Tink Initialisation

So I’ve had heaps of trouble getting my Mac to do linking stuff. Mac’s ld isn’t the same as ld on linux (and I shouldn’t really expect it to be). So I tried dual booting Ubuntu and that sort of worked, not great but enough. Ubuntu though isn’t really what I want since I find linux isn’t a really good desktop operating system, OS X is. So I looked at VMWare and Parallels and didn’t really want to pay for it. So I looked for alternatives and I am currently trying Sun’s VirtualBox which seems to be going all right. All I want is a terminal to do programming in, I don’t need X or anything like that.

Sun seems to have a decent product (as far as I can tell). VitualBox can be downloaded here.

I also edited /boot/grub/menu.lst and removed the old linux entries and made sure linux-kernel-generic was the first entry.

I’ve found a problem, virutal box doesn’t like the linux kernel within the Ubuntu server install. I had to boot off the cd (after install) into rescue mode and get to the shell. I did apt-get install linux-kernel-generic and then restarted. I have to load the right option from the grub menu after that.

Also there is a page at My Debian about setting up Virtual box so you can ssh into that machine.

Last night I pulled apart my Macbook Pro to upgrade the hard drive. It only took me an hour or so and I cut myself a few times. (I don’t have the right tools but my pocket knife seemed to do the trick).

Today I installed Ubuntu following this GUIDE. However Ubuntu doesn’t work so well. It takes a long time to configure everything and I can’t get my isight to work. Also resuming from suspend doesn’t work.

I’m learning about how to create operating systems. This post is pretty much a place to save my firefox tabs while I switch to my linux machine.

Google Search

http://www.osdev.org/osfaq2/index.php/Introduction

http://www.osdev.org/osfaq2/index.php/BabyStep

http://www.osdever.net/tutorials.php?cat=0&sort=1

http://www.mohanraj.info/josh.jsp

http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/booting_process.php

http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/hello_btldr.php

http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/bochs/bochs.php

http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/brunmar/tutorial_01.php

http://www.osdever.net/downloads.php

Problem: Flash is crap and uses up all my cpu even while I have firefox minimised, in the background or flash content is in another tab. Flash shouldn’t be doing anything if I’m not looking at it.

Solution: Flashblock

Flashblock puts an icon over the place where the flash is supposed to go. You can click this icon to start the flash if you wish.

Games I’ve had on floppy disks years ago which have failed. I must get these back somehow:

• Epic Xargon
• Epic Zone66
• 3D Realms Duke Nukem 1, 2, 3d, MP
• 3D Realms Monster Bash
• 3D Realms Secret Agent
• 3D Realms Crystal Caves
• 3D Realms Halloween Harry
• 3D Realms Word/Math Rescue (Greatest games for kids)
• Creative Writer (This too is great for kids)
• Word Munchers (This Too)
• Paganitzu
• Secret of Mana
• Syndicate
• Math Blaster (This is the best one for kids)
• Prince of Persia 2 

Note to self, look this up for text based game.

I like wordpress but have found a couple of things that annoy me a little. They could be fixed with a bit of effort on my part but I couldn’t be bothered so I’m moving over to Drupal. www.tinkinit.com will direct to the new site when its finished.

I’ve set up a forum on my site, you can access the forum by clicking on the link on the side of the page under TinkInit Pages.

To add comments to other pages in WordPress you need to add the line:

<?php comments_template(); ?>

To your Page Template file. Easiest is to goto the admin section->Presentation->Theme Editor and then select Page Template from the right hand side. Add the line just after the “Edit this entry line” and just before the </div> section.

I’ve just created a blank page for my Game Programming information. It will contain a bunch of info on how to do opengl stuff on Mac and Windows. (Sorry about you *nix guys but I couldn’t be bothered checking it, I’m just going to assume it just works with no changes :P).

The biggest problem I have had with opengl is creating a window, a simple window. I want to have a game that can run on all platforms so I was going to start to write basic window managers for each operating system but gave up when I realised GLUT does it all for you. I’d like to thank NeHe Productions for their tutorials and Video Tutorials Rock for their cube demo which I am using for the basis of my game/s.