Doomed to Go Paddy

Doom. The most legendary of all FPS games. And even after 16 years it still manages to entertain me. In fact, it's one of the very few FPS games I've ever had any real interest in. Obviously I don't play it all year round, but I enjoy returning to it every now and then, in one form or another.

A year ago I wrote about playing the Doomsday Engine version of the game, with updated graphics and modern, Quake style mouse controls. This summer I'm trying something a little different. As you might know, earlier this year I switched from Mac OS X back to Debian GNU/Linux. I discovered the only Doom port available in Debian's package repositories was PrBoom. Worth a try, I thought, before I try my hands at compiling another port.

PrBoom takes a fairly different approach from Doomsday Engine. While there are numerous bug fixes and improvements to the engine, on the surface it looks and feels much more like the original game. Only the original sprites are used (although there are options for smoothing the graphics) and there are no modern control features like jumping or free aiming with the mouse. I briefly tried the mouse control it has, and couldn't really play with it (I'm not a 100% sure it couldn't be tweaked to behave better, though, I didn't really spend much time looking into it). While back in the 90's when I first played Doom I naturally used the keyboard controls, I found them impossible to return to after growing accustomed to the agility of mouse control.

So I decided to look into a possible third option: a game pad. The first try was disappointing. While PrBoom, like the original Doom, supports joysticks, the controls aren't really configurable, and no more agile than keyboard control. I would need something more akin to modern console FPS games: using one thumb for moving forwards and backwards, and strafing left and right, while using another thumb for aiming (turning) and a shoulder trigger for firing. (I use PlayStation controllers with a USB adapter.) I wasn't hopeful at first, but after a little digging I discovered a little application that converts joystick input into keyboard input (called joy2key). And, a little to my surprise, it worked perfectly, allowing me to freely configure my game pad controls.

And I must say, while I've always been somewhat sceptical about console FPS games, this control scheme works quite well with Doom. It's simple, fairly agile, and fun to play. I don't mind the old school graphics. Quite the contrary, in fact. Doom was an awesome game for its time and there's really no reason to mess with it any more than is necessary.

I've also been trying out some of the many mods available for the first time. I might write more about them in another post.

Going Home Stage 2

Continuing the story of my transition to Debian.

KDE4, with its eye candy and many features mimicked almost directly from Mac OS X, softened the transition. But after a while I begun to feel how cumbersome and, frankly, buggy, it really was, and remembered that, hey, this is GNU/Linux we're talking about, with an endless selection of different window managers.

So, just for fun, I decided to look at possible alternatives. One light-weight window manager in particular caught my eye: Sawfish. Apart from generally being completely different from KDE, what really caught my attention was the introduction: "Sawfish is an extensible window manager using a Lisp-based scripting language..." Being something of an Emacs enthusiast (a very powerful editor also extensible in a Lisp-based language) and a Lisp fan in general, this looked like a solution with real potential.

So I installed it, and have now spent a day fiddling with it, and I think I'm hooked. There's less eye candy, but that only means that it feels much lighter and everything works faster. Sawfish, at its core, is a very bare bones window manager, the very opposite of what KDE stands for. But the scripting facilities provide endless possibilities. I've set up some very handy keyboard shortcuts, for instance, which launch applications I use often or switch to them if they're already running. Adding a few scripts from the website gave me some features I've gotten used to, like periodically changing wallpapers.

For the first time in a good while I feel I'm in control of the graphical environment and not the other way round. And hacking extensions with Emacs is lots more fun than than any GUI configuration tool will ever be.

Astrology and Debian

I set up my astrology software for the new Debian installation today. The environment is pretty much the same I had on Mac OS X, based around Matt Skala's astrology LaTeX style, horoscop. But setting up a working TeX installation, complete with custom fonts, is rarely straightforward.

I went with a full TeX Live installation. It's a hefty download, and contains a lot of useless junk, but I didn't want any problems from missing packages. Installing the font for astrological symbols took some trial and error. Finding the right filetree for the files, the right configuration files to edit etc. took some work. But I succeeded in the end and now have LaTeX running without problems, complete with astrological symbols and the horoscop style for drawing good looking charts.

Last, I needed a backend to do the calculations. On OS X I used Astrolog, so I compiled and installed it, without problems. However, I discovered that when I enable ephemeris files provided for greater accuracy, I get some really weird planet positions, at least for Jupiter and Saturn. Without them it works perfectly, and also has the X interface that wouldn't work on OS X. The loss in accuracy should be insignificant for most ordinary needs.

