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ru.linux
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From : Sergey Lentsov 2:4615/71.10 04 Oct 2001 17:57:17
To : All
Subject : URL: http://www.lwn.net/2001/1004/desktop.php3
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[13]All in one big page
See also: [14]last week's On the Desktop page.
Note: An asterisk (*) denotes a proprietary product, (w) denotes WINE
based tools.
Office Suites
[15]Ability (*)(w)
[16]Anywhere Desktop (*)
(formerly "Applixware")
[17]GNOME Office
[18]HancomOffice
[19]KOffice
[20]StarOffice / [21]OpenOffice
[22]Siag Office
[23]WordPerfect Office 2000 (*)(w)
Java / Web Office Suites
[24]ThinkFree Office (*)
[25]Teamware Office (*)
[26]Cybozu Office (*)
Desktop Publishing
[27]AbiWord
[28]iceSculptor (*)
[29]Impress
[30]Maxwell Word Processor
[31]Mediascape Artstream (*)
[32]Scribus
Web Browsers
[33]Mozilla
[34]Netscape (*)
[35]Opera (*)
[36]Konqueror
[37]Galeon
Handheld Tools
[38]KPilot
[39]JPilot
[40]Palm Pilot Resources
[41]Pilot Link
[42]SynCal
On The Desktop
The gamers way. Not long ago we received a simple request from a
reader. A long time Windows user, he decided the switch to XP was not
conducive to maintaining his personal privacy, so he wanted to migrate
to Linux. His main computing requirement: games. Which distribution,
he asked, would be best for playing games?
The answer is that just about any major distribution should work just
fine, a fact that might be surprising to new users but not to long
time Unix diehards. There have always been games for Unix systems,
including the original console based [43]Adventure, the flight
simulator [44]ACM and the venerable [45]Netrek. Yet it is only
recently that professional quality, off-the-shelf games have been mass
marketed for Linux users. Loki was the first company to bring a
selection of existing titles to Linux (while id actually ported Doom
on their own sometime previous to that). Loki still offers the vast
majority of available titles, but they aren't the only one these days,
says Michael Vance of LinuxGames.com. Vance also works for Treyarch,
LLC, a company that has a close working relationship with game maker
Activision.
"Hyperion has two games (Shogo, Sin), Tribsoft has one (Jagged
Alliance 2), Vicarious Visions has one (Terminus), and Loki has 19."
Vance, who worked as a lead programmer on various Linux ports at Loki
between June 1999 and January 2001, says that other companies did some
of their own porting work to Linux, then handed the projects over to
Loki. "Companies like id and Vicarious Visions have done work
internally," he said. "id later handed that work off to Loki, then
that contract expired. Companies like Epic used Linux as a testing
ground for their [PlayStation 2] development, then handed maintenance
to Loki," but that contract has also expired he said. Other companies
porting games to Linux include [46]Introversion, and [47]Illwinter.
Proprietary games on Linux primarily run natively either as OpenGL or
SDL based applications. Some games like [48]Unreal Tournament use SDL
to access OpenGL directly. Using OpenGL allows games to make use of 3D
hardware acceleration, providing better game play through faster
graphics. This hardware acceleration is a new thing for the Linux
world, having become readily available only within the past year or so
from both the [49]XFree86 project and commercially through [50]Xi
Graphics.
Alternatively, players can try their hand by running games under
[51]WineX, a DirectX-enhanced implementation of the WINE environment.
While WINE already supports DirectX, WineX aims to improve on that
support. Unfortunately, success along this route is less than stellar.
One of the editors from [52]evil3D, who prefers to be called Avatar to
maintain a separate identity from his day job, says he's had little
luck working with WineX. "I can hardly get Solitaire to run under
WineX. And I'm happy to leave it at that." He adds that despite his
own failures, the WineX project developers seem to be having a lot of
luck with DirectX support. The other major Windows-under-Linux
solutions don't fare any better. VMWare reports that they provide
[53]limited support for DirectX (and thus games) while [54]Win4Lin
doesn't handle DirectX at all.
Native ports vs DirectX issues aside, the choice of a Linux
distribution isn't a serious problem. Vance says only cutting edge
distributions might pose obstacles, but even that isn't likely.
