Three games for the EEEPC

The EEEPC flexibility gives you, among many other things, also a reasonably good portable games machine. Speaking about gaming depends a lot on personal preferences, one could spend a lot of time playing simple games like solitaries, I'm going to speak about three near commercial quality open source games: Glest, Torcs and Vega Strike.

Installation

Installing all of these three games in EEEBuntu is quite easy: just matter of selecting them in the “add remove programs ...” utility. After installation ended all games needed only a little of manual configuration to adjust  them to EEEPC resolution.

Upgraded to Firefox 3.5

I recently updated both my desktop and my laptop machines to the new Firefox version
Sempron 2400 (Ubuntu 9.04)
I upgraded to Firefox 3.5 on my desktop Linux installation (Ubuntu 9.04 on Sempron 2400) simply by following instructions suggested on Ubuntu community documentation page about installing firefox new versions. I so simply clicked on Firefox's 3.5 APT Link (apt:firefox-3.5) to install all needed packages (As you probably already know I ever prefer the easy way).
At last I replaced firefox symbolic link from terminal by simply typing:

sudo rm /usr/bin/firefox
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/firefox-3.5 /usr/bin/firefox

EEEPC (EEEBuntu)
Upgrade Firefox on EEEBuntu it's a quite different thing (I haven't upgraded to EEEBuntu 3.0 yet) I did choose to try the command line way as suggested in Lifehaker and Kabatology blogs.
I backed-up my firefox settings:

cp -r ~/.mozilla/firefox/ ~/firefox_backup

and then launched the long download-and-install command (of course it must be typed all on a single line)

sudo wget -O - http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/
          mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.5/linux-i686/
          en-US/firefox-3.5.tar.bz2 | sudo tar xj -C /opt

I didn't resist, so I personalized it in order to install Firefox on the /opt path.

At last I changed the firefox link like in previous installation:

sudo rm /usr/bin/firefox
sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox 

Links

• Mozilla Firefox
• Ubuntu documentation
• Lifehacker
• Kabatology
  

Migrating to Linux: hugin

I use my desktop computer (Sempron2400) mainly to manage my personal photos and videos. Often it happens I have to join two or more shots in a single panoramic photo. Of the many panorama tools I tried the one that permitted  me to obtain the best results with minimum effort is hugin.

Hugin is a multi-platform open source panorama software, it implements many complex image joining algorithms but keeps a simple and effective user interface.

Installation

I installed hugin the easy way, by simply selecting its components in the Gnome application installer (the add/remove applications menu voice).

JavaFx on EEEBuntu

The newly released version of Sun's JavaFx also comes with a Linux version. Even it's still a beta version I decided  to try it on the EEEPC 900

Why JavaFx on EEEPC?

I know that EEEPC is not the best choice for programming because of the small keyboard, the small screen and so on ... but the high portability of EEEPCgives you an ever-ready programming environment good for little experiments and for just having some fun programming.

Java SDK update

I first downloaded from Sun site the latest Jdk version, JavaFx requires at least 1.6.14 version while the currently installed version on EEEPC was 1.6.10.

I extracted Jdk files by executing its installation file

chmod a+x jdk-6u14-linux-i586.bin sudo mv jdk-6u14-linux-i586.bin /opt
sudo /opt/jdk-6u14-linux-i586.bin

then I configured the newly installed Java as default virtual machine by first adding it to the udate alternatives list (the whole command goes in a single line)

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java
      /opt/jdk1.6.0_14/bin/java 30

I at last selected the just installed Jdk as the default one using the command

 sudo update-alternatives --config java

Some blog layout changes

I decided to follow the advice of a more expert blogger and to make some layout changes to my posts. I Also moved  from the profile page to a regular posts sections about me and my machines.
Let me know if you like the new layout.