λογισμικό (software)

Do you happen to remember a game called Duke Nukem 3D? Well, it was one of the best games I've ever played. I remember playing it sometime in '97-'98 or '99. It was a DOS game and its requirements were not that high, even for the standards of that period. Duke Nukem Forever was announced to be released sometime in the years that have past, but it never actually made it to the shelves of the computer shops. Wired had an article about the dying of Duke Nukem Forever this week. 3D Realms was the software house behind the game.

Now, let's cut to the chase. You can run Duke Nukem 3D under Windows, Linux or even Mac OS X. There's a nice wrapper called eduke32, that uses the game's original files and runs it under your currently installed OS. I've successfully run it under my 64-bit Gentoo and here's how I did it:

• Download the eduke32 source and save it under your $HOME directory. If your distribution's PMS already includes a package for it, you are free (and highly recommended) to use that one instead. You will need the SDL library installed, plus the sdl-mixer package. Unpack the source, type make to compile and create a directory somewhere where you will put these files: eduke32 and mapster32 from the eduke32 source folder. There are the executable files of the eduke32 program. Then, you are free to delete the eduke32 source directory.
• Download the Duke Nukem 3D files from 3D Realm's website. I used the shareware version (1.3d) and it worked fine. Unfortunately, you will need a way to install the game, because the provided files in this page are the installation setup of the game. I successfully installed it using a Windows XP virtual machine in Virtual Box. Then, copy all game files from the installation directory, inside the directory where you copied the eduke32 executables.
• Run eduke32 from a terminal window. It will look for the duke3d.grp file. When copying the Duke Nukem files from the installed directory, remember to rename DUKE3D.GRP to lowercase (duke3d.grp), otherwise you will probably be presented with an error about a TABLES.DAT file missing or something. eduke32 launches a small GTK window with a few options. Click on Start and you are ready to go!

There's a high resolution graphics pack for Duke Nukem 3D from this duke4net. eduke32 is supposed to support this pack, I haven't tried it though.

One last comment: Duke Nukem 3D was a Game. Modern games today have little to show other than excellent graphics, weapons, etc. Duke Nukem 3D was a game that you played for months, not for 2 or 3 days like today's games...

Happy gaming!

Digikam 1.0.0 has finally been released. If you are not familiar with Digikam, let me tell you that it's probably the best photos organizer, that comes with an editor with various effects, fixes, etc. and the best of all, is open source (requires KDE 4.x, but that's not a problem I guess ). I always wanted to write a detailed review about it, but the program has many functions that you must learn to use and the time needed for this cannot be easily found. But since we have the final 1.0.0 release now, I'll probably put it in my mid-term TODO list.

Use your favorite Linux package management system to install it, or download the source and compile it yourself.

It's here. Today, Opera 10 was released to the public. The press release can be found here.

At first glance, it's faster than the older 9.64. Maybe it's time to write again a comparison between the most widely used browsers, like Firefox, Opera, Chrome and IE ()...

Αφορμή της καταχώρησης αυτής είναι ένα μήνυμα στο φόρουμ του SMF, όπου χρήστης ρωτάει τι πρέπει να κάνει προκειμένου να έχει ελληνικά χωρίς entities στην εγκατάσταση του SMF του, καθώς και συζητήσεις κατά καιρούς με συναδέλφους και η κατάσταση γενικότερα όπως την βλέπω. Λίγο άσχετα όλα τα παραπάνω, αλλά θα εξηγήσω ευθέως.

As the title says. Today, Qiang released v.1.0.8 of Yii as he announced a few days back. This version finally comes with a completed Greek translation of the core messages used by the framework, so with a minor configuration tuning, you can see the messages in Greek.

You can grab the source and the documentation here.

As you might remember, I wrote about the Yii web application framework some time ago. As all projects like this, localization is an important step for the wider adoption of the framework. So, I've finally completed the Greek translation of the Yii core messages (the messages that Yii uses internally for mostly informational purposes). The current version is 1.0.7, but tomorrow Qiang is expected to release version 1.0.8, which will include the complete translation. There are more to translate, like the user guide, the blog guide, etc., but these are huge...

Stay tuned for more Yii news.

The other day, a ADSLgr.com forum member posted a link to Peacekeeper, a web page that benchmarks your browser. Test your own benchmark here and see which browser is the fastest.

Lately, I've been searching for a robust, efficient and well documented PHP framework. In case you are not familiar with the term framework, all you need to know is that a framework is a set of programming code that is usually targetted for general purpose applications and is supposed to take the burden of coding repetitive tasks from the developer, leaving him/her to concentrate more on the business logic. So, a web application framework -and in our case- a PHP framework is a set of classes that deal with data validation, connection to databases, authentication, session management, etc., features that any web application has.

Frank van Wensveen writes a series of articles, documenting his personal reasons for hating Microsoft. I don't remember where I found the link to his articles, but after reading the first part named "From the people who brought you EDLIN", I realize it's an interesting view of how Microsoft got up to the point where it stands now.

The articles are loooong to read, but judging from the first part, I think they worth it.

Today is the release day of KDE 4.2.0 (codename The Answer), one of the most popular desktop environments for Linux (and not only). You can find the full announcement here, where you can read about the changes and features that v.4.2.0 brings to our desktops.

I've been using KDE 4.1.4 for a couple of weeks now (actually a little after v.4.1.4 was released with a bunch of fixes mainly for the PIM applications - KMail, Korganizer, etc.) and I now admit that I like it. After seeing the KDE 4.1.x desktop for the first time as soon as I had emerged the necessary packages for my Gentoo, it seemed ackward, with some functionality missing when compared to the previous v.3.5.10 of the "old times". I had not seen v.4.0.x at all, since this version lacked the KDE 4 ports of the PIM applications, which was a very strong reason for me not to use v.4.0.x. v.4.1.x was a much better version, with bug fixes and more applications ported to the new framework. Still, some people saw that it lacked the full functionality range of v.3.5.x. So, it takes some time to get used to it.

So, today is the day of 4.2.0. The source packages have already been downloaded locally, so when all the 4.2.0 ebuilds make it to the portage tree, I will issue the famous

emerge -v world

command.

Soon, the 4.2.0 impressions to follow...