Oct

31

Review: Sabayon 3.5 Pod

Category: Linux | 6 Comments

Since both Gentoo and Sabayon were included on this Linux Format DVD, I decided I would first try and install Gentoo and then Sabayon and compare how easy the installations were since Sabayon is a derivative distro from Gentoo.  As you know, I was unable to get a working installation from the LiveCD of Gentoo.  If this was the case for most people, then the fact that they will no longer produce one is a good riddance.  Sabayon, like most of the “modern” distros (or at least Ubuntu and Fedora), display a loading screen instead of the “ok” messages.

The Sabayon slogan unfrotunately reminds me a bit too much of the current presidential campaign in the USA.  I do, however, like the graphics - soft blues and elegant simplicity.  Here’s the default desktop on the LiveCD.

There are two things I don’t like here.  First of all, the mouse pointer is HUGE.  But second, I’m not a huge fan of distros radically changing the defaults in the desktops.  Xfce should look more like CDE than KDE.  Still, only minor issues.  On the positive side, unlike with Gentoo, the liveCD has built in audio players so I was able to test and confirm that audio should work as I have it set up in the virtual machine.   Here I test that the audio works by listening to the Severed Fifth intro.

The Sabayon LiveCD also does a better job of giving the prospective Linux user an idea of what programs they might use.  Included are GIMP, Audacious, Mplayer, RealPlayer 10, Firefox, Pidgin, Abiword and Gnumeric.  Ok, so let’s get installing and see if it’s easier.

The installation program is quite blue!

I thought it looked very familiar and today I found out the Sabayon project is using Anaconda (which is what Fedora uses for installs) so that’s why it looked so familier.  First step is to select my language (english).  Second step is the keyboard - us english.  Next I had to choose whether I wanted EEE PC Sabayon, Xfce, or basically just a commandline system.  I chose Xfce.

Then came package selections.  They appeared to be limited to what was included on the DVD because clicking on details didn’t allow me to select extra things.  I just left it with the defaults.  Next it was time to choose individual packages.  It was very unclear where the check-boxes were.  But if you clicked in the right place it gave you the option to remove packages.  I removed Compiz and left everything the same.  If you double-click on a package you get a very detailed description of the package.

Next was choosing which services to enable.  I left this at the defaults.

I left partitions at automatic partition.  Then came the grub installation screen and it was no more complicated than in other distros.  This was followed by the ethernet settings.  Again - it was pretty standard - not more complicated nor less complicated than Ubuntu or Fedora.  Then it was time to set the timezone and the users.  I like that root and the normal user are on one screen to help show the computer user that these are two separate accounts.

I love that, unlike with Gentoo it double-checks the user’s password.  Then the installation began.

Apparently, during the installation they show desktops of Sabayon users.

So the installation began…and finished about 20 minutes later.  Not bad!  So I reboot the VM.  It loads up that dreams we can believe in screen again.  And I end up at a very nice looking GDM login screen:

And I find myself at a desktop that looks exactly the same as before with exactly the same selection of programs.  And the sound and internet work!!

So, there you go, it’s easier to install than Gentoo and everything works after installation as well as it did in the LiveCD.  Now, I notice that I’m not getting any notices that my packages are out of date.  It is possible, of course, that my packages are not out of date.  But I find that hard to believe - after all, they probably started work on this magazine DVD 2 or more months ago.  Perhaps I need to first use the package manager.  So I launch the Spritz Package Manager.

Ok…so maybe I AM up to date?  On the repository page, I clicked refresh and that started downloading the repository database.  Perhaps I do need updates….I’ll find out in a few minutes.  I think, if it wasn’t going to happen automatically, it should have told me to do that when I logged in for the first time.  Overall, I really like the Spritz Package Manager.  It’s very well-polished.  I think the closest thing I’ve seen to this that’s this good would be Mandriva’s package management.  This looks nicer.  Now it started getting security advisories.  It earlier said it didn’t have any and I couldn’t believe that.  Now, this is more like it.  I have to update everything that’s installed.

