CD writing on Fedora Linux

Fedora Linux provides a selection of tools for writing CDs. k3b and xcdroast with nice graphical user interfaces (GUIs). cdrecord and cdrdao for console users. All of these work just fine and have a number of options to fine tune the process. There are few other tools provided in different repositories which broaden your horizons with this task. For example, Fedora.US repository provides bin2iso and bchunk (both links are two Fedora Linux Core 2 RPMs), which can convert CD images from BIN format to ISO 9660.

WineX 3.3 on Fedora Linux Core 2

Being uterly bored today, I decided to try WineX to run a few games on my home Fedora Linux Core 2 workstation. WineX is a commercial version ($5 USD) of Wine project produced by Transgaming Technologies. WineX is mostly Wine, plus a few goodies, like better support for DirectX.

It seems that Transgaming Technologies website is partially closed for renovation. Including the part of the store where you can buy WineX. So, I searched the web and found a stripped down version of WineX which works on Fedora Linux and a couple of other distributions. It comes in RPM format, so all the installation and configuration thingy is pretty much minimized.

When I tried to run this and that executable I started to get all sorts of debug and error messages. Brief search on Google also provided me with an answer, which, pretty often, was to go to DLL-Files.com website and download this or that file.

Most of the games I tried ran the installation just fine. Everything was installing pretty nice, but I didn’t succeed in actually playing any game except for Sierra’s Half Life. It was getting stuck every other time after accessing main menu, but when it was working – it was perfect. Age of Empires II, Sims, Singles, Colin McRae, Midtown Madness, and a couple of others – all refused to work, reporting problems about unhandled exceptions.

It seems that some people do succeed in playing some of the games I failed, but I am certainly not alone. Overall, I think that the progress is very noticable. Last time I tried Wine/WineX I could only install Counter Strike at best. I have no idea if the commercial versino of WineX is any better, but judging from the impressive list of supported games it must be.

I will try it again later and probably will pay my $5 USD. These guys are doing a great job and they need all the support they can get. Meanwhile, I am back to Quake III Arena and a whole bunch of Linux games.

Hacking Lexicon

Computer people use a lot of terms. Deeper these people are into computers, wider is their computer vocabulary. There are many attempts of computer/hacker/programmer dictionaries on the web. Hacking Lexicon is yet another one. It does have a lot of entries, and it groups terms by the subject nicely. Check it out for any term you are not sure about.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (Taroon) Beta 1 Public Available

From today issue of Linux Weekly News I’ve learned that Red Hat has announced public availability of its Enterprise Linux (code name Taroon) 3 Beta 1. It contains the usual number of updated bits like kernel, Gnome, KDE, and the rest of the software. It supports more platforms and bigger systems this time.

Slashdot will probably mention it too soon.