Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Supreme Super Gamer-Big Failure of Linux Games

I am afraid I have to make two negative reports on the trot (not mission critical this time, unlike Dropbox) and this time on Supreme Super Gamer.

After 7 days of download time finally I got this Live DVD in my hand eager to boot up enjoy.
This was on May Day Holiday, quite appropriate for me to enjoy the games when real workers are bashing Bunki Moon on the main high streets of Colombo.

Bunki Moon has become a Punchbag for Political Punchers, I wish somebody make a game of U.N.O on the web with Bunki Moon as the main man of action and I can assure you we will give you 20 million people to both for and against playing the game.

This was quite contrary to the Foreign Minister's assertion.
In my case I took his advise in good stead and want to play some games pass midnight. That was the time the download was over (really on the day after May Holiday) and I could not boot the CD on both computers having less than 100 graphic capability.
It was pass midnight and I had to attend to some work on Monday morning, I went to sleep.
Toady after an evening nap I took the DVD (first double layer gamer in my hand) and booted up with my laptop with 4 GiB RAM but relatively reasonable graphic card capability (IBM).
It booted up but failed to configure X-Windos on root permission.

The kernel in the DVD has two problems.

1. It cannot identify various types of file format of Linux including reserfs.
2. It does not have modules for old and new graphic cards.
3. X-windows even though kernel is new fails.

This is where Linux Developers failed their users (rather customers).
Do not blame Windows for this lapse and I do not think I will download a gamer till next May Day.
I am a professional who has other important work than playing games.
Unfortunately Linux is my home base where I cannot play games with my grandchildren in the backyard, till next Christmas.
Thanks guys ' girls for your interest in Linux games!

Update on Dropbox

I do not like negative comments especially in regard to new enterprises taking effect from the ashes of Phoenix.

This comment is a negative one but it does not belong to the enterprise concerned, the Dropbox.

Dropbox is doing an excellent job to make cloud computing a worthwhile endeavour.

Even if the the service provided is good but the infrastructure below its level of competence is poor like in the third world where download speed of the telecoms are in snail pace activity, I find it difficult to expand on virtues of cloud computing.

I do not have a single photo or any videos in my folders but the Linux Iso image is taking ages to come back to it's home compartment.

I grabbed the idea of cloud computing to exchange Linux images especially new versions to share with my friends all over the globe but it looks like that experiment is going to have a natural but premature death.

All this happened because I formatted my home compartment to install new version of Linux.

I do this annually but this time delayed it for few months due toother important activities related to computing.

Even though I copied everything in the Dropbox to a DVD (again except Linux images) I forgot (deliberate action of mine) to put my files back where they should be.

Once I activated the Dropbox I did not have any control over synchronization.

The Linux image is trying its best to come to its home but the telecoms and its speed is the stumbling block to rapid synchronization.

In future I would delete all the heavy files and let synchronization to take effect and format my home partition if I decide to do so.

If I leave the home partition intact this problem might not happen but formatting home partition to get rid of all junk files is a routine that I use to bypass the failed CRON jobs.

I hope Dropbox gives me some control over hopelessly slow downloads (If I can arrest this automatic synchronization after 24 hours, it will help the Dropbox team too).

Mind you uploads are even slower, so putting a Linux image back into its place is also not an option left for me.

I vaguely remember the Linux image but that is also blessing in disguise.

Point to point download or upload is not an option but something in the make of Torrents is the way forward for Dropbox.

For that to be effective Dropbox needs to have more split servers all over the globe with split images of large files. At least they should offer that service for premium customers who paid for the extra payload in space (I mean cloud space which takes physical space of a server).

Will they go for it, only a wishful thinking of mine, I do not know.