Now, one place where it looses points vs Mandriva, Fedora with package-kit, and Ubuntu is in the categories of the packages.  This is where I would go to install packages by category:

It’s not hard at all to figure out what games-board means.  But it’s uglier and not quite as elegant as the rest of Sabayon.  I decide to install Blender to see how easy it is to do.  (not that I can actually expect for it to work well in a virtual machine)  It takes a little while to search through the packages.  And it finds 2.46.  It’s one revision behind, but then again Fedora likes to push the edge.  Ubuntu and FreeBSD are also not yet at 2.47.

I also decide to process all the updates.   Now it wasn’t 100% clear what to do, but I quickly figured it out.  All the packages I was going to install were put into a queue.  So I will click on process queue.

It was taking a while to download.  It grabbed a bunch of tbz2 files.  It looked like it was probably going to do like FreeBSD and then it was going to compile and install the files.  I’m off to bed (since I’m “live-blogging” this) and I’ll see what’s going on when I wake up.  When I woke up it was on package 87/179.  I’ll leave it downloading while I’m at work today.  Three hours later (I had to come home early for something) it was on 126.  8 hours later it’s still not done.  It’s on 127/179.  Does it only fetch packages if I’m watching?  Now it’s Tuesday and I started this on Sunday.  It’s on 160/179.  This is really, really slow…. I wonder if there’s a mirror list of faster mirrors and the default mirror just sucks.  Got home and 170/179.  I have a very fast broadband connection and usually a 500 MB file takes 30 minutes to and hour to download.  So I think it was probably a mirror issue.  It finished after a little while and then began installation.

Finally, on Wednesday, it finished.  That took waaaaay too long.  At least everything worked while that was happening.  However, since I installed it into virtualbox, it could be that it’s not getting enough processor power to build the packages quickly enough.  There were a lot of messages going by while packages were built letting me know that this package or that one needed some post-configuration like me changing a config file.  I wonder if there’s somewhere I can see that after installation is done.  Spritz then informed me that everything was done.  But then it became unresponsive.  I rebooted so I could get into the new kernel, xfce, etc

So I was now using Xfce 4.4.2.  Blender was installed and it surprisingly worked from within the VirtualBox!  Firefox was now 3.0.1.  So it appears to be just as up-to-date package-wise as all the other major distros - Fedora, Ubuntu, etc  Interestingly, Spritz now has a banner ad.  Well, if that’s how they pay the server bills, then that’s ok by me.  The icons were also slightly different.

So what’s the verdict?  On the one hand, Sabayon beat my first try at installing Gentoo via LiveCD.  But on the other hand, it took basically 3 days to update the few packages that were installed.  Again, that might just be a VM or mirror thing, but that definitely is horrible.  Second, ever since the packages finished installing I’ve been trying to load up spritz to see which versions of other programs are available, but spritz keeps freezing.  And when it hadn’t frozen and I attempted to update the sources, it crashed.  So I’m going to say that my final verdit is as follows:

Visual Appeal:  Great, inviting -  something about the background, bootup background and theme they’ve chosen just looks right

Ease of use (distro installation):  Easy as any of the easy-to-use distros - especially Fedora since it uses Anaconda

Ease of use (programs):  For running programs and all that it’s about as easy as Ubuntu.

Ease of use (initial configuration):  Pretty good.  Audio works and it even appears to have flash preinstalled.

Ease of use (package installation):  I’d have to say that Sabayon, while easier than Gentoo, is certainly not yet ready for primetime.  It’s not as easy to install programs as in Ubuntu or Fedora.  For the first time user, Synaptic and PackageKit are a LOT easier to use.  A lot of the choices in Spritz seemed odd or confusing to me so imagine someone who was told that Sabayon is easy enough for new users.  In the end, I could never get it to work again and it complained about needing to get a new version of entropy, but I couldn’t get it since the installer was b0rked.  I took a closer look at the error.  It’s an absurd catch-22.  When I try to download the repository I get a warning that I can’t do that because I haven’t downloaded the repository.  Then Spritz appears to lock up.    I have no idea if it’s doing stuff in the background.