"Ancient distributions had a hard time with games because of glibc 2.0
and a few other older libraries. Bleeding edge distributions, such as
Debian's "unstable" branch, have also proven difficult at times." He
suggests using a distribution that has been available in a stable
release for a couple of months. A current Red Hat, SuSE or
Mandrake-Linux, for example, should work with most games. That's
because most games, though not all, are delivered with all the
libraries on which they are dependent. Says Vance, "It depends on the
game, and usually whether it is a commercial product or not. Almost
all commercial games come with every library they require. To my
knowledge, none (other than the old Quake 1 and 2 rebundles) come in
RPM or .deb formats. Most install using Setup, a nice GUI installer
that Loki developed."
Though most of the major distributions should work, you may still find
a few "gotchas" for particular games. The biggest problem comes from
getting a video card with the right kind of X server support. Vance
notes that it depends on the card in question, and the version of
XFree86 you're using. "Pre-XFree86 4.x support for the 3Dfx cards was
fairly decent, and post-XFree86 4.x support for the ATI and Matrox
cards has been pretty good." He says that to his knowledge most 3D
gaming on Linux today happens using the NVIDIA and ATI Radeon cards.
"NVIDIA has a binary-only driver that is exceptionally fast and
robust," he added. Support for joysticks is good but there is little,
if any, support for force-feedback devices.
Sound under Linux is sufficient for most games. Hardware environmental
effects such as those found in the SB Live! adapters and in the EAX
library which supports such hardware is still lacking, though the
[55]OpenAL project has been slowly moving towards that direction.
With all those commercial games running under Linux you might wonder
if open source alternatives can compete. Evil3D posted an
[56]interview of TribSoft founder Mathieu Pinard, who said he doesn't
think so.
If you would see the amount of code that the games done in the last
few years, I don't think we could imagine the Open Source community
putting out 5-10 complete quality games per year. Of course, feel
free to prove me wrong, and I hope nobody will take this as an
insult. It's just no longer possible to make games in your garage
that will compete against the latest closed source games.
Vance agrees, but says there are some nice alternatives. "Open source
games are usually cheap remakes of old arcade games. Within that
arena, the best is probably [57]FreeCiv, a very nice reimplementation
of Civilization II. I'll also plug [58]gltron for Andreas Umbach, an
acquaintance of mine. But nothing out there is going to rival even
five year old commercial games. A friend of mine maintains that
[59]Nethack is the only high-quality open source game available. I
think Nethack is a bit of a stretch for modern gamers, though.
[60]Chromium BSU is also a nice little arcade game."
The problem with open source games is abandonment. The Linux Game Tome
has started posting games that are listed as [61]missing in action,
noting game developers and/or their web sites that seem to have
disappeared. Open source games don't get the dedication from their
developers necessary to reach professional quality (this isn't
suprising at the application level in open source, and is really not
reflective of the lower level kernel world). Vance says it takes a lot
of people working together to reach that point. "Only in very rare
exceptions, such as with FreeCiv, can a large group of people come
together and collaboratively build a game. Game programmers aren't
usually the most friendly and sociable sort, and the splintering and
fragmenting of numerous little game projects is of little surprise."
He goes on to say that the art requirements for games are much higher
than for traditional open source projects. Producing art is not the
forte of open source developers, and even solid GUI design is, at
times, a stretch.
"Linux lacks a continually refreshing pool of interesting games," he
adds. "Companies like Loki have done a pretty good job in the past but
it remains to be seen, given their present financial hardships,
whether that will continue. The market is small, thus there is little
incentive to make/port games. Because of this, the market is slow to
grow. The problem is a hard one."
Most sales of commercial games are web based at places like
[62]TuxGames and [63]ebGames . However, the latter is exiting the
Linux business because they say there is no market there. They've been
selling off their stock of Linux games, most of which are Loki titles
but also a few others, for less than $10 each.
But this really shouldn't suprise anyone familiar with the general
gaming market. Linux sales shouldn't be compared with Windows, says
Vance. "I don't know if you've looked at PC sales figures lately, but
it's very hard to be profitable in the PC games business. Companies
like Activision have seen their profitability increase enormously
transitioning their business to the [game] console arena. The market
is much larger. Thus Linux has to not only overcome Windows gaming,
but a stagnating, almost exclusively hit-driven PC game market. Not an
easy task."
