a big one and a little one

having reinstalled pclos minime for the umpteenth time, it has booted from the first partition, so i have configured the bootloader to (i hope) include the partition hda6, which will give me a choice of two versions of the same operating system, one with masses of stuff installed for me to play about with and decide whether or not to keep, and one skinny version to add to until satisfied that i have it right for mklivecd, as i don't want to have to keep burning the same thing over and over again.

because i am so expert at losing data, i have taken to saving to external storage devices in an effort to keep it safe. this leaves me with tons of space on the internal hd for experimentation and i toy with having several 10gb partitions for installing various versions of the same os.

of all the versions of pclinuxos available, i find pclos-minime-.93 both the easiest and the hardest to get to grips with. much of linux is intuitive, now that it has finely-honed front-ends like kde. the wealth of applications is astonishing and i have found at least twenty text editors, knowing that there are many more. some are simple editors, such as nano, for use in a terminal, going all the way to koffice and openoffice, offering the utimate sophistication in word-processing.

the trickier bits happen when something i want to do is baulked in some way. sometimes it's a matter of permissions and if experimenting with chown and chmod in a terminal don't fix it, i login to root and try to fix it that way. i rarely go into root, preferring to see if i can get the answer in my own user area first. like surgery, rooting is the last resort of failure. i have been trying to make a usbhome key with a 1 gb usb flash pen, so far without success. i shall probably have to rtfm, something i prefer to avoid as much as possible. i would far rather talk to the members of #pclinuxos on irc.efnet.ca in konversation and get realtime online tuition. it tends to stick better.

a friend showed me how to navigate to folders and install tar.gz and bz2 files. while he was doing this, i learned two invaluable pieces of knowledge. 1, i had been navigating incorrectly and, 2, the use of ls to reveal what was available. so now i can:

use the handy dandy extractor to "extract here"

$ cd download - the folder where i keep incoming goodies
ls - look for the extracted goodie folder in question

$ cd copy/paste to relevant folder

repeat until i find the magic green "configure"

then

$ ./ - copy/paste the word (saves typing and typos)

watch while ./configure does its' thing and tells me to "make" - cool. i can manage that

at the end of make

$ su
passwd

# make install - and the system installs all the little bits and pieces wherever they are supposed to go.

for my own amusement i went through the entire database of packages available for installation and found a huge number to install simply out of curiosity. some are games and others are more serious applications. i have no idea what many of them do. that's part of the fun of linux - great explorations.

when first installed, minime takes up about 1.5 gb of hd in 564 packages. to this i have added 493, which will swell the gross by a further 1.9 gb - pure greed. i shall explore the games first. i enjoy daft, mindless games like lbreakout2 and some of enigma. i am addicted to spider patience and have found a way to skirt the statistics while i learn how to scrub round them altogether. instead of clicking on new and increasing the losses, i judiciously saved a few that i had solved, just before the final placement, and open, or open recent. then i can make the final placement for another "win".

there is something about computer games that invites cheating, which is a game in itself. i found this when playing wizards and warriors. certain anomalies in the game enabled the keeping of hit points if issued just prior to reentering a town and saving. once my priest had acquired the toughen spell, i could take my little gang of marauders into the town, where all mana was fully restored, promptly leave town, issue the spells until mana was exhausted and return to town.

later i found an ace way of gaining levels and use that to determine the number of levels a player was able to reach. while doing this i found one of the dire limitations of the game. one of my characters had filled up all his attributes and skills slots leaving only 3 spaces. when he next made level he had five points to award and only 3 spaces available. impasse as there was no way back. an editor helped me get out of that. i reduced his scores in several areas and off he went again. he had been stuck at level 149, but, now, the sky seemed not to have a limit.

the editor was also a handy tool to enable a bunch of novice characters to have sufficient skill and hit points to speed through the boringly tough initial stages of progress. the amazoni mantraps still scared the shit out of me and i took a high-powered mage along to lob really massive spells at them.

none of that has anything to do with linux, of course, but i want to be able to play the game without benefit of woze, and that's where wine comes in. this is the emulator linux uses to enable woze based games to be played. another nice toy to learn.

it would be great fun to port the wizardry series to linux, but i wouldn't have the first clue how to go about it. no programmer am i. i don't even know what language the files are written in but i do know that the series started life on an apple IIe, or thereabouts, using a 6502 chip, two screechy floppy drives and a crummy mono-green monitor with wire-frame graphics. i found out later that the game had colour.

i managed a wonderful cheat in that. by dint of creating twenty characters, pooling their money to one character, deleting 19 and recreating, pooling again and then transferring those characters to the working scenario disk, i could take them to boltac's, the all purpose rip-off emporium and make sure my little band of miscreants had decent armour and weapons against all foes.

it took 10 hours to make my first million and then i got curious as to how long the string was that held the money. a further two hours got me to a billion, by means of exponentiality and at the end of it i had a disk (with backups and backups of backups, of course) describing my team as "shit-hot, tooled up and rich". the string wound up at 12 digits. beats me how i managed work as well. after it ported to the mackintosh and the guts had been reamed out of it, i kinda lost interest in the follow-ups and stuck to the IIe version even though the graphics had improved.

when i left that job, i no longer had access to the machine and lost the disks in life's shuffling about. not until the year 2000 did i rediscover the game, much improved all round and hours of fun. i haven't played it in a couple of years and would like to at some point, though i am massively involved in playing the best game ever invented - linux!