If you’re powerful and losing market share because you can’t innovate, litigate.  Microsoft have decided to attack TomTom who are a European-based GPS provider.  But the attack is also a proxy assault on Linux which TomTom uses in their product.  Keep an eye on this one as it goes through the courts.

Actually this is more a post to test if twitterfeed plays nice.  Twitterfeed is a nice simple tool to take these blog posts via RSS and throw them on twitter thereby informing more about my deep and meaningful posts, witty commentary and sheer good looks.  Or something.

However I thought I’d throw in a short post about Katmouse which is a very very simple tool for Windows only.  Wot no Linux!  Yes indeed.  Katmouse does something exceedingly simple yet I believe it could be quite useful to those who use many windows on their desktop.  It allows you to move you mouse over a window and, without clicking to activate the window, scroll the window with your little wheelie as you see fit.  Hence you can scroll many windows with a minimum of fuss.

Went to an interesting event on Saturday. It was a Barcamp in Adelaide which is something I’ve heard about from Meatball and others but never attended myself.

A Barcamp is a rather informal meeting of a modest group of people who have the common thread. In Adelaide’s case it was a strong interest in technology. There’s presentations where all are encouraged to present but really the focus is on discussion, networking and throwing ideas around and most of all, participation.

All in all this barcamp seemed to pretty much do that and I enjoyed myself a great deal and learned quite a bit. Quite a mix of people there geeks, engineers, programmers, young businesspeople, twitter addicts

Some of the major discussions covered things like the future of ISPs, vine pruning robots, internet communities and business, social networking like twitter, Blender an open source 3D modeler, mobile phone application development.

It went on for most of the day at the Xentech offices off Rundle Mall and was well catered by 4 Wheels- 5 stars.

For those of you who are new to Linux, and the dreaded command line (CLI) in particular, you can use wine in the try and pray mode. As I’ve said before around ¼ of games will work like that.

However to get a higher success rate and an easier installation process you should consider using one of the GUI (graphical) interfaces which both simplifies the wine process and ensures you don’t have to touch the CLI.

There are a couple of options to do this but unfortunately none of them stand out as problem free. I’ll list them here;

1) Use Cedega, a commercial product which is not really wine. As best as I can determine it is a very old fork of wine meaning it is based on wine some time ago but has altered significantly from wine since it split off for better or worse. I do not recommend Cedega because it has a dreadful reputation for both support and running games and because it costs $US45/year.

I cannot personally vouch for or against this product except their Eve game bundle failed to work. They also offer a Mac flavour called Cider.

2) Use PlayonLinux, a free open source product which uses clever scripts with recent versions of wine. There seems to be a significant language barrier from English users there but otherwise the community looks active and friendly.

I have not tried it out but might do so sometime.

3) Use Crossover. Crossover comes in three flavours. The stable office/business Crossover Linux, the more leading edge Crossover Games and the Crossover Mac version. Crossover is really the official commercial level of wine and it is a positive thing to note that Crossover and wine try to work together.

Crossover Games is the cheapest and targets games only. It costs $US29.95/year. There’s a 7 day trial so you can see what it’s like.

I used the trial to test out Crossover and to foray into wine. Overall I found the GUI application to be quite nice and reasonably powerful and it included a few installers for supported games. It used a slightly older version of wine; 1.1.0 versus the current 1.1.13 at the time.

More than the GUI software provided, Crossover is a support service and offer support for a few popular games.

However Crossover Games has three problems I noticed;

1) It’s out of phase with wine. Some of the advice in wine can be useful but you must be aware of the version of wine Crossover is based on and you do not know any hidden changes made by Crossover. This, coupled with Crossover’s support based service, means wine users are not so willing to help a Crossover user. They expect Crossover to do the job. The games database in Crossover is OK but is too incomplete to really supersede wine’s software database.

2) Crossover Games has bad support. I contacted them about a few issues including on supported games and received replies 2 days *after* the trial ended which were also less than satisfactory. It’s was very bad pre-sales service and a sign of later service should you actually cough up the cash. There is no support for games outside the few officially supported as well so the support you pay for is very narrow.

3) The software does menus in KDE very badly even deleting other game links when installing a new game.

Given the primarily support based nature of Crossover and my experience I can’t really recommend them.

These services are as easy as it gets with wine at this time and the overall result is passable but if you do have some basic skills you can get a cheaper and improved outcome.  I’ll help show you how in an upcoming post.

What if World War II was an online multiplayer game?