulty RAM.

I personally use both the programs, MemTest for quick testing while I have other things to do, often when i am trying to initially test the stability of an overclock, and then Memtest86+ when i am either trying to analyse for long term stability, or trying to identify RAM with an inherent fault. The pictures you see above come from recent tests of my own system, analysing my 4 RAM sticks for errors, 2 of which you can see have been diagnosed as faulty and need replacing and has since been removed from my system.

So whether you are an overclocker looking to squeze that extra bit out of your system without compromising on stability, or just someone that wants a computer they can depend on, MemTest and Memtest86+ are great tools that will allow you to rely on your computer with certainty.

News broke this week of a new sub $200 system being sold in American stores running a 'gOS' distribution of Linux. As it turns out the 'g' is indeed for our overlords Google as the system comes with several Google Apps installed as per default. In the obligatory attached screenshots I noticed a slightly unusual desktop environment running and decided to do some digging. It turns out that the window manager used is the minimalist Enlightenment with a number of tweaks and customisations. gOS is available as a LiveCD which I have now downloaded but not had a chance to try. Seeing some quite impressive screenshots of Enlightenment DR17 in action I decided to take the plunge and try to install it onto my Ubuntu 7.04 laptop. This took about an hour because it has to compile and a lot of the material you find is out of date.

The last official built (E16) was released in 2000/2001 and as a result its horribly out of date. The most recent unstable release is DR17. Unfortunately with this release, it has to be built from CVS although there is a script written by Morlenxus which greatly simplifies the process. Annoyingly, since the last unofficial release was a good few months ago, the default dependencies have either changed, been superseded or have broken. As a result it might take a few attempts before the script completes. I opted for the minimal installation + extra modules.

The first thing I needed to do was add the appropriate sources to my sources.lst. This can be gone either from the GUI or via:

sudo [insert your favorite text editor here e.g. gedit] /etc/apt/sources.list

and add these lines...

deb http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17

deb-src http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17

Save and close. Next you need to download the gpg key for this repository to check the digital signatures of the code downloaded.

wget http://lut1n.ifrance.com/repo_key.asc

sudo apt-key add repo_key.asc

You can now delete this armored key file. Next you will have to update your lists.

sudo apt-get update

SIDE NOTE: According to ubuntugeek, all that is now required is the command 'sudo apt-get install e17' however this is not how I did it so I can not attest to this working.

Next I downloaded and installed some required dependancies to make sure they were all present on my system.

sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4 g++-3.4 libx11-dev libpng12-dev libtiff4-dev libfreetype6-dev

libssl-dev zlib1g-dev xlibmesa-dev xlibmesa-gl-dev libxine-dev libtag1-dev libxml2-dev

automake autogen libsqlite3-dev libtagc0-dev

Now I downloaded the rather good script by Morlenxus using the following command. Make sure you are in your home directory for this. (If you are not sure use the command pwd)

wget http://omicron.homeip.net/projects/easy_e17/easy_e17.sh

Now make the script executable.

chmod +x easy_e17.sh

According to the official instructions, the next command entered should be './easy_e17.sh -i' this would by default install E17 with all the modules and dependencies This did not work for me for the reasons described above so instead I used the following command.

./easy_e17.sh -i --skip=imlib2,edb,emotion,entrance,eclair,evfs,edje_viewer,edje_editor,elicit,evolve,elitaire,

emphasis,empower,engycad,scrot,entrance_edit_gui,entropy,ephoto,estickies,exhibit,expedite,extrackt,

engage,enthrall,rage,emu,flame,moon,rain,screenshot,snow,language,mixer

This will omit the troublesome packages. If you still have problems then you can try installing just E17.