In the end I’d say - first get used to Linux on Ubuntu, Mandriva, openSUSE, or Fedora.  After that, check out Debian.  Then you’re ready for Sabayon and it would probably be a good stepping-stone to trying out Gentoo, Slackware, and other more involved distros.

  

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Oct

30

Avant Window Navigator

Category: Gnome, Linux | 3 Comments

For a long while there I didn’t want to check out the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) because I was shunning Compiz.  But now that I’m back on the Compiz (and since Metacity should have compositing “soon” anyway) I decided to give a shot when it was featured in Linux Format Magazine Issue 112.  I found the AWN packages in Fedora although for AWN only AWN-extras comes up.  You need to search avant-window-manager to get the main package.  It doesn’t matter since AWN-extras brings in AWN in the dependencies.  Here’s how my desktop looks before that:

Pretty plain looking and I currently have the default Fedora background.  The article reccomended switching to the Glossy Gnome theme, but I’m pretty happy with Nodoka.  So here’s what it looks like with AWN in my fourth desktop:

And here it is a little closer up:

The left section is launchers, the middle section is what I happen to have open in the current Window and the third section is filled with applets. The effects are really neat and impossible to show in a screenshot.  The icons can bounce when you pass over them, magnify like OS X, turn in circles, or have a spotlight.  The bar shrinks and grows depending upon how many icons it needs to display.

In this second screenshot, you can see what it looks like with my brother chatting with me via Pidgin.  The icon for his window is represented by his buddy icon.

So how do I feel about AWN?  On the one hand, it certainly looks neat.  Sure, it’s aping OS X as opposed to coming up with something completely original, but it’s still fun to use.  At least for a little while after you install it you’ll probably find yourself mousing over all the icons to make them bounce over and over again.  But there are a few little things that need work.  For example, it’s still has some glitches.  I can’t have a workspace switcher applet because the simple workplace switcher it acts strangely and the shiny switcher is way too big.  The AWN window is a bit slow to update (probably due to my graphics card being JUST good enough).  Also, when someone IMs me, it DOES put their icon in the AWN if you’re in another workspace, but it doesn’t keep “flashing” it to get your attention like it would with the normal Gnome taskbar.  I’m going to keep it on my desktop for a few days and if I decide to remove it, I’ll mention it briefly here in the blog.  Otherwise you can assume that all my concerns were ameliorated and I love it.

  

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Oct

30

Ubuntu 8.10 launches today!

Category: ubuntu | Leave a Comment

Unless something went wrong between when I’m writing this post at 2324 on 29 Oct and tomorrow when it’s scheduled to launch, Congrats to the Canonical and the Ubuntu Release team on Ubuntu 8.10. The servers will probably be pounded today, so you might want to wait a few days before upgrading. I usually wait about a week anyway to make sure there aren’t any show-stopper bugs that somehow made it in. (this saved my bacon 1 or 2 releases ago)

So enjoy the Brown! Two or so more weeks until the blue (Fedora) releases version 10!

  

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Oct

26

Review: Gentoo 2008.0 and beyond Part 1

Category: Linux | 22 Comments

Another distro in the seven distros included in Linux Format Magazine issue #110 is Gentoo 2008.0.  This is an interesting release given the recent news that, at least for the time being, Gentoo is not going to be releasing these discs anymore.  Apparently for both of the last two years there has been a lot of trouble with compiling the LiveCDs.

On the one hand, yearly (or biannual like Ubuntu) releases are redundant for Gentoo users.  You just install Gentoo and from then on you just emerge newer versions of packages and always stay up to date.  I have to say this is one of the features that makes Gentoo very attractive to me considering all the problems I’ve had with Fedora in-place upgrades.  But if they are no longer making these annual LiveCDs, what will the Linux magazines feature on their distro discs?  After all, there are people who have bandwidth issues and can’t download Linux distros to instasll.  They are dependent upon magazines to carry the latest releases.  And you know the magazine isn’t going to make a LiveCD for Gentoo.  I still think that a yearly snapshot makes sense.  Also, there has to be a starting point from which the user has a rolling updating system.

