From a comment in one of my blog articles, WINE 1.1.40 is now available on the official aLinux rpm repository. Please update your aLinux 12.9 through synaptic now!

Again,

A quick post on Moblin repository updates.

I added wine 1.1.38 on my small Moblin repository. Aside from this, I added sane-backend, libieee1284. I also backported latest gphoto2 and libgphoto2 sources into moblin as well.

This should all be working properly. If there are any dependencies which I forgot to upload, please do inform me.

There’s an interesting writeup by Gabriel Forster in his blog on how he implemented linux on the Christian School that he was teaching in.

He started: “Like many other people, our church and, more importantly, our Christian school, ran the Windows operating system on all computers.”

Basically the computers he had in the school amounted to 40 computers initially, with some 65 computers donated a year ago. The problem that came about was of licensing all those computers. Although they had 100 licenses of Windows 2000, the software was obsolete and unsupported already, and basically, all of their computers don’t have enough processing power in them to handle Windows 7.

In short, they replaced their Operating Systems with Ubuntu, and run their windows software (Rosetta Stone, an online language program for their students in learning new languages, and Firefox) in WINE.

All in all it’s a really pragmatic and practical way to avoid lock-ins and costs. If you want to see the details on how he did it, read about it more in his blog.

Here’s an interesting take into how to make an open source program. This should make a good case study on how to plan out and develop a program for distribution to the open source community.

Presenting Binary Clock – a GPLed java program which shows the time in binary. This is a simple java midlet made for nokia phones (from what I’ve heard, it runs on samsung phones too).

Anyways, here are the steps (illustrated):

1. Decide on what you want to do with the program.  You can then make a mock drawing on a piece of paper on how the program will respond like what is shown below:

2. You would also have to determine the target audience for your program.  In this case, we target mobile phones, mainly nokia phones.  To do this, you would have to have appropriate tools for the job ready.  Shown below are the tools used to make the program (testing and design).  Note that all these tools run in linux (although there are windows versions available, except for Fireworks which is a windows program); Fireworks was run in wine (yes, it does run, for those who are curious).

The final design from the Fireworks layout is below:

3. Since we have tested this in our emulators/sdk, it is now time to test it by ourselves with our available hardware.

Click to Watch!

Click to Watch!

Click to Watch!

4. When you feel that it is more or less ready to be distributed, you announce it to the world, and allow other people to modify and enhance our code.

Many thanks to Daniel Rindt of Visetics (http://www.visetics.com) for sharing the development workflow and the actual program with me.  To get the actual source code, please get it here.

On my free time, I like testing out and playing games.  This is because, as a wine applications maintainer in the past, I had to cross test between distributions (mainly PCLinuxOS, and sometimes slackware at the time) and new updates to wine (particularly before it reached version 1.0).  Unfortunately, as work went more demanding, I had to leave all these behind.

** Sigh **

I was even surprised when my name came up on the ubuntu forums one time (archived already of course), regarding wine:

They always say I’m from Canada, even if that’s my Last Name (Distrowatch got my name wrong too)

Back to the topic, I’m getting offcourse…

Anyways, as I’m mainly in windows for testing games now, I’ve noticed an error in my Vista box lately after I updated my Batman: Arkham Asylum game through Windows Live:  800705b4.  This happens when I log into Windows Live, after which, the game would totally become unresponsive and has to be shut down from Task Manager.

After looking for a solution (this was a very cryptic error message, and many users don’t know what to do with it), I found a solution which works for me: open up the command prompt in administrator mode and type in the commands:

netsh winsock reset

and

netsh int ip reset

and reboot your pc.

This should fix your Windows Live problems.  As a side note, I find this one to be the best of all the superhero games I’ve seen so far (good story, albeit not for young audiences – stays mostly true to the Dark Knight stories in comics, depth and actually lets you feel you’re Batman – LOL) – and I’ve played quite a number of Batman games for the NES and SNES and Genesis, and a very nice game to see graphically – it puts the Unreal game engine to good use (which is quite impressive because this game is not a First Person Shooter, which I’m not fond of).

Looks like Tom posted a fresh news update on the codeweavers side of the fence.

Codenamed “Zombie Mallard”, this version sports compatibility to Left4Dead 2, and apparently, Codeweavers is running a raffle wherein the lucky winner customer buying CrossOver Games or CrossOver Offline gets an Intel Core i7-870 Lynnfield 2.93 Ghz Quad-Core Processor machine as a prize!

Sounds too good to be true?

Here’s an excerpt from the Codeweavers Site:

As part of our CrossOver Games 8.1 release, and its support for Left4Dead 2, we felt it was important to put superior firepower into the hands of our users! Any customer purchasing CrossOver Games or CrossOver Professional until December 1st will be automatically registered to win this loaded CodeWeavers Gaming PC. We’ll pull the name out of the hat on December 1, 2009, just in time to have this little gem sitting under some lucky winner’s (non-denominational) Christmas / Hannukah / Kwanza / Festivus tree. Lovingly hand-crafted by our very own sysadmin / web genius / first-person shootist Jeremy Newman, we promise it will have all the woof you need to feed smoke to the baddies. Did we mention that it comes with a lifetime license for CrossOver Games Linux as well?

Look to Tom Wickline’s site for more details.

http://www.wine-reviews.net/wine-reviews/games/codeweavers-releases-crossover-games-81-for-mac-and-linux.html