./easy_e17.sh -i --skip=imlib2,edb,emotion,entrance,eclair,evfs,edje_viewer,edje_editor,elicit,evolve,e_dbus,

elitaire,emphasis,empower,engycad,entrance_edit_gui,entropy,scrot,ephoto,estickies,exhibit,expedite,

extrackt,engage,enthrall,rage,scrot,alarm,bling,cpu,deskshow,emu,flame,forecasts,language,mail,

mem,mixer,moon,net,news,photo,rain,screenshot,slideshow,screenshot,snow,taskbar,tclock,uptime,

weather,winselector,wlan,mixer

You can always install packages later. Once the installation has completed, you need to add the path to your opt/environment file.

sudo [insert your favourite text editor here e.g. gedit] -w /etc/environment

Append the following to the PATH line:

PATH="(whatever was here before):/opt/e17/bin"

Mine looks like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/ bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/opt/e17/bin"

Save and exit. With the skip script above, Entrance, the default login manager for E17 has been left out as it can sometimes cause problems according to several threads. As such your existing login manager will be used. A guide how to install Entrance with E17 can be found here and basically involves removing entrance from the --skip.

We now need to add an entry for Enlightenment so that it is can be loaded after login.

sudo [insert your favorite text editor here e.g. gedit] /usr/share/xsessions/enlightenment.desktop

And add the following:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Name=Enlightenment

Comment=Enlightenment Window Manager - www.enlightenment.org

Type=XSession

Exec=/usr/bin/enlightenment_start

TryExec=/usr/bin/enlightenment

Please note the _start in bold. This is important and not on any of the forums link to from this article. If you do not add this then Enlightenment will not start properly. It crashed on loading and recovering via F1 didnt fix the problem so appending this will save you some headaches.

That will give you a fairly minimal E17 to customise. You will however want to change from the default theme fairly quickly and Get-E.org is a great source for themes. As a side note, if you want to update E17, use the following command :

sudo ./easy_e17.sh -u

Enlightenment also supports animated backgrounds, however I have not tested this feature and all the example videos I have seen show it to be horribly stuttery.

For more information or support I would encourage you to visit the following places : old & updated ubuntu installation guide, Enlightenment page.

As a whole, I rather like E17 but I have not had enough time to really play with it. When I have I will post some more on the subject.

I came across a second sequel to the amazing fear today entitled Perseus Mandate. The official trailer is below. It is unclear at this stage whether this game will pick up after extraction point, however I hope it is a completely new instalment albeit in the same universe.

The problem is, whilst fear was an excellent game which made stunning use of particles, slow down and a creepy little girl called alma, that was a couple of years ago. The original game tied up the storyline quite nicely, however leaving a beautiful opening for a sequel with Alma's stunt at the end. I eagerly awaited a continuation of the storyline only to be presented with Extraction Point, a game that answers very few questions and just serves up a few extra hours of game time in the same environments as the original. Whilst some new bad guys and weapons were added, recent game sequels have shown that this is not enough, particularly with a cinematic game like F.E.A.R. Needless to say I was bitterly disappointed with Extraction Point. Now we have Perseus Mandate that, on the surface, looks like another cheap effort to use the F.E.A.R engine and content to sell a few more games.

It should be noted however that in the original, you (the player) are a hapless member of F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) and that you are charged with investigating strange occurrences and circumstances. The fact that, right from the moment go, you are thrown into the twisted universe of Fettel and Alma almost makes the player forget this and take up the time honoured, if tired, role of unlucky bystander #1 who surprise surprise is either unknowingly the answer to the game or unsubtly, a human tank that bulldozes through the levels.

I think the key to Perseus Mandate will be treating it like a completely new game rather than as a sequel. The problem is that games have moved on considerably since 2005 and coupled with the rather unique engine of fear means that this game will have to do something or offer something very new or different in order to achieve its potential. Thankfully the trailer shows several interesting new events/ways in which the game plays with the player's mind. I hope that whatever story the developers choose to tell, they generate the atmosphere as well in the original.

There are so many 'horror' games on the market but most use the over used system of dark corners and imps/zombies jumping and lurching around. F.E.A.R was one of the few games that attempted to get under your skin by constantly putting you on edge and it worked remarkably well. As such I am quietly optimistic, as I dearly would love a game that matched the original in terms of atmosphere and immersion.