I want to apologise for taking so long to release Episode 103. This week was a combination of long hours at work, family commitments, some unforeseen events I had to attend, and to make matters worse, Audacity decided to eat my project file for the show. With the help of Ubuntu Studio I was at least able to get Ardour running and to learn enough to edit the rest of the show using that. More on those adventures in a future show, suffice it to say for now that I will be switching to Ardour for producing the podcast from here on out. At least all of this gave me the chance to finally get my arse in gear and start learning how to use it (I had meant to do that for ages now).

I hope you enjoy the show despite the wait. The news might be slightly stale content by now but as usual, Dan and I had great fun recording this episode and if nothing else it should at least be funny. Once again, we are sorry for the inconvenience of the late release. There will also be no rest for the wicked and we plan to record 104 today at 18:00 UTC so be sure to catch the live show on ustream. If you can’t make it, Dan will edit this one so it should be out a lot more quickly then this week’s release…

Hey, everyone! I’m back with an update concerning the next few weeks and some very cool news. As we have mentioned a lot on the show already, Dan will be flying down to Germany on Saturday and we will spend most of the next week in Berlin at Linux Tag. We wil record a regular episode on Monday, but we will not stream it live. It will also not be released on Wednesday, since we’ll be busy geeking out and drinking beer in the capital. We will, however, record special content up there, so look for a flurry of activity in your podcatcher in the week starting on the 29th. All of this will mess up our schedule a bit and the Springsteen concert on the 3rd of July that I have tickets for as well as the Rheinkultur festival in Bonn the day after won’t help either, but we should be back on track during the second week of July. I hope all the extra content we’ll hopefully get out of all of this will be worth the disruption.

But now to something completely different: You might have heard Outlaws community member and resident music professor Jonathan Kulp announce in his audio feedback to us from Episode 96 that he was working on an arrangement of the Linux Outlaws theme tune, Sudo Modprobe, for classical guitar. Well, he’s done it already. How cool is that! Now, it’s been ages since I’ve played proper notes, but it looks awesome and the midi file he send us already shows how much intrinsic detail he put into the arrangement. I am really, really stoked about this and can’t wait for his recording; I can already promise you now that you will hear it on the show when we get it. Most definitely! It is totally amazing what Dan and Jon have done to the aweful little tune I hacked together at the beginning of all of this. This stuff is why I can justify spending 8+ hours each week working on the podcast and the many more I invest in growing the community around the show. Thank you very much, Jon! This is one of the coolest LO-related gifts we have ever received, I think. Although beer parcels are always up there as well, of course.

If you are interested in Jon’s work so far, all licensed CC BY-SA of course, here’s the Lilypond source file and a compiled PDF document. You can also listen to a preliminary midi version of the arrangement but please use that as a preview (and maybe to experiment around with it) only since it’s not a proper recording and doesn’t sound like a real song yet. Anyway, have fun trying to play this awesome version, all you wannabe Roy Buchanans.

Just a quick post to draw your attention to two excellent blog posts that Dan posted recently (in case you haven’t seen them already): Yesterday, he published a great opinion piece on the European Parliament’s motion to extend sound copyright even further into the future including a video of a speech given by Becky Hogge at these proceedings. This is definitely worth a read! He also finally released his mammut Sabayon 4 review which we hinted at in Episode 78 — this might be the most scathing review Dan has ever written. Well, for Dan standards, anyway.

With this, I’ll leave you to enjoy your weekend. I myself will probably spend it checking out Jaunty and playing lots of Fallout 3. We will most likely record the next show on Monday evening (CET) — so if you want to catch it live, feel free to stop by.

Last night, Dan and I did a little experiment. We attempted to stream the recording of Episode 78 live on ustream.tv — “attempted” is the right word, because I discovered that both the webcams I tried with my Eee PC would invariably cut out after a few minutes.  We managed  to stream the audio feed of the whole show though, I guess that’s something. Because this was highly experimental, we only announced it in our IRC channel (#linuxoutlaws on irc.freenode.net) and on the Linux Outlaws group on identi.ca. In the end we got about 34 viewers, which isn’t bad considering we didn’t advertise it at all before going on the air.

Streaming the making of the show live is something I wanted to do for quite some time and we had many requests from listeners to do it. I will try to get the webcam issues sorted out for the next recording session (probably on Monday) and we’ll take it from there. If people keep saying they like this sort of thing, I am definitely happy to keep doing it. As long as it doesn’t detract from the audio podcast version of the show at all — and in contrast to Leo Laporte, I really mean this. Anyway, please feel free to tell us what you think of this idea in the comments or the forums. We appreciate your feedback a lot and always take it into account.  Right now, we will only stream video from my end I think, but you can of course hear Dan’s audio over the stream. Maybe you guys & gals can persuade him to stick his mug up on camera one day as well…

Oh, and one last thing: We will be calling this little venture Linux Outlaws Live (or LOL for short). That acronym is way to tempting not to use it.