Since the whole point of using Gentoo is to install a custom distro, I decided that I would install it to my computer instead of evaluating the LiveCD as all there is to Gentoo.  A bit of background here - Gentoo is a distro like Slackware where all of the packages are installed via compilation.  (edit based on comment - Gentoo also has binary packages) The biggest difference is that Gentoo borrowed the concept of Ports from FreeBSD.  Ports, as implemented in FreeBSD and Gentoo, are patches that are applied to raw source code from the developers of the software to customize it for that distro.  So, for example, you can download the source code to Mplayer.  If you want it to be installed in the right place in your distro so that other programs can find the libraries it installs, you need to give it configuration options.  Ports do that automatically for you so everything ends up in a consistent place.  Also, Port installation systems also handle dependencies for you.  If you were installing Mplayer from source you’d have to find everything it depends on and then install that from source.  Then find what that depends on and install it from source.  With Ports, all that happens automagically.

So, why, in this age of binary packages (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, et al) would you ever want to install from source?  It takes a LOT longer (hours for Gnome).  Well, there are two main benefits touted by Gentoo users.  First of all, your programs are now ultra-customized for your system.  If you want Gnome without Mono compiled in, you can do this.  (Assuming that’s one of the options)  Also, it is tuned to your hardware.  You are compiling your programs to the Intel Core 2 Duo instead of the i686 (Pentium 4, I think)  Now, some people say this is a false benefit.  How optimized is it going to be for your system versus the defaults?  I think the real answer is somewhere in the middle.  For some processor heavy programs like Blender, Cinelerra, and OpenOffice.org, perhaps it will really speed things up.  For Pidgin, it probably won’t make much of a difference.  The second benefit, they say, is that you get new versions of the program much sooner than with a binary distro.  Debian, Fedora, etc have to create binary packages from the source packages and usually they only do that in the next version of the distro - as much as six months later.  With Gentoo, you can have that program right away.  Again, the real answer is probably in the middle since Gentoo has a testing process like other distros (thank goodness) so the program won’t be available right away either.  It has to go through testing first.  This could end up taking just as long as with a binary distro.  Sometimes it will be sooner, though, because there’s no later release to wait for.  As soon as it’s ready for mass consumption you can have it.

Since I don’t have any spare computers, I decided to install Gentoo to Virtualbox on my test computer.  As I booted it up, I got a refreshingly candid view of what was going on.

Gentoo was displaying what many distros have been hiding from their users in recent times, the boot messages.  I love seeing this as it really gives you a glimpse of what the computer is doing.

I’m one of those people who believe we should remove this sense of mysticism about how computers work.  The more of the general public we can get educated on what’s happening with their computers, the better.  They don’t have to all become computer Gurus - that’s extremely unrealistic to expect.  But I’d like to see as many people as possible getting an idea of what’s going on under the hood.  (You hear that Fedora, Ubuntu, etc?)

Then I was presented with a pretty attractive GDM login.   It’s dynamic-looking without being too flashy.

And here’s the Xfce desktop you arrive at:

So, as you know - people usually tout LiveCDs as very useful because they give you a chance to know if the distro will be able to use all of your hardware.  That’s why everyone says, just take the Ubuntu or Fedora liveCD and try it and you’ll know before wiping out Windows if the distro will be able to use the wireless, sound, and video hardware.  Indeed, this is why the Debian release team plans to have a Debian liveCD this time around.  So, with the Gentoo 2008.0 LiveCD I was able to get online and verify that it would be able to use my ethernet card.  I did this with Bon Echo - the development version of Firefox.  This was 2.0, but Gentoo 2008.0 is from earlier in the year before Firefox 3 had come out.

However, there are audio programs on the LiveCD.  I see this as a major shortcoming since sound is one of the most likely things to be need to test (other than wireless hardware).  I downloaded an OGG of Jono Bacon discussing his Severed Fifth album, but was unable to play it.  In fact, the LiveCD is pretty bare when it comes to programs.  So I can’t even give this to someone to give them a taste of what programs they may have available under Gentoo.  Perhaps they just have a different mentality over at the Gentoo team.  After all, up until now my experience has only been with more mainstream distros like Fedora and Ubuntu.

So, I decided it was time to go ahead and do the install.   The first task the installer asks you do to is to partition your hard drive.

