Trouble Brewing on the FLOSS Front

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Z9484

Some recent developments in Free Libre Open Source Software lead me to believe there is trouble brewing. With growth comes problems. And it seems many projects aren’t living true to their principles. Instead they are once again just trying to copy proprietary or other software. Some examples. The new version of the Gimp plans to enforce a single window a la PhotoShop design. I sincerely hope they keep an option to have multiwindow mode. It’s a complete abandonment of Gimp legacy as well as Linux heritage.
OpenOffice recently showed off a prototype copying Office’s Ribbon. There was fortunately a loud and angry outcry. But unfortunately that doesn’t mean it wont necessarily happen. The ribbon should be a plugin for those who think that way but forcing that on unwilling users is the exact same thing Microsoft did. Next in line is Firefox new GUI. They appear to be copying chrome this time as well the Ribbon again.

Finally one more troubling example that happened recently. That of Ubuntu disabling ctrl-alt-backspace as default. According to this poll (albeit nonscientific) 88% thought it was a bad idea, yet they did it anyways. Fortunately its still Linux so you can go and change a config file and fix it. Ctrl alt backspace to me is one of the great things about Linux. If X crashes that doesn’t mean the kernel has so there is no need to reboot. For instance I was working on KQ recently and it completely locked up. (You need plain lua to run KQ you know ) I switched to a virtual console ctrl alt F6 and did a killall kq. But unfortunately KQ was stuck in fullscreen mode which left X on a wonderful 320-240 resolution. Trust me it looks great on my 24 inch Monitor. And the screen was locked to a small section so I couldn’t access any menus. With a quick ctrl alt backspace X was restarted and I could go on with my work. The reason behind the change was so people didn’t accidentally lose data. Personally I don’t know how anyone can accidentally hit a keyboard combination as awkward as ctrl alt backspace.

Some of these examples are probably only problems to me but it does make me wonder about the future of some of my favorite FLOSS. It goes back to why Wesnoth is such a good game, its not just a Yet Another (insert name here) Clone. (YAC’s I dub them.) I think that if FLOSS projects really wants to succeed they have to be original as well as functional. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case. Just look at all the horrible Office YACs out there(Office included). There has to be a way to make a word processor that doesn’t make you want to throw your computer off a cliff.

Hopefully this storm will pass but we shall see.

Hex-a-hop Revolver Canyon Walkthrough

Posted on September 20, 2009 by eremite

Walkthrough for Revolver Canyon level of Hex-a-hop puzzle game

Hex-a-hop Outposts Walkthrough

Posted on September 18, 2009 by eremite

Walkthrough for Outposts level of Hex-a-hop puzzle game

Hex-a-hop Inversion Walkthrough

Posted on September 16, 2009 by eremite

Walkthrough for Inversion level of Hex-a-hop puzzle game

HOMM3

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Z9484

Wow its been a while. Summer’s over and schools back in session. Unfortunately I didn’t accomplish as much this summer as I had hoped to.

Recently I have been playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Complete brought to you by Good Old Games your neighborly DRM free, digital download, game store. Homm3 is a timeless classic TBS game. You lead your armies around the map collecting resources. With those resources you can recruit creatures for your armies at your castles. You can upgrade your cities to give you more resources, upgrade troops or improve your heroes. And then of course vanquish your enemies. It’s a lot of fun fun for $9.99. It comes with a lot of campaigns that are quite difficult. The only problem is that games take a very long time to finish.

There is also a Russian fan made expansion called In the Wake of the Gods. (For some reason I can no longer find the page on google. Just the Russian page shows up. What has google been doing!?) I am surprised about how much they have added. Though it does crash more than the original. (Which still crashes sometimes). A nice thing is that though they have a lot of options most all of them can be disabled if you don’t like that particular feature.

There is a free and open source project called VCMI which is trying to recreate a new engine for HOMM3:WOG. It is not very complete right now. Besides Linux support they plan to add more functionality to HOMM3. This will hopefully allow the mods to add those features that the original engine does not permit.