Enter the Time Machine

I grew up during the early years of computers and computer gaming. I remember the excitement I experienced when I first purchased Ultima VII to play on my IBM compatible 386 machine. I had already played through both Ultimas V and VI on that machine when it was still a 286. I had upgraded the motherboard in the meantime and I was eagerly awaiting the release of U7.
My computer was at the tail end of the recommended System requirements as the game recommended a 486 if I remember correctly, and I had a heck of a time getting it to run on that machine. It took a lot of tweaking and rebooting with a strange new memory manager called voodoo. I had to have a separate boot up configuration just to play the game, but it was entirely worth it. I got it working and to date, that was the best gaming experience I ever had. I was truly immersed in the story and gameplay. Soon after, I purchased Ultima Underworld, and it too was a great game that I enjoyed.
Now that I have Ubuntu, I've discovered that I can replay these classic games again, and without the headache of 'voodoo' magic and memory management woes.

Exult is an open source game engine that was designed to allow Ultima VII to be playable on todays systems. As long as you have the original Ultima VII game files, the installation is a piece of cake compared to the original installation anguish. I still have the original game box with the cloth map and small trinket stored in my basement game museum along with a lot of other games from that era.
There is another great program called Dosbox that can be found in the Ubuntu repositories that will allow you to play just about every other game from years gone by.

I'm going to post instructions on getting a system configured to run Dosbox with the least amount of fuss. I'd like to thank someone named xbmc who wrote these steps on the old PSUbuntuforums.

First thing that needs to be done is to install Dosbox.
Once installed open it via Applications > Games >Dosbox.

In the Dosbox window, type in the following command:

config -writeconf dosbox.conf

this will get your configuration file up and running.
Now close that window and open up the terminal program and type these commands in one at a time (you'll need to use your own username to replace mine:
/home/ubucrates/dosbox.conf mkdir /home/ubucrates/dosbox sudo cp /home/ubucrates/dosbox.conf /home/ubucrates/dosbox.conf.backup
Open up your configuration file with this command:
gedit /home/ubucrates/dosbox.conf

Add the following lines at the very end of the file and then Save:
mount c /home/ubucrates/dosbox C:

Now you only need to copy all your game files to the /home/ubucrates/dosbox folder and then launch Dosbox to start playing.
Once Dosbox loads you'll be looking at a C:/ prompt. If you're familiar with the old Dos commands then you'll know what to do. If not then you only need to know how to open the game folder and then type the game name to launch the game. Pressing Ctrl+F1 in Dosbox opens up the configuration window that will allow you to change many features of the game such as allowing shortcuts for various tweaks like having a fullscreen shortcut key.
I'm currently replaying another fun classic called Wolfenstein 3D.
I had fun tweaking Ubuntu to get these working and now I get a chance to rediscover some amazing titles from the early days of gaming.

Ubuntu and the auto update

The reason Ubuntu can be both fun and frustrating is that it offers a sharp learning curve at times.

I saw the nice little orange update star in the upper panel like I occasionally do, and clicked on it to do an auto update of my Compaq laptop. Everything went well, and I returned to work.
The next time I booted up my laptop, I saw a warning popup telling me that "Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode".
There was a setting for me to manually set up my monitor/video card, but the settings there were not the most user friendly. As I'm not sure which settings applied to my particular laptop, I cancelled the manual setup and continued on into a generic 800X600 desktop.
I determined the problem to be the latest install update. It seems that the update decided to include the fglrx envy files, which I did not previously have installed. That screwed up my graphics settings at bootup.
I simply used Synaptic Package Manager to completely uninstall those drivers and then rebooted. Everything went back to the way it was before.
Lesson to learn is that whenever doing an auto update, double check all the files that are selected to update and uncheck those that definately don't belong on your particular system.

wlassistant launcher command

I added a launcher icon in my top panel to access wlassistant, but have been not able to get access due to a window that pops up stating that I have insufficient permissions' to function properly and that I should run it as sudo.
I changed the command line to read "/usr/bin/su-to-root -X -c /usr/bin/wlassistant" which now opens the window without a password prompt.
I'm planning to reinstall Ubuntu from scratch on this laptop next month, when I return from holidays. I'm sure that getting wifi to work flawlessly on this laptop without all this tweaking is possible. I've got a 64 bit Ubuntu DVD that I want to try out as well.

