Computer culture

As you may have heard, the WINE-project, which let's you run Windows programs in Linux, released it's first beta version after a long time.
I've been a demoscener for a long time, while with my switch to linux some years ago, I couldn't watch most demos any more (and having a windows partition just because of that was too much hassle, I like my laptop windows-free).

Today I was playing around how well WINE performs with Demos and was quite impressed. My experiences in the past were mostly that WINE only produces error messages and never runs anything. After DasTier (still not blogging) told me that probably my sound settings are wrong and I have to set it to "driver emulation" in winecfg, I could run a couple of older windows-demos and intros, I had at least The Product (FarbRausch), Kötterdämmerung (SquoQuo), Störfall Ost (Freestyle) and Raving Tomatoes - Biomutating Planet Acid running (just some random ones I tried out).
I failed to run more recent stuff, at first because my graphics hardware won't manage that (just a Radeon 9200) and second because of the limited shader support in WINE.

Motivated by that, I also could run the legendary Second Reality (Future Crew) (hey, did you know that it has a hidden part?) in DosBox.

I'm thinking about creating a project for building a database of working demos and writing qualified bug-reports/patches for non-working ones.

Auf der Hobby & Elektronik Messe in Stuttgart gibt es seit Jahren einen Bereich von Computerclubs. Dieses Jahr wird die LUG Stuttgart dort eine Reihe von Vorträgen unter dem Motto "Linux zum selber ausprobieren" halten.
Ich werde dort morgen (Sonntag) um 15 Uhr einen Vortrag unter dem Titel "Linux Next Generation" halten, wo ich einige aktuelle und zukünftige Entwicklungen auf dem Linux-Desktop präsentieren werde. Die Vortragsfolien gibt es dann nach dem Vortrag unter http://www.int21.de/slides/.

Update: Slides jetzt online, als OpenDocument, als PDF.

Some years ago I started the webpage dosdriver.de, cause I permanently had problems running old DOS games and demos, the lack of proper VESA-support, missing sound drivers and things like that. I forgot to upload this again when I moved all my webpages to our little server project, so it was offline for the last months.
I noticed when the free-domain-provider I'm hosting dosdriver.de mailed me that I'm violating their AGB if I don't use the domain for a real webpage. Today I took the page from a backup, removed old eMail-adresses, made xhtml 1.1, added a small section about emulators and some general rework. Most of the information is still valid, so if you intend to run a real DOS on some up-to-date PC, you might find it useful.
The domain is still a free-domain with ads, but as most of you probably have popup-blockers, you won't mind.

Everybody seems to talk about flock today (via BoingBoing). Flock is a web browser based on Firefox supporting features like direct tagging of links, uploading them to del.icio.us, blogging, uploading images to flickr and things like that.

It's surely a nice idea to integrate all those social software into easy to use applications, so more people get to know blogs and all that stuff. Although I'm a bit sceptically about centralised services like flick or del.icio.us, I prefere more standardised, decentralized services that everyone can use with his own software (Blogs, Podcasts and things like that).

I'd prefer to blog this entry with flock, but it seems not to support serendipity yet, at least I couldn't get it to work.

Get Flock today, probably no distribution packages for anything yet, but the binary just works when running from it's unpacked dir without installing anything.

Wie ich heute erfahren durfte, laufen die Beamboards am Stuttgarter Hauptbahnhof mit BeamCon 2.04, außerdem läuft die Lampe schon über 2000 Stunden und noch einige andere Debugging-Informationen sind zu erfahren.