I’ve done this on a few distros already so I knew what to do.  I clicked on recommeded layout because, from what it said on the left, it looked like what I usually do.  So, here it is in its colour-coded glory:

The next step was to configure the mount points.  There are a lot of schemes for this such as having /var and /tmp on their own partitions.  A lot of people also recommend having /home on its own partition.  However, this is not only just a test distro, but it’s also not meant to be a production server or anything like that.  So I left everything under the root directory.  Then it unpacked the stage tarball.

I’m not 100% sure what that is, but I can guess from what I know about Gentoo.  Basically, instead of making you compile everything form the beginning, Gentoo provides the basics already as binaries so you can get started in less than 24 hours.  Later on you can compile it while running the system and save yourself some time.  This is taking some time.  At its current pace it will probably take maybe 20 or so minutes to finish.  However, remember that I’m running this in a virtual machine so that’s going to be a limiting factor in terms of how much processor it has access to as well as how much RAM.  My DVD drive speed also plays into it, I’m sure.  But I have a pretty standard one - neither slow nor unbelievably fast.  Since I’m blogging this as it happens,  I’m going to go off to do something else.  I’ll be back later when this is done.

I was in another room the whole time so I don’t know how long it took, but somewhere within 2 hours it was completed and asked me for a root password.   Then they ask you to pick your timezone.  Nothing too hard or out of the ordinary here.  The next screen was for setting up the network and this one was definitely more involved than other distros I’ve installed.

I fill out the info.   In continuing my Mario character theme, I name the installation Poochy, after the huge dog in Super Mario World  2.  That dog was only a minor character and this distro is only a virtual one.  After that it emerged some more stuff.  I was then given the option to add users.  That’s right, users - plural.  Most distros just give you your username at install, but if you want to add everyone’s name at once you can do that.  Sweet!

They say you learn a lot more about how Linux works when you install Gentoo.  I learned about how you need to be the member of all these groups to be able to do much in Linux.  I never realized all the work the distros had been doing for me.  Also, it shows me how a user could be locked out of certain things like using the cdrom.  One stupid thing on their part is not double-checking that your password was typed as you expected.

The next page is where you pick additional packages although I must say the warning at the top is pretty ominous.

Ok, so I checked… everythign in X11, GnuPG, Cups, iptables, slocate, ufed, logrotate, ntp, alsa-utils, and mozilla-firefox.  It appears I was limited to installing whatever was included on the disc.  I guess that makes sense.  I would probably want to compile everything else?  I’m not sure what the rationale is.  Or was it unable to connect to the net and find the repos?  It started to calculate dependencies.

Son of a b.  I was running VirtualBox on Windows XP and it rebooted last night in the middle of the install while I was asleep.  (It had a critical update)  I think I’m going to have to start this process all over again.  See you on the flip side.

When I finally caught back up again, it was time to pick which services I wanted at runtime.  No Linux distro I have ever used has asked me this.  Instead it leaves a ton of services running - some of which may be unnecessary if you aren’t running a server.

There’s really one one bad part with the installer (and I guess this goes along with Gentoo users learning a lot about how the system runs) and that is that it doesn’t explain what most of these are so I have no idea if I’d want them running at the beginning.  I looked around the installation documentation on Gentoo’s website, but couldn’t find the info.  I selected  alsasound, consolekit, cupsd, dbus, hald, iptables, ntp-client, ntpd, numlock, sshd, udev-postmount and xdm.  I guessed based on things I’ve heard before.   Then came this page of a lot of startup stuff:

I ended up changing it to xdm and Xsession since I knew I had xdm installed from the earlier package selection.  And that was it.  Pretty painless (assuming it worked)

So I exited and rebooted the VM.  Here’s where I ended up:

So, apparently alsa and cups weren’t installed although I asked them to be installed.  And apparently the ethernet card couldn’t start.  Why didn’t XDM or Xfce start?  And why does my kernel say sabayon-r1?  Is there where the name of Sabayon, the Gentoo derivative distro, came from?  So I go ahead and login.  I’m not exactly sure what to do.  I can’t really emerge anything that isn’t installed if I don’t have a connection to the net.  Interestingly, when I login as root, my username wasn’t created either.  Looks like something went wrong during the installation.