Loki is currently in Chapter 11, attempting to get their finances in
order. Word is they've paid off what was owed to programmers, but
haven't addressed all their other debts yet. For now, the company is
stable enough to continue. It's hard to tell if contracts lost
recently from id Software and others have dealt them a fatal blow.
Only time will tell.
For now, however, games are an integral part of the Linux desktop.
Despite commercial failures, the porting of games is one of the true
Linux success stories.
________________________________________________________
Recent Commercial Game Releases
* [64]Uplink
* [65]Dominions
* [66]Conquest of Elysuim
* [67]Soul Ride (rumored to be in porting development
GPL Games
* [68]Geki series
* [69]Chromium B.S.U.
* [70]TuxKarta
* [71]CircusLinux
Other sites of note
[72]New Breed Software has 13 or so GPL games for the Linux platform
and has recently started working on games for the Agenda VR3 PDA.
[73]LinuxGames.com
[74]TuxGames.com
[75]evil3D.net
[76]Linux Game Tome
[77]DRI based 3D video card support
________________________________________________________
StarOffice 6.0 Beta hits the streets. Sun delivered the [78]official
announcement on the StarOffice 6.0 beta this week. This is the first
release of the much anticpated version without the extra desktop
features built in.
We downloaded the huge binary to give it a quick test. The
installation is very clean, it even noticed that we'd forgotten to
grab the extra Adabas package. Installation takes about 5 minutes and
requires only limited configuration information from the user. Red Hat
users may find the option to install a Sun blessed Java installation
refreshing. Or maybe not. To each his own.
While this new release is very welcome, it didn't take long to crash
it. Interested in the one feature we've seen next to no support for
under Linux - text along a curve - we opened up the FontWorks tool
under the Drawing tool. Text along a curve is very simple to use, but
in an attempt to find a way to rotate the bounding box of the rounded
text (while incorrectly using the selection handles) we managed to
bring StarOffice to a halt, hung in mid move while we searched for a
command line to kill the session.
Despite this early problem, most other features seemed to be very
stable, though we hardly gave it a thorough test. Performance was
modestly improved and the interface feels more like users will expect
from their office applications. Most interesting of all is the
apparent support for XP format files, from Word to Excel to
PowerPoint. LWN.net doesn't use Microsoft products so we couldn't test
that support, but it's obvious that Sun sees a distinct need for file
format compatibility between office applications.
Users of Ximian's GNOME desktop will find some solace in knowing that
this beta installs in a user defined directory quite nicely, thereby
avoiding the 5.2 installation provided through Ximian's Red Carpet.
That said, you have to manually configure the GNOME desktop's menus to
access the new version. StarOffice only seems to update the KDE menus
during the beta installation.
Earlier in the week, [79]The Register covered the StarOffice 6.0
release, prior to our testing. "The new version does away with the
much-hated integrated desktop, saves files as XML, and has improved
language support."
Linux-based GUIs: a perspective (ZDNet). A Gartner study posted to
ZDNet does a [80]detailed analysis of the Linux desktop space,
comparing KDE and GNOME to the traditional Unix desktop provided by
CDE. "For more widespread desktop use, Linux faces hurdles. A new,
albeit intuitive, user interface may be among the least of these. Even
ordinary users can assimilate the differences between a Macintosh
desktop and Windows desktop, and Microsoft itself is introducing
changes with Windows XP. Distribution, support, availability of
peripherals and application readiness is a greater challenge." Despite
referring to the ORB component in GNOME as "Bonomo", the report is one
of the better analyses we've seen on the Linux desktop.
Desktop Environments
Ximian Setup Tools, Control Center updates Ximian has released new
versions of their [81]Ximian Setup Tools (aka XST) and [82]Control
Center.
Ximian adds new channels, but stays away from Linux distributions If
you haven't been paying attention, Ximian's Red Carpet is showing
signs of how that company might be making money in the future: by
adding software management for third parties. In the past couple of
weeks Red Carpet has added channels for StarOffice, Loki, VMWare and
CodeWeavers. The StarOffice channel currently supports the 5.2 release
but expect to see it bumped to 6.0 once that version becomes solid.
VMWare and Loki are offering versions which need license keys (VMWare)
or just come in demo form (Loki). CodeWeavers is providing their own
version of WINE, the Windows under Linux environment. This is probably
a first step in later providing their newly announced Crossover plugin
which, it is said, will provide support to Netscape for Shockwave and
QuickTime under Linux.