However, on GNU/Linux I've got another option: Swiss Ephemeris from Astrodienst. I coudn't compile it on OS X, but had no trouble now (although I had to fiddle about with the sources a little to set the correct path for ephemeris files). This software has several pros and cons when compared to Astrolog.

On the plus side: It's much newer than Astrolog. It should be very accurate, though, as I said, in ordinary usage this is not a huge factor. It's able to calculate countless asteroids not supported by Astrolog. (Though as of now I'm still using only the seven classical planets.) It's GPL licensed. (Astrolog is basically free, but the terms forbid any kind of commercial use. Which naturally doesn't matter much to me right now, but I can't rule out the possibility of doing interpretation for money some day, even if only on a very small, semi-hobby basis).

The only real downside is that there is no feature rich interface like Astrolog has. It's really intended as a library for developing your own astrology software, but the included demonstration app is good enough to provide data for horoscop. Of course right now a basic, simple birth chart is what I'm mostly looking for, so I guess I'll go with Swiss Ephemeris for now, for accuracy and peace of mind over license questions.

Going Home

Well, after bitching about Mac OS X's shortcomings for a long while, I finally took the plunge and installed GNU/Linux on my MacBook. (Why it took this long was mostly because I didn't have that USB disc to backup my stuff, until now.)

In case anyone is wondering why, let me reiterate. The reason is twofold.

1. Ideology. I'm a devoted supporter of the free software movement. While Mac OS X utilises many open source components, and as a Unix system is fairly compatible with a large number of free software applications, it is still a proprietary system, and many of Apple's policies I just can't agree with.

2. Functionality. While Mac OS X is a certified Unix system, it's focus is on its own desktop environment, which doesn't intergrate perfectly with the Unix core, its command line interface or other Unix software not tailored for OS X. GNU/Linux systems (and probably most other Unix-like systems as well) are much more configurable, use the standard X Window System and are generally more 'whole', not suffering from an identity crisis as OS X is.

Debian GNU/Linux was the obvious choice, as I said before. Installing it on a MacBook isn't exactly a trivial matter, but following instructions on Debian's wiki page it wasn't actually too difficult, even though on the first try I ended up with kernel panic and had to do it all over again. In the end it booted without problems, though, and most features work fine pretty much 'out of the box'. (I still have a small partition with Mac OS X as a backup, and because a pure Debian system apparently still has some issues.)
There's still plenty of configuring to do, of course. The touchpad works, but needs tuning. I haven't been able to figure out how to get custom settings to work yet. And I haven't got wireless yet. It seems that this would require upgrading the kernel to a newer version, which is something I've never done before.

I might have been worried that I'd grown too accustomed to OS X's eye candy and convenient features. Well, I installed KDE 4, and it has certainly softened the blow. It looks pretty, and has pretty much all the desktop and window management features of OS X, such as a grid view of all the virtual desktops. And a slideshow mode for my many wallpapers.

For now, I'm just happy to be back home in a proper free software *nix.

Do As I Say Not As I Do

Computers 101: you don't, repeat don't, go a year and a half without backing up anything on your computer.

Luckily mister Murphy was kind and nothing went wrong this time. I'd been meaning to get a USB hard drive for ages, probably almost as long as I've had this MacBook. But, mostly due to lack of funds, kept putting it off, until I finally got one now. Now everything's backed up, and I feel much safer. The music alone would have been a huge loss if something had gone wrong, ripping all of it again would be more than I could bear...

I think it's time for a fresh start for this computer. A year and a half's worth of accumulated junk needs purging. I might also be interested in trying another OS. It'd almost certainly be Debian GNU/Linux.

Procrastinating with OS Woes

Still got that flu. Mostly it's just an annoying cough, with a slightly runny nose thrown in. I haven't been sleeping very well either. And I have to go to class tomorrow and speak. Great.

I've really started to yearn for a proper free software operating system again. I've used Mac OS X for well over a year now, and the magic is slowly beginning to wear off. I've written before about its flaws from a Unix user's perspective (just look at the posts labeled Mac OS X). Toss in the ethical problems of proprietary software, and I'm really starting to turn against it. OS X had its attractions, much of which were just simple eye candy. But free software systems aren't that far behind. Just look at these features in KDE 4.

Debian GNU/Linux would probably be my top choice. It's undoubtedly the best GNU/Linux distribution I've used so far. A great package management system with a huge software library is one of it's best features. And it's also more devoted to the GNU philosophy than some other distributions.

But installing a GNU/Linux system on a MacBook is no trivial matter. I need to find out more about how well it actually functions. I certainly couldn't even try it without making a complete backup of all my stuff, for which I would need a USB hard drive, which I just don't have the money for at the moment. Which leaves me kind of buggered. Not happy at all.