Update: I have set up a preliminary page at /live where you can watch the stream when it goes on the air. We will announce air times in our identi.ca group since we don’t have a specific schedule for recording yet.

Lenny Is Looming

Hey folks, just wanted to update you on what’s happening with the show and also give you a sneak peek at what you can expect in episode 77. We recorded the show tonight and it went really well I thought, it was packed, man was it packed. There was so much content cram in we had more stuffing than a Bernard Matthews turkey and we still managed it in about 80mins. So what can you expect to hear this week? Well for this I have to break out the bullet points so stand back everyone, nobody tries to be a hero and nobody gets hurt:

• We spare a thought for our brothers and sisters Down Under, we’re thinking of you
• All the usual releases, will there be another mention of SystemRescueCD? You’ll have to listen to find out
• More news than you can shake a stick at, no matter how big it is
• A full Microwatch section with some added gaming news
• An interview with Debian Project Leader Steve McIntyre about the release of Lenny
• Fab reviews Cruncheee on his eeePC and also the new revision of Crunchbang 8.10.02
• We discuss the future of linuxoutlaws.net and ask for your input
• We have a full mail bag as ever, will there be an Aussie accent? Again you’ll have to listen and see
• We play a great public domain song by a famous band you wouldn’t expect, trust me it’s a cracker

All this in 80mins or so, that’s not bad going. Hopefully the show will be out this Sunday,  it needs a fair bit of work and Fab has a big party on Saturday night so he’ll probably be wrecked but you didn’t hear that from me ok? Hope you all enjoy it and we’ll be back next week with even more new stuff, I’m not exactly sure what yet but as usual we keep rolling like Cypress Hill on a tour of Holland.

Take care everyone, see you soon

Dan

Just a quick heads-up to let you all know we just released Episode 75 which is our interview with Miguel de Icaza. It’s over an hour long, so we made it a special episode. I think it turned out really well and as Dan said after editing it, it might well be the difinitive interview with the man. OK, enough touting our own horn here, I already have enough delusions of grandeur as it stands.

Fire up your podcatcher, check out the episode and then tell us what you think of it. Enjoy!

Hey folks, just wanted to update you all on what we’ve been doing in the last week or two for the show. As you might have guessed from the title of this post the schedule’s gotten a bit messed up lately. We’ve never really had a strict release schedule and in the early days we just released the show whatever day it happened to be ready, it was different every week. I never worried about it much as I figured it’s a podcast, people will get it when it hits the RSS feed. That was until Lugradio Live last year where people kept coming up and asking me “what day does the show come out?”. Since then we’ve tried to release on a Sunday or Monday more consistently in the hope that it sets people up for the week. We hit this target most of the time but every so often things get backed up and with one thing and another we get off schedule. This is where we find ourselves now, somewhere way off the schedule and nearer to the grass verge Recording and editing about 80mins of audio every week can be quite a strain at times but between us we usually manage it and I’m certainly not complaining, I love doing the show and I love even more that other people seem to enjoy listening to it. If we can bring a smile to one person’s face then that satisfies me greatly. So here’s what’s happened in the last couple of weeks.

We recorded some extra content whilst we were doing episode 72 and that became an extra episode about Mythbuntu (73). The plan was to release 73 in the middle of last week and keep to the weekend releases as normal. Unfortunately we didn’t quite manage that and things got pushed back, we ended up releasing episode 74 just last Thursday night, a couple of days ago. Originally ep 74 was meant to be our extended interview with Miguel De Icaza but unfortunately he had to reschedule and we recorded a normal show instead. Last night (Friday) we recorded a very long and I think interesting interview with Miguel where we discussed his feelings about Microsoft, the whole Novell deal, patent issues surrounding Mono and much much more. It finished up at about 75mins in total and we decided to make this episode 75. I need to edit it a little, add music, sprinkle in some prerecorded bits and do all the usual production work that entails. I expect we’ll release the show on Tuesday probably. Following that I hope we can get back to our normal weekend releases and get back into our rhythm. I notice with a lot of podcasts and I’m not talking specifically about Linux one here but all podcasts in general, the main issue they run into is a lack of shows or lack of content. Gaps between shows get longer, releases are delayed. I’ve even heard some people call this phenomena “podburn”, I’m not sure if that qualifies as a real word but to me it just sounds more like the name of a small Scottish town. Maybe the sight of a battle, the battle of Podburn. In the 16 months or so we’ve been doing this that’s never happened to us and in fact we normally tend to have the opposite problem, too much content and not enough time to release it all. So I guess I should be thankful for that and long may it continue.

