Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Friday, March 5th, 2010
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If you guys weren’t terrified of North Korea by now, here’s more evidence that the country is absolutely nuts: they’ve developed their own Linux distribution! It’s called Red Star OS , and we can thank a Russian student for unearthing it for us. I now fully expect to see knee-jerk reactions like, “Down with Linux!” even though that makes no sense at all. The distro costs $5, and the included readme file contains kind words from Kim Jong Il, who says that it’s important that the DPRK have an operating system that gels with its values. Install time takes about 15 minutes, and there’s one language available: Korean. Judging by the screenshots, it doesn’t look too crazy at all; it’s your standard Linux distro. (If I were to go Linux full-time, I’d probably go with Linux Mint, merely because it looks neat.) My concern is that people who don’t really understand tech too well will see that North Korea has this, and will automatically assume that Linux is Evil. That’s clearly not true. The fact is, it’s fairly easy to whip up your own Linux distro these days. I’d be surprised if the neighborhood geek doesn’t have his own distro at this point. Now all we need is for the ISO to be released so we can all give it a shot. via Network World
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
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Of all the wonderful uses for Linux, gaming hasn’t traditionally been one of its stronger suits. But as we all know, old console emulators provide eons of entertainment and said emulators run across a variety of operating systems. And so there’s Puppy Arcade, a derivation of the small-footprint, runs-on-just-about-any-hardware Puppy Linux. Developer Scott Jarvis just finished up the latest version, Puppy Arcade 7 , and has made it available for download. Run it as a Live CD, make a bootable USB stick, or install it full-bore. What you’re presented with is a clean UI with an OS X-style launch bar chock full of your favorite emulators. Fire one up, show it where to find your ROMs, and enjoy. It’s a pretty smooth installation process if you’ve played with Live CDs before. I tried it out a bit this morning and was up and playing old NES games in no time at all. Good stuff. Puppy Arcade 7 [ScottJarvis.com]
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
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While I think the passion for building stand-up arcade games has waned recently, it’s nice to see that someone out there is still thinking of the children. PuppyArcade by Scott Jarvis is a CD-based arcade system that boots in any PC and allows you to access MAME ROMs on almost any disk. The game plays Amiga, Atari, Commodor, and even Doom ROMs and WADs and, as you’ll notice, even runs NES, PS1, and Gamecube ROMs, among others. It’s based on a barebones Linux install. Plays Amiga (500, 1000, 2000), Atari (ST, 800, 800XL, 130XE, 5200), Amstrad (CPC, Plus, VEB), Arcades, Colecovision, Commodore (64, 128, VIC20, PET), GameBoys (GB, GBC, GBA), GameGear, Genesis/MegaDrive, MasterSystem, MS DOS, N64, NeoGeo, NeoGeo CD, NES/Famicom, PC Engine/TurboGrafix, PSX, ScummVM, SNES and ZX Spectrum (16k, 48k, 128k, +2, +2A, +3) & more! You can download the emulator here . Warning: Some classic games are dumber than you remember (See: Golden Axe )
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Monday, March 1st, 2010
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I knew you had to pay a little extra to get Windows , but $100,000 to get Linux on your Mini 10n netbook ? Good lord! What are the manuals written on? The skin of unicorns? Thanks, GT!