hoodyhoo

Things are working pretty well. My keyboard and mouse (Logitech G13 and G7) work under Ubuntu, although things like the side mouse button and the LCD screen aren’t supported.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get my Aiptek tablet to work properly in Ubuntu. TheJoe even went through the whole instruction set posted here, and it didn’t fully work as I couldn’t get any pressure sensitivity going. Plus, a new kernel just recently winded it’s way through the update manager so all that mucking about is lost anyway. We plan to pick up a Wacom Graphire in roughly a month ’s time. It’s the cheaper of the acom tablets, but it shares the same 512 levels of pressure with my 12000U so I shouldn’t have problems adjusting. Until then I can muck about in other things.

Things like Inkspace. I’ve created a little logo for the site and have been keeping track of it’s creation. I’ll be posting more detail on that later.

On thing that works amazingly well is Beryl. I absolutely love Beryl and not just for the 3D stuff it does to the desktop, as cool as that is. What’s great is the window navigation it provides. Four screen of workspaces can easily get filled with apps and windows, but Beryl has some great tools for navigating to whatever window you need without having to bob and weave and shuffle windows around with the mouse. If you haven’t seen it, this video should give you an idea of how cool this is.

Something I’ve been able to get working with no problems are the various emulators. So far I’m covered for playing arcade games, Nintento NES, Super NES, Genesis, Gameboy Advance and even Playstation 1 games. Even those programs that weren’t in the various repositories were easily installed and run things fine. Even my old save states work! The only downside is my gamepad doesn’t seem to have any driver support. While I don’t really need it for most of these games, it makes playing PS1 games pretty awkward. Gonna have to start researching to see if Ubuntu supports any gamepads out the box.

TheJoe and I tried installing my Special Edition Unreal Tournament 2004 DVD. We were pleasantly surprised to find a Linux installer shell on the DVD. It seemed to have trouble finding and installing the sound files. It does play, silky smooth even. It’s just totally silent. I’m checking out if anyone else has had that trouble. Soon we’ll go to storage and dig out my Quake III disc and see how that runs. I was playing around with Nexiuz on XP before I switched over. It’s a pretty fast-paced shooter and I actually think it looks better on Ubuntu than it does XP.

Looking on the game front, I have quite a lot of options open to me. I know how Windows people like to tout themselves as a top game platform, but I find myself wondering if I had more of a glut on Windows than on Linux. I mean, do I really need the platform that Circus Empire and Nanny Mania are exclusive to? It seems as if the really good Windows games get supported by Cedega anyways, so I’m not exactly hurtin’ for interactive entertainment.

So all told, it’s up and down. Some victories, some sacrifices. I may be frustrated sometimes, but I’m enjoying myself as well. I don’t think I’ve been that way in a while running XP.