Right, that should be everyone up to date now with recent events in Linux Outlaws Land (what a truely disappointing theme park that would make) so move along there’s nothing to see here, go on clear off. I hope you enjoy episode 75 when it hits the net and thanks for listening, reading, contributing and ranting in our general direction. We appreciate it

Just a quick note wishing you all a happy holiday and a good start into the new year. I am leaving for my parents’ place in Duisburg tomorrow and after a quick stopover back home to release the final episode for 2008, I will be on my way to the Netherlands to spend the “time between years” in Zeeland like I did last year. I hope to see all of you refreshed and ready for more Linux Outlaws action in 2009!

Remember, we will skip the first week of 2009 but will be right back in the swing of things around the 10th, so stay subscribed to those feeds!

In this article, I describe how to get Spore running in Linux with a patched and custom-compiled version of Wine. I’ve been enjoying this game quite a lot lately and wanted to share my method for getting it to work on a penguin powered machine. It was a bit of hacking to figure it all out (especially for a compile-n00b like me) but the resulting howto should be easy enough to follow. I hope this helps a few people. We will also talk about this on Episode 54 of the show which should be released in the next few days.

Disclaimer
To get Spore to work in Linux, you currently have to break the game’s DRM because it does not work with Wine using a so called “no-DVD crack”. This may be illegal in your jurisdiction and I cannot accept any responsibility for anyone doing so. As far as I know (and I am certainly no lawyer) it is currently not illegal to do so here in Germany.

Reference System
I used a Dell XPS m1330 laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GBs of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS graphics card for this howto. The machine is running Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” and I am using the nvidia-glx-new driver provided by Ubuntu.

What to Expect
On the aforementioned system, Spore runs with about 95% quality compared to Windows. Basically, everything works minus the build-in DRM and the most advanced shadow and lighting effects. All the online features seem to work perfectly as far as I can tell. It also probably runs a bit faster than on Windows due to the fact that the OS itself has a lighter overall resource footprint.

Prerequisites
If you currently have any version of Wine installed, uninstall it completely taking care to rename your current .wine folder (i.e. to .wine-old) before you do so.

Having gotten all this out of the way, we get to the meat of it. Here’s what I did to get the game to run in Linux (it should work for you as well although you might need to modify certain things if you are using an ATI/AMD video card or if you’re not on Ubuntu):

1. Make sure you have the following packages installed before you start:
   # aptitude install libgl1-mesa-dev x11proto-gl-dev libasound2-dev
   At least these were the packages I had to install in Hardy to get Wine to compile with OpenGL and ALSA support (crucial if you want to get the game to run at all and with sound as well).
2. Grab the latest Wine source (1.1.4, at the time of writing) from the official download site
3. Extract the source tarball to its own directory, cd to that directory
4. Download this patch to the Wine source and rename it to spore.patch
5. cd into the wine-x.x.x subfolder with the actual source
6. Apply the patch by issuing the following command:
   $ patch -p1 < ../spore.patch
7. If the patching was successful, compile and install Wine with the following command:
   $ tools/wineinstall
   Make yourself a sandwich and some coffee, because the compiling may take a while depending on how fast your CPU is (it took roughly 20 minutes on my 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo). When Wine asked me if I wanted to install the compiled version to my system, I answered “yes” and consequently had to enter my root password before the installation stage. If you do not want to install the patched version permanently, answer “no”.
8. Install Spore with the installer from the CD and cancel the DirectX install popup. The install should finish normally. If Wine hangs a bit, leave it to do its thing for a few minutes.
9. Crack Spore’s stupid DRM (see disclaimer up top!).
10. Start the game with the provided Wine launcher or by going to the game’s Sporebin directory and typing $ wine SporeApp.exe in the terminal. Enjoy!

If you follow these steps, it should be pretty straightforward to get the game to run on your system. And don’t be afraid of the patching & compiling, it sounds scarier than it is. I did it all in a coffee shop on a half-full laptop battery. Just make sure you back up all your other Wine games and the whole .wine config folder before you do this…

If you have any questions or run into trouble, please post something in this forum topic and I will try to help you as much as I can. You can also ask me for help in #linuxoutlaws on irc.freenode.net whenever I’m in there.