Free open source games that I actually want to play are few and far between. Then there is Wesnoth.

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme.

Build up a great army, gradually turning raw recruits into hardened veterans. In later games, recall your toughest warriors and form a deadly host against whom none can stand! Choose units from a large pool of specialists, and hand-pick a force with the right strengths to fight well on different terrains against all manner of opposition.

The art is wonderful and the game play and story are captivating. Available on more operating systems than you can probably name, hours of free entertainment to be had from the the multiple campaigns that are available.

So of course I tried to get it running on my Eee PC.

Initially I had terrible problems with the resolution, font size, sprite size, tiles, all of it seemed messed up. I was trying to compile the stable branch.

I tried the development branch and ended up with a whole other set of issues.

My entire adventure can be seen in this thread over at the wesnoth forums.

Turns out not all the fixes for smaller screens were back ported to the stable branch, and the dev branch’s image resize script was broken, so nothing was actually getting resize when compiled with –tinygui.

They released a new version the next day and it works just fine now.

Still a bit tiny, but very much worth it.

So yeah, if you’re looking for a great game to play on your Eee, go for Wesnoth. You’ll have to compile from source however, just grab the dev brach and ./configure –enable-tinygui.

UPDATE:

I suppose in my haste to finish this post, I neglected to mention the build dependencies.

Prior to compiling you’ll need to make sure you have the required development libraries installed. First off, you’ll need to add the debian repositories to your sources.list file. Don’t let that scare you off, I wrote a friendly tutorial for that type of thing here. We need to add a source repository in addition to the ones mentioned in that post. Once we have access to some source packages, getting the appropriate development libraries installed should be a piece of cake. So, following the same procedure, add the following line to your sources.list.

deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

Next, open up a console (ctrl+alt+t) and type in:

sudo apt-get build-dep wesnoth

That will pull down all the stuff required to build wesnoth. There are a few more things we need to install to get the development branch of the code working on the EeePC however. One of these they decided not to mention on the wesnoth pages, which was quite a pisser when I was trying to get this working, and that is the imagemagick package, which is used when compiling with –tinygui to resize the images.

Some of the stuff in the following line may not be needed for it to compile, and I don’t have a machine to test it on right now. The first part (python-dev) you may be able to omit and have yourself some space on your EeePC. Same thing goes for libboost.

Try this:

sudo apt-get install libboost-iostreams-dev imagemagick

And then give it a try. If you get errors give this one a try:

sudo apt-get install python-dev libboost-iostreams1.33.1 libboost-iostreams-dev imagemagick

Then do your ./configure, make, make install.

I hope that helps, if anyone experiences problems with that please let me know in the comments.

Taking cues from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and movies like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, and SwordFish, Uplink from Introversion Software is an amazing “hacker sim” that brings to life the campy hollywood concept of hacking we often see on the big screen.

…

Your trace tracker is beeping like crazy as you’re bouncing your signal all over the planet to avoid being caught as you hack away at a corporate firewall, intent on destroying a database as outlined in a contract from a shady employer. Sweat beads on your forehead as a storm of packets fly by. Bypass the firewall, wipe the database, remember to delete the logs! BEEP BEEP BEEP! Time is running out! Hurry, the trace almost has you pinned down! Hurry it’s-

…

Anyway, I love this game.

One of the great things about Introversion software, is that they simultaneously release all their games on all 3 major OSs. We’ve got Windows, Mac, and Linux, right out of the gates. Pretty damn nice for “The last of the bedroom programmers”. Uplink costs $20, but you can also get it in a 3 pack containing the other amazing games these guys make, Darwinia and Defcon, for $40. Go buy em. Now.

So, what we’re interested in here is the Linux release, and how perfectly it runs on my EeePC. I’ve also tried the other 2 mentioned above, but since the Eee has no graphics card, they aren’t any sort of usable.

Basically you’ll want to unzip the linux version to a location of your choosing, download the latest patch and install it. Then you may need the code card, depending on where you got the game. At this point it should be ready to run, and it should run flawlessly.

One of the things I really dig about this game is that there is out of game content that you need to “hack” to get access to, the game extends beyond the executable. Just as an example, you need to decrypt a series of images using a hex editor so you can get more info from them and move onto the next challenge. There was additional content to be hacked on the bonus CD which you can’t really get anymore, but has been made available here. Also there is a developers CD available containing the source for Uplink, which has led to all kinds of user made mods and expansions for the game.

Uplink does it all just right, and with a tag line of “Trust is a weakness”, it really brings the paranoid campy fake hacking of the movies to life.

A public demo of Renoise is now available for Linux. I love this tracker, especially for beat slicing madness, and I’m very excited to see a Linux release. It’s something like 50 euros to buy the full version.

Now, hopefully I can get it running on my Eee, and not run into the kind of issues I had with window size while working with wesnoth.

I’ll let ya’ll know how it goes.

UPDATE: So, as it turns out it the minimum window size for renoise is 990 x 700, which presents a slight problem on my 800×480 Eee PC…

So aside from being rather cramped on my tiny new toy, we are still looking at a fully functional tracker for Linux. We’re talking ALSA and JACK support for MIDI and sound routing excellence, aswell as support for both LADSPA plugins and native Linux VSTs(link to renoise forum listing currently functional ones, also check out jucetice). So, overall I suggest you pick this thing up and go play around with it since you can finally enjoy it’s /massive greatness/ under Linux. Actually if you’ve never used it you should give it a try no matter what OS you’ve got running, you may come to love it’s unique approche to music making, especially if you’re a techie and a musician.

Aside from Linux, there’s been a variety of additions and and bug fixes in the 1.9.1 release, including a great “Draw Mode” in the sample editor that you can use to quickly edit out pops and clicks in your samples (or however you want to change them), as well as the ability to create new samples on the fly by drawing thier waveforms.

There are a few bugs lingering in the Linux version, but it mostly seems to be with multichannel sound cards and ALSA. Also there are a few things I’d like to see added, namely DSSI support for native Linux synths, better integration with the Jack transport, and the ability to load mp3s. Then again this is just a beta.

Overall I give this a rating of awesome sauce or, if you perfer, sawesome.

Anthony from freshplastic recently asked if I could provide a rough guide to installing Hydrogen, a free drum machine for linux on his EeePC. This has inspired me to post a HOWTO on getting additional applications installed on your EeePC without actually wiping out the default installation, etc.

First off I should state my assumptions:

• You’ve got an EeePC with the default “easy mode” installation intact
• You’re connected to the internet
• You’ve got enough space to actually install stuff
• You can type
• You can read

Ok, so with that out of the way, lets get to work.

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So I picked up an EeePC recently and i have to say, I fucking love this thing.

Does everything I need, and it’s ultra portable. Comes with an Easy mode menu thing that seems to work just fine for what i use it for, which is mostly firefox and msn. Anything more complex and i’m just a ctrl-alt-t away from a terminal and happy linux land.

I’ve been thinking though, this would work really well as a mobile music platform, you know, just something to toss ideas together on, drum loops, synth lines, etc…. I’ve got hydrogen running on it with a bunch of drumkits and thats working fine, but I’m thinking I might wanna pickup a 2gig SODIMM and install something like studio64 or Ubuntu Studio on here… we’ll see how it goes.