I’ll give it one more shot and check the logs this time.   See you in an hour or so.  By viewing the log, I was able to see that my user didn’t get created because of the way I specified the groups.  Perhaps they need to have a comma instead of a space between them?  I have no idea and it doesn’t say.

Ok, so it appears that perhaps there’s something wrong with either using VirtualBox or with the graphical installer.  When I’m in the LiveCD I can use the internet AND I have a graphical interface.  When the installation completes eth0 no longer works and I can’t get a graphical interface.  I have no idea why this is happening.  Obviously, if it works for the liveCD, then the LiveCD should be using that information to configure the real installation.  Therefore the installation should work just as well as the LiveCD.  Well, I’ve been working on this for about three days now without any luck.  I’m giving up for now.  Perhaps someone else knows what I’m going wrong, but after having gone through the installation about four times now, I’m pretty sick of it.  If someone knows exactly what’s going wrong or what I’m supposed to do, I’ll check it out.  Otherwise, Part 2 will be me just doing a manual installation sometime next week.

Sabayon was also included on my Linux Format Magazine DVD and I planned to check it out after Gentoo.  Perhaps it will prove how much more of an easy-to-do installation it is and why people would choose to install Sabayon instead of Vanilla Gentoo.

  

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Oct

22

Review: Slax 6.0.7

Category: KDE, Linux | 4 Comments

For some reason, I didn’t get Linux Format Magazine issue #110 when I was supposed to. I ordered another copy and it arrived recently, so it’s time for another slate of Linux reviews. Unfortunately, something appears to be wrong with the way they mastered the magazine DVD, because I was unable to boot into any of the Slax options. So I went online and got the latest ISO off of http://www.slax.org.

Slackware was the original Ubuntu. It was the first very popular Linux distro and it is the oldest distro still in production. Most users have on to Red Hat, Mandriva, Gentoo and, finally, Ubuntu, but Slackware still exists. There are a lot of people out there who still use it. I don’t know if this is because they cut their teeth on Slackware back in the day or because they like the pain of doing everything by hand. You have to admit there’s something nice about Slackware’s programs being the most untainted by the distro. You know that Slackware’s KDE is the closest to bare metal KDE you can get.

Strangely, considering how old Slackware is and how it’s considered the Linux distro for Linux experts, there are a lot of distros based off of Slackware. Slax is a LiveCD based off of Slackware and it’s been getting a lot of attention recently. Some of it has been good and some not so good.

I loaded it into RAM and it runs just as fast, if not faster than my installed Linux distros. Interestingly, compared to other Lightweight Linux distros I’ve reviewed it uses KDE instead of Fluxbox, JWM, or others. Here’s the default desktop upon first boot:

Net Connection
worked without any extra configuration

Programs
Slax basically consists only of KDE programs. Of course, this is fine because KDE programs are going to be well known (unlike mtpaint) and a lot of them are at or near the top of their class. Kolourpaint is for creating raster graphics. Kate and Kjots are available for text editing/programming. The KOffice programs are available for Office-level projects.

Kopete is included for instant messaging. Konqeror is the browswer (which is why I don’t have screenshots - it doesn’t work well with Wordpress). Kmail for mail, Akregator for RSS feeds, and other tools for the net. Very comprehensive suite.

For multimedia applications we have Juk for audio and Kplayer for video. Gaming consists of KBounce (a very addictive Quix-like game), Patience and KBattleship.

So, last time around, I said that Antix was the new king of Lightweight Linux distros. Does Slax unseat it? On the one hand, Slax has KDE as the base system so it’s automatically going to be more familiar to newer Linux users. On the other hand, the choice of KDE probably means it won’t run on computers that are as old as the ones Feather, Puppy, and Antix run on. Still, there’s room for a distro like Slax for recently obsoleted machines. And, if you want to run it on a 3 year old machine like mine - it flies. Now, some of the other lightweight Linux distros have more programs or DVD ripping software included. However, this brings us to one of the neat aspects of Slax - modules.

