OpenSuse 11 – First Impressions

I downloaded OpenSuse 11 Linux yesterday… ended up letting it download overnight and then installed it this morning. All in all… impression of this release has been very good so far although I haven’t really had a chance to get my teeth into it. Had a few other things to do today and then was out watching The Police in concert tonight at Stormont in Belfast (which was excellent by the way!)

Install was very clean with much improved interface. Installed to dual-boot alongside Windows XP on one of my older desktops – is an AMD 64 3500 processor with 2GB Ram and an Nividia 6800 128MB Graphics card… had a 160GB disk which I partitioned in 2 – giving the linux install a nice clean 80GB to work with… is not bad for a mess about machine to experiment with.

Two of my biggest bug-bears with OpenSuse Linux have been solved in respect of the USB wireless dongle being picked up and working straight away, as well as much improved ease of install of Nvidia graphics driver.

I still find it annoying that you have to download Nvidia drivers separately for OpenSuse linux… as has always been the case… but they have made the install very very easy these days and was impressed that Nvidia were bang up to date with OpenSuse 11 drivers pretty much on the day of distro release.

The Wireless LAN pickup was a dream come true. It took me ages to get this same Wireless USB dongle working on OpenSuse 10.3… at least 2 evenings… so I was glad to see that OpenSuse 11 just recognised it straight away.

Was a bit dissappointed with Compiz-Fusion experience on this machine. Was able to get it working OK using nice new graphical UI configuration tools and the fx are pretty sweet… however I haven’t been able to spot  anything on the GUIs provided to enable this to be switched on by default whenever the OS reboots… so I guess I’m gonna have to hack some configuration file in the background somewhere…just a slight annoyance – but still it would have been nice to put something so simple on one of the config screens! Secondly… I admit the graphics card I’m running this on only has 128MB Ram… but I have noticed that, when I have compiz-fusion switched on, the window buttons for maximise, minimise, close etc keep on disappearing… windows won’t close sometimes even when you repeatedly press the close button… is a bit annoying… never the less is all still a big improvement over the previous configuration experience and certainly all-in-all makes linux just the sexiest looking rich eye-candy desktop experience out there when compared to Vista or OS X… especially like the Apple cover-flow-style alt-tab window swapping experience they’ve built in… that’s just sweet…although obviously Apple did it first.

Was impressed with the fact that a lot of packages they have in this distro were so up to date including KDE 4.0, Firefox 3 (which was only released the day before!), and Wine 1.0 (just released the week before) were all in the box… very nice!

Was out at concert this evening but had left it installing all the usual development stuff including Apache, MySQL, php, Mono, Eclipse, SubVersion, webkit etc etc… will get messing with those in due course to evaluate…

All in all… good solid distro so far although I think I’m probably going to leave compiz-fusion switched off on my test machine… will try it on another machine with a better graphics card to see if experience improves… I still think OpenSuse is the best linux distro out there and makes for a great free download!

Go get it!

XBOX 360 and GTA IV – Just Great!

I bought a new Microsoft XBOX 360 specifically to play GTA IV on (although have bought and borrowed a whole bunch of games for it).

This has turned out to be a great investment. I have HDMI cables going from both my XBOX 360 and my PC into an HDMI switch which is then plugged into my HD Monitor – so I can just switch between Vista and the XBOX on the same screen – works perfectly. The graphics quality and smoothness of gameplay of gaming is just sweet!

My brother-in-law bought me the messenger keyboard that plugs into the bottom of the game controller so you can sign into Windows Live Messenger.

Still have to get myself setup on XBOX Live which I fully intend to do. I want to procure the wireless bridge dongle (shame this wasn’t built in by default into the machine as this is an additional £46 from amazon).

The XBOX 360 and Windows Vista work seamlessly together for media streaming so I’ll also be able to wireless stream my music through this if and when we ever invest into a larger HD TV elsewhere in the house.

One thing I did think was missing from the XBOX 360 was the presence of a web browser… both the PS3 and the Wii both have browsers – it seems strange that Microsoft didn’t stick an XBOX version of Internet Explorer web browser onto the XBOX… probably something to do with anti-competitiveness…

GTA IV itself… possibly the best game ever made… Rockstar have not let us down. The game runs extremely smoothly on the XBOX although the loading times could be a little faster. Am only about 25% through the game and am just loving it. The sheer amount of detail and effort put into this makes it truly a work of art. The cars are beautiful, the environment feels alive, the plot is engrossing… it just all feels good.

