Featured – The SteamOS Beginners Guide

Gave Half Life 2 a try this morning on SteamOS, and wanted to give a quick nod to Valve for making HL2 playable with a gamepad (even if not recently with SteamOS).  But Mr. Gabe Newell!  Make The original games support it too!  Now, you can lambaste me all you want for “you should use a mouse and keyboard,” but I am getting quite used to sitting in the living room and gaming all “lounge like.”  Anyway…enough banter, here is what to expect when browsing for and installing games on SteamOS:

Featured Story: Say It Isn’t So! Thoughts on Tom Merrit Leaving TWiT

The Tom Merritt file

As more and more treasured post-Tech.tv familiar faces leave TWiT, I hope very much things stay positive at the TWiT Brick House.  TechTV was a beacon of the late 90’s and early 00’s for aspiring techno geeks and nerds alike.  I never had the channel at home, so I always had my amazing grandmother tape me episodes and also watch them while I was at her house.  I have many fond memories of Call For Help, X-Play, and the infamous Screensavers.  Personalities like Leo Laporte, Chris Pirillo, Tom Merritt, Sara Lane, Kevin Rose, and more, helped inspire me to be what I am today, to be highly interested in the field of computing.  Who could forget John Devorak! 

How To – Workarounds for SteamOS beta System Requirements

Friday was one crazy day.  If you were lucky, and I mean lucky, you could get a solid download without disconnect from Steam’s new repository.  There were bitorrent links floating around, albeit with some inherent danger, making a hash check after the download very recommended.  But, as soon as you explored the SteamOS FAQ and subsequent “Build Your Own” page, it was apparent you were dead in the water without a UEFI Motherboard.

The easiest method I have seen so far, is the Debian Wheezy conversion (edit check out Ye Olde SteamOSe below!), in which you start with a simple Debian load, and change a few files.   I say easy, as it leaves little room for UEFI and partition errors, which most have issue with.

Note:
In the end, you will still get the experience if you install Steam as a client on a desktop such as Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu, and enable autostart and start in big picture mode as options.  Truly that is your easiest way to Steam rather than messing with SteamOS beta at the moment.

Featured Articles: Jolla’s Sailfish OS

 After a bit of monitoring this project, I wanted to talk about Jolla’s Sailfish OS, and where I think it may fit in with the current smart phone line up, and how it competes.  After seeing the Edge campaign fail, which we all saw coming, and the split opinion on Canonical’s motives as a company, Sailfish OS may just be up your alley.  The question, is whether or not the average consumer cares vs. the computer community.

I Have The Power! – su vs. sudo: Core Concepts of Being a Superuser

Credit: http://sunshinewonderland.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/heman.jpg

For the new Linux user, that is quite a bit of weird looking garbage in the title, right?  The concept of the “Super User” is one that is often mis informed, or very much abused.  Too often users will use the super user account for things that do not even require it, or use it exclusively as their regular account.  This ia very bad way to go about things, and you’ll soon find out why.  A good misnomer:  I am *not* an expert, but pride in learning the best methods and concepts of any particular concept.  Read on for more.

Software Spotlight: Well Darling, Shall We Dance?

Well Mac OS X, we meet again…You sinister Unix-like system, wrapped in showgirl makeup.  To be honest, we could have had more compatibility between Mac OS X and Linux, had it not been for the major changes made on top of Darwin’s Unix layer and the XNU kernel, including vast changes to the DE and handling of file types.  Enter “Darling,” a project aimed at emulating Mac OS X software, much in the same vein of the popular Wine software for Windows binaries.  What does this entail?  Read on to find out.   (image credit: http://darling.dolezel.info)

Upcoming: Another Look At KDE After 9 Years (preview)

I used to shun KDE,  I used to abhor its cruft, heft, and radical “departure” from the gnome desktop I came into contact with in 2004.  I thought, “this is too weird, I’ll never like this, and it takes up so much memory.  I mean, it is way too cluttered and complicated.”  Then KDE4 came out.  At first, it was even worse, even more radical changes!

Fast forward today, and I can tell you that I no longer am some “anti-KDE” zealot, spreading FUD against KDE over gnome and other desktops.  That is why I plan on taking a huge look at how KDE has changed for me, and what I personally like about it.  Hell, I’m typing this in KDE as you read this.  So, I figured “what the heck, I’ll take another look at this.”

Be sure to check out the upcoming article to follow: “Another Look: The KDE Desktop After 9 Years”

The Cinnamon Challenge : The Aftermath of a Year of Cinnamon Goodness

I thought I’d weight in on my experiences so far with the Cinnamon desktop environment, which I came into contact with last year.  While the project is coming along nicely, it does have it’s pro’s and cons.  I wanted to go over what I have come across is using the environment over that past year.  Read on for more.

Feature Articles: Are We Living In A Post GPL World? Not Yet.

For a while now, I have realized that many developers have not been too kind of the GPLv3 license, in comparison to it’s predecessor, GPLv2.  GPL is still the clear leader in this respect, but numbers lately are discouraging for the long-standing GNU license model.  Looking further into license use under FOSS/OSS, led me to some other nice discoveries.

Featured Articles: “Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split”

Note:  This is probably the best writeup of the fragmented bin and lib system of Linux I have ever read so far.  Head past the quote for the full article:

“Standards bureaucracies like the Linux Foundation (which consumed the Free
Standards Group in its’ ever-growing accretion disk years ago) happily
document and add to this sort of complexity without ever trying to understand
why it was there in the first place. ‘Ken and Dennis leaked their OS into the
equivalent of home because an RK05 disk pack on the PDP-11 was too small” goes
whoosh over their heads.”

Source: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html