While many distros and LiveCD distros are incorporating similar features, Slax is still unique in that you can remix the LiveCD to include whatever programs you want. You just go to the Slax website and download the modules you want. Then you put them into a certain folder and burn a new CD. Bam! Now you have a LiveCD distro with exactly the programs you like….as long as they exist as modules. They have a lot of work to do to get more programs working as modules, but, as far as I can tell, this is a new feature with version 6 so they can be forgiven for missing some programs.

Overall, I’m very impressed with how fast it runs if you have the necessary RAM. The program selection is decent - could be a little better. I would have liked Firefox because Konqeror doesn’t work quite right for me on all sites. I’d say that Slax is tied with Antix. I really like a lot about how Antix works and it truly is lightweight since it runs Fluxbox. Slax, however, has all that KDE has to offer and modules. If I were to walk around with two CDs (I don’t even walk around with one), I’d be sure to have Antix and Slax around for use on any computer where I wanted to run Linux and then leave without a trace of it. One more thing in Slax’s favor - like DSL, you can download files to easily create a bootable thumb drive/memory stick to use if your BIOS supports booting from USB. Definitely check out Slax, you’ll rethink your image of Slackware as a hard to use distro.

  

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Oct

21

Spore!

Category: Computers, Video Games | Leave a Comment

Got Spore on Saturday and I’ve been playing it more or less non-stop since then. It was very, very fun! A lot more fun than I expected from the reviews. I don’t blame the reviewers since the game had been hyped for the past three years. I think the cell stage sucks and I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again. It’s very boring and there isn’t much to do other than eat red or green dots. The tribal stage was also boring and needs some tweaking - perhaps a la expansion pack. All the other stages have been a lot of fun - especially the creature stage.

One thing Spore has done for me that no other game has been able to do is get me excited about achievements. My brother, as he wrote here, is really into game achievements. I’ve never really been into them and I’ve often resented them. I’ve felt as though sometimes it’s been used by developers with inadequacy issues to make sure you play the game enough to get characters and abilities that should have been there in the first place. With Spore’s space phase, however, I’m digging the achievements and constantly trying to get more of them. They also give some structure and goals to what would otherwise be a pretty boring space phase.

Speaking of the space stage, here’s what’s annoying the heck out of me and what they could do in the next expansion pack to help make it more fun for me. Once you get past about 10 or so star systems, you pretty much just spend all your time flying back and forth picking up spice and dropping it off to make money. This really, really needs to be automated as today it was the last straw for me and made me finally get bored of the game. (This is good because I have some other things I want to do) So, they really need to add trade ships in the next spore game. I need to be able to set the minimum price I’ll accept for spices (say, don’t sell for under $10k) and then be able to buy some ships to go back and forth for me to sell the spices. Because I don’t have any time to go quests anymore, I’m stuck ferrying back and forth.

Speaking of trade - we need to have more than 3 trade routes - that’s just an absurdly small amount. And, what the heck to trade routes do anyway? It’s really not very clear to me what function they serve other than to eventually have the system offered for you to buy. And what good is that? So I can have more planets to go back and forth to? The game has done a very bad job of explaining to me why I want to do this. Perhaps they can fix this in a patch instead of waiting for an expansion pack.

Of course, for the quests, you start to feel like everyone else’s intern. There’s even an award called the Gopher award.

Overall, I really like this game and found it to be very addictive. Key things they need to fix are:

  • overhauling the cell stage to make it more relevant
  • fixing up the tribal stage to be a little less like an annoyingly stripped down version of an RTS - you can’t even properly automate food collection!
  • and fix up trade routes in space.

I kind of sense that my goal is to reach the center of the universe. I finally found the Grox and I feel they’ll probably cause trouble for me as I attempt to reach the center. But I’ve already gotten most of the in-game achievements and I’m getting bored. The spice trade issue isn’t really helping to alleviate my boredom. Also, it’d be nice if I could tell at a glance which of my planets require terraforming to become useful. Right now it’s way too annoying to travel from the edge of the galaxy towards the middle without knowing if I need to bring some animals and plants along.

  

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