A few things I don’t like about GTA IV…

• I wish the environment was more destructable and realistic… If you drive a car at 100MPH into the front of a shop window… I’d expect the car to go through the shop window… not bounce back into the street.
• I wish the environment was more accessible… there are lots of buildings which should have lots of rooms… but not too many open doors… would be better if you could kick any door in and go anywhere in the map… and it would be cool if the properties were inhabited appropriately.
• I wish there were planes… In earlier versions of GTA you could fly planes… this has been removed out of respect to 9/11 which I think is just dumb… they haven’t removed bombing and shooting from the game out of respect to all the other horrific terrorist acts the world has seen over and over again… they haven’t removed cars out of respect for all the car bombings the world has seen… Given that this games glorifies violence, crime and the murdering of innocent people… it’s just seems a little superficial to take planes out of the game in respect for a one-off act of terrorism in a small part of the world that happened years ago. Flying planes was one of the best parts of GTA San Andreas and it is sorely missed from GTA IV.
• I wish you could procure property earlier and easier – I’m currently running around the game with thousands of dollars in my pocket… but I’m living in a really dodgy apartment…
• I wish the map was bigger… like world-size bigger… instead of just one city and one general environment theme… it would be really cool to be able to travel to any part of the world… the game is limited in that you know the most you can ever aspire to is becoming a City boss… if the map was expanded to be more world sized then you could play to become an international crime boss…
• Think there should be much more online capabilities… able to setup online teams where we could compete against each other to rise up through the ranks…

I suppose, really what I’m saying is that GTA needs to become a lot more like SecondLife in its architecture for the future for online play and achievements… and much more like Far Cry or Crysis in respect of destructability – needs to be much more real! We want real!

Anyway… love the XBOX 360… and thoroughly enjoying GTA IV… all well worth it for entertainment…

Am also playing Assassins Creed and a few other games at the minute… and have a few others on my Amazon Wishlist at the minute… too many games and not enough gaming time seems to be the only issue!

New Microsoft XBOX 360

GTA IV… The game of the year is now only weeks away from being on the shelves and I simply cannot wait.

There are some rumours that this game will be released for the PC in October but it’s just far to far away to wait.

So I have finally given in and bought an XBOX 360 from Amazon.Co.Uk who are, by the way, doing a deal to knock of £10 if you buy the console with GTA IV… my brother was a bit disgusted with this… he said I probably would have got a better package deal from Game… he was probably right… but what the hey!

Microsoft have just reduced the price of the XBOX 360 substantially to help ensure that it remains the leading next-gen console against the PS3.

So I got an e-mail in from Amazon this evening saying that the console had shipped already and will be at my front door hopefully within the next few days… cool… I have a few older games to play on it in the meantime…

Am also happy enough with this purchase because, as a .NET developer, I’ve also been messing with Microsoft Game Studio Express 2.0 so I should be able to use my XBOX 360 for program testing. This is really cool, it makes use out of my pre-existing programming skills, and knowledge of Microsoft development studio, and allows me to cross-develop games that will run flawlessly on the PC and the XBOX. With the next release of Game Studio Express 3.0 there will also be the ability to port games directly to the Zune and hopefully Windows Mobile as well…

As well as that I should be able to stream media pretty easily on my home network from my Vista machine down to my XBOX so that’s cool too…

As well as that I’m gonna sign up for XBOX live which should integrate nicely into my Windows Live account so I get joined up E-Mail, Instant Messaging etc etc.

This is the thing I love the most about Microsoft technologies… they all just glue together seamlessly!

Anyway, in the meantime – new toys! Woo-Hoo!

Just need to get myself a decent HD TV now to connect my XBOX to. Still can’t justify this seeing as I have two perfectly good TVs already that are only about five years old and still working perfectly… I need to start leaving cups of coffee on top of them or something to help me build my business case for new asset investment…

Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 Released to MSDN

Microsoft have released Windows Vista SP1 onto MSDN Subscriber Downloads at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/subscriptions/default.aspx

Annoyingly, you need to use a alternative downloader for this which you may have trouble getting to work if you are behind a corporate firewall…

The joint 32-64 Bit DVD Download is a whopping 1.15GB and took about an hour to install on a reasonably powerful 2.4GHz quad-core with 4GB Ram… This service pack to longer to install than Vista itself..