Wifi working on my v2310

My laptop has been up and running Ubuntu for the last few days. As I mentioned in the previous post, the only real problem I had was getting my wifi to work consistently. It worked initially, however on rebooting/restarting the system, the laptop had trouble finding the wifi signal at times. I've followed the guide for installing drivers for Broadcom wifi cards, which helped, but rebooting killed wifi at times.
I've downloaded and tested several wifi apps that help me to get connected manually.
The two apps that I'm using now are kwifimanager along with wlassistant. The two of them guarantee wifi connection success, however I have to open them manually to get them to search the wifi signals and then connect to my preselected prefered network.
I have also tried the following programs that also work with various success.
Gtkwifi: great program that worked initially, but on rebooting I found that it wouldn't work on its own and it didn't play nice with the other wifi apps I tried to run along side it. I may give it another try in the future.
wifi-radar: this app may have worked for previous versions of Ubuntu, but the website is dead and I didn't spend much time with this one. It's still on my laptop, so I may play with trying to get it to work in the future.
Wicd: This program shows a lot of promise. To be honest, I found this after I got wlassistant working, so I haven't explored what this program can do or how well it works, but it's on my to-do list of things to try with Ubuntu.
There's also the preinstalled network manager called nm-applet that loads in the panel but it's very limited in what it can do. It also doesnt' seem to be able to find all the wifi networks in my area.
That's a brief summary of configuring my wifi on this laptop. Don't ask me why both of the apps that I'm using are KDE based and I'm running a Gnome desktop environment. I should be using one of the gtk apps but if it works I won't question it.

New laptop, new adventures

I recently bid for a laptop on Ebay and I won the auction. The laptop arrived this week, and today was the day I had time set aside to load Ubuntu on it. I'm going to set it up to dual boot with Windows, but I doubt that I'll log into Windows very often. I'll keep it for accessing my Dell Axim pda. I could probably do that from Windows, or even use the SD card reader to transfer files to it, but going to Windows to work with Activesync seems to be the least stressful way at the moment. Maybe PDA plug and play will work flawlessly in Ubuntu, but it's not there yet. I am partitioning the drive roughly 40% Windows and 60% Ubuntu as I write this from my desktop pc. The only minor problem that I anticipate at the moment is that the Broadcom wireless card may not work and I'll need to search for a compatible driver. The laptop is a Compag Presario V2310 AMD Turion 64. I have both the 32 bit and the 64 bit DVDs of Ubuntu, but I will be installing the 32 bit version for now but I plan to try the 64 bit flavour sometime in the future.

Fosswire offers a Cheat Sheet to Ubuntu Users

I discovered a great blog for open source software that offers tips and tutorials along with great articles. The posts cover all the linux distros and aren't Ubuntu specific, but I found such a useful pdf Ubuntu Reference Cheat Sheet that I had to post it here. If you're interested in even more Ubuntu posts on Fosswire, there's a search window right at the top of their page where you can search for whatever specific topic that might be of interest.

Laptop recovery

I finally managed to recover the laptop that was freezing when loading gnome. I found many links talking about this similar problem, and I'm not really sure why it happened in the first place.
Whatever the cause, I'm glad that I found a solution that has Ubuntu up and running again on the laptop.
I'll post the links here along with the solution that worked for me.
Fix 1:
/etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto ath0
iface ath0 inet dhcp

then restart networking with: sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Fix 2
Blacklist ipv6

Fix 2 is what finally got things running for me again.
gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
add a line that reads:
blacklist ipv6
reboot

Another Ubuntu problem solved in Ubucrates Classroom.
Class dismissed.

testing moblog from pda

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

Laptop down and out...revisited

I'm still trying to resolve this issue that my daughters' Ubuntu laptop is experiencing. If nothing else, I'd like to learn what caused this problem and what the simplest fix might be.
I've already discovered that if the computer is booted up and then left alone once it gets to the white rectangle, then eventually the computer will load Gnome, but it takes around 5 minutes. After that, Ubuntu is fully available for use but it suffers from terribly slow program load time speeds.
The online programs access the internet without any problems. It's just their loading times that is affected.
In doing a search for this problem, I've already found that this issue has been occuring for years now, but I have yet to find a definitive fix that will solve the slow bootup and slow program load times.
Arrrgghhhh, the joys of Ubuntu.

Laptop Ubuntu down and out

Yesterday marked a day of Ubuntu troubles. My daughter asked me to check her laptop, as she was unable to start Ubuntu today.
I tried to start her computer and found that the computer simply froze up once gnome was loaded. All that could be seen was a white square in the upper left corner of the screen overtop of the background colour. Try as I might, I couldn't get the computer to move past this freeze. I tried various fixes from the terminal via Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. I tried reloading/uninstalling/reinstalling gnome without success.
I then installed Kubuntu and was surprised to find that I could log in via Kubuntu, but if I tried to log in to Ubuntu, gnome would simply freeze and refuse to work.
So, kubuntu kde works but not ubuntu gnome. I have yet to find a fix for this.
The only change made to the laptop was the recent upgrade of Ubuntu 8.04.1 which I also installed on my desktop without any problems. Not sure if this change screwed things up.
I also made a change in my DNS settings on my desktop as I'm now using OpenDNS settings for internet connection.
Sadly, this problem has left me stumpted and I had no other alternative but to make Windows XP the default OS on the laptop until I can solve this. Kubuntu isn't running very well either or I would let that be the default. It's running very slow (Firefox takes ages to load) and the wifi connection doesn't always load forcing me to manually get it working. Not a good solution for a user that wants to just have everything work staight away like my daughter.
I so much wanted to steer her away from Microsoft and I was succeeding until this happened.
She's now back to surfing the net with XP, which is running very slowly on her old laptop, but at least she's able to get online.
Ah, the joys of Ubuntu.