The Whole Story

Akamaru is a simple, but fun, physics engine prototype. It is amazing to use, and easy to install. One more reason to forget Windows Vista, embrace Open Source, and use Ubuntu or Fedora.

The dock at the moment kinda works just like the MacOSX dock at the bottom of the screen, and tests the functionality of the Akamaru physics engine nicely.

This looks really great, adds some nice eye candy to the Linux desktop.

This is so great. I’ve been using Linux for about 2-3 years now and I love it, but more recently over the last month or two, I switched from Fedora Core to Ubuntu 5.10 (”Breezy Badger”) and since the two distro’s are pretty different in terms of their package management, getting my internet connection functioning correctly in Ubuntu was a challenge, (a very big unnessesary challenge).

My cable connection requires a login client to access the internet (Telstra Bigpond) and the only implementation of a login client for linux we have is bpalogin which is an open source project integrating the same windows functionality of the client, for linux use.

It ended up being nothing, just my inexperience with Ubuntu which lead to my months of pain lol. All I needed to do is install bpalogin either with the Synaptic package manager or (The way i did it) use apt-get to get the file for installation. Thats where Ubuntu really shines from other distros making software installation a piece of cake. I had configured it all properly but still didn’t work. I read somewhere that the client requires port 5050 to be open on my router, so i forwarded that port, now it all works, and I couldn’t be happier.

I love the stability linux brings and I love not having to worry if windows is about to go crazy on me, and linux distros are looking better and better these days, and there are tons of  gtk themes, wallpapers, icon themes, etc to customize the look and feel to your heart’s content (im using the ‘Gentle’ gtk 2.0 theme and ‘edge’ icons in case u were wondering lol). Most linux users out there know about sites such as http://gnome-look.org and http://kde-look.org but if your new to the linux world and feel like tinkering a bit, go check out those sites, they have heaps of stuff and are pretty cool.

Thanks guys, thought i’d share that with you lol.

Ubuntu Linux in my humble opinion is one of the most user friendly Linux distributions around these days and anybody even remotely interested in switching to Linux should really give it a go. I myself was new to linux and I know first hand how difficult it can get when your first starting out learning something new (especially coming from a strong windows background).

One thing in particular was trying to figure out how to get mp3 playback in Rhythmbox (default ubuntu music player).

Here is the solution:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins

No problem at all was it.