Despite channel support for particular distributions, Ximian has said
on many occasions that it isn't interested in getting into developing
and shipping their own Linux distribution. That doesn't mean, however,
that clever souls won't figure out a way to do it for the company,
even if the work doesn't have an official blessing from Ximian. The
[83]Unofficial Unsupported Ximianized ISO Images project aims to
provide ISO images (i.e. something you can burn to a CD for
installation) of various Linux distributions with Ximian's GNOME
added. So far they only support Red Hat 7.1, but work is underway on
Debian with Mandrake planned for the future.
GNOME 2 technology preview release. The first [84]technology preview
release of GNOME 2 is now available. Many changes are expected for
GNOME 2, however this release is not intended for end users,
especially since it cannot be installed parallel to existing stable
GNOME environments.
Two New DCOP Tutorials (KDE Dot News). KDE Dot News reports that
[85]two new tutorials on programming with DCOP have been made
available on the KDE Developer site. The first one, titled
[86]Creating a DCOP Interface, covers the API for instantiating a
simple DCOP application. The second article, titled [87]Automation of
KDE2, discusses the use of scripting to access an applications DCOP
interface.
Office Applications
Linux Magazine names Evolution best Email Client. Ximian announced
this past week that their Evolution package was named the [88]Best
Graphical Email Client by Linux Magazine.
AbiWord Weekly News and a new release. The big news this week for the
[89]AbiWord project is the announcement of a new release: [90]version
0.9.4. Some of the key updates in this release include a highly
improved spell checker, better XHTML export support and various Styles
updates.
Also from the AbiWord front: After publishing 2 issues last week,
Jesper Skov has been busy once again, producing 3 new issues of the
AbiWord Weekly News. All three new issues, [91]Issue 60, [92]Issue 61,
and [93]Issue 62 are pre-0.4.9 and carry information leading up to
that release.
Desktop Applications
Sodipodi 0.24. A new release of the GNOME vector art tool [94]Sodipodi
has been released. This version includes improved linear gradients,
many stability and internal bug fixes, and the start of an XInput
caligraphic pen tool. It also support SVG better, including
Illustrator exported SVG files.
pim.kde.org back online. News went out this week that the [95]KDE PIM
web site went back online. Most of the changes will revolve around
developer updates, with the section on PIM-apps staying static for a
while.
And in other news...
Qt3.0 Beta 6. TrollTech has released [96]another beta of the Qt3.0
widget set. This release has had the QCom module removed after
feedback showed the API to be less compact and intuitive than the rest
of Qt.
Linuxlookup.com speaks with KDE Chairman. LinuxLookup.com interviews
the [97]Chairman of the KDE League, Andreas Pour. "This revolutionary
approach to development permits individuals from all around the globe
to coordinate and cooperate in design and development, with decisions
reached purely on the quality of the code being contributed. Unlike
many other projects, KDE does not have a "charismatic leader" or a
company behind the project. Instead, development decisions are made on
development lists, in view of the world, and development sponsorship
comes from a broad coalition of individual companies."
Section Editor: [98]Michael J. Hammel
October 4, 2001
Note: An asterisk (*) denotes a proprietary product, (w) denotes WINE
based tools.
Desktop Environments
[99]GNOME
[100]GNUstep
[101]KDE
[102]XFce
Window Managers (WM's)
[103]Afterstep
[104]Enlightenment
[105]FVMW2
[106]IceWM
[107]Sawfish
[108]WindowMaker
Minimalist Environments
[109]Blackbox
Widget Sets
[110]GTK+
[111]Qt
Desktop Graphics
[112]CorelDRAW (*)(w)
[113]GIMP
[114]Kontour
[115]Photogenics (*)
[116]Sketch
Windows on Linux
[117]WINE
[118]Win4Lin
[119]VMWare
Kids S/W
[120]Linux For Kids
Send link submissions to [121]lwn@lwn.net
[122]Next: Development
[123]Eklektix, Inc. Linux powered! Copyright Л 2001 [124]Eklektix,
Inc., all rights reserved
Linux (R) is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
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URL: http://www.lwn.net/2001/1004/desktop.php3 |
Sergey Lentsov |
04 Oct 2001 17:57:17 |
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