gog.com Games now available on linux!

If you have never heard of gog.com and you are into PC gaming then please stop reading and visit gog.com right now.

They have a ton of games available at usually a little over the Steam price BUT completely DRM free.  You don't need any CD Key's, online accounts (other than to initially download the game) etc.  You download an exe file for the game and that is it, it's yours to install as many times as you like on as many PC's/laptops as you own. Whoop!

Being a Linux fan finding that gog.com has finally decided to provide Linux support for games is fantastic.  Now for a long time the focus of gog.com was to provide users of modern PC's and operating systems the ability to play old games on those new systems so there is a lot of "retro" content on there but the focus of gog.com is shifting to include more indie and newer content (guess it is difficult to get AAA+ title developers to agree to completely DRM free grrr)!

Officially gog.com only support Ubuntu and Mint though I used Lubuntu without any problems and I suspect that maybe a lot of debian based distros will be fine (please comment on your own experiences).

Installing gog-stargunner from .deb file is easy :)

I tested the free game StarGunner and noticed a tarball and an installer - I opted for the installer, life is too short for tarballs which is a .deb file :)

Yay Stargunner on Linux - not sure I will be playing this often but hey it was free :)

The Linux available gog.com titles are available here

Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun on Linux for free

Instructions
You may or may not be aware that EA Games have released C&C, C&C Red Alert and Tiberian Sun as freeware.

This will show you the quickest and easiest way to play a fully patched Tiberian Sun with IP networking enabled to allow you to play LAN games with others even without the old IPX networking components configured (basically anything later than Windows XP I think).
 *Note: You must install wine in order for the instructions below.  On debian based distros this is as simple as typing in:

sudo apt-get install wine

Install Wine to play Tiberian Sun in Linux

You should then be prompted firstly for your password and secondly a Y/N prompt - naturally you will want to press Y and wine will be downloaded and installed as above.

Step 1.
Go to this cnc-comm.com this is an amazing site that has all of the downloads you could ever need for Command and Conquer as well as hosting some awesome mods/map editors etc.
More specifically for Tiberian Sun goto the TS: Download page then click the rather small Download button to start the download.

Step 2.
 Once the TSInstaller.exe has downloaded run it - hopefully Wine is the default application for .exe files so you should be able to double click on it.  Otherwise open a terminal and cd to your Downloads directory and run

wine TSInstall.exe

Setup C&C Tiberian Sun using Wine

Either way you will end up with the Tiberian sun installer running.  I would choose the default options for everything except to remove the LAN patch if playing online and skip downloading movies unless you are going to play offline.

Step 3.
Run the game! (it should be in your gnome menu under "other")

Linux App: KompoZer

Hi Guys,

There are so many apps for Linux that stand up well to (or even exceed the quality of) the commercial options available.

Many of these apps are also available on Windows (Linux programs tend to be ported very well to other Operating Systems).  One such app that I have really started to love is KompoZer a website development application in a similar vein to Microsoft's FrontPage.  This is great for me as an amateur website developer, I would imagine that users of Dreamweaver may be left a little disappointed.

The UI

When first starting up KompoZer you will see the Design tab already open which takes up the majority of the screen which gives you a pretty good representation of what your website will look like as you build it.  The "Site Manager" window to the left, this gives you an overview of the file structure of the site.

First thing that I do is setup add the location of my sites files to the site manager (the small 2 screen icon) so that it displays my website structure.

Anyone who has ever used Microsoft Frontpage will immediately be at home with the design/split view (split view shows the html code for the selected item at the bottom of the screen).  While the "source" view will show the websites html which is kept very neat and tidy.  KompoZer's html code output looks like someone created the site in a text editor by hand rather than being generated by a machine - Creating the same site in FrontPage would show hundreds more lines that would be formatted in-comprehensively.

The CSS editor

Wow - just wow, this is such a neat little tool that comes with KompoZer.

The CSS tool allows you to setup your HTML elements/id's/classes with simple drop down menus and gives you a preview of how those changes would look.

The CSS component can either embed the stylesheet into your current page or export it an external CSS file (which it can then easily link into your page) so that you can use the same style on multiple pages.  Changes made to the linked CSS file are immediately visible on the design page and I do mean immediately no need to even click the OK button on the dialogue box - if you select something on a drop down in the CSS builder your webpage will be refreshed with the new style in place which is great for making finite alterations.

Final Comments

This is a very polished HTML website builder that is very easy to pick up and start using for new and experienced users.  I like the number of options that you can set when importing images, creating links etc which other tools might hide away.  The UI was very intuitive - to me at least.

KompoZer is compatible with Linux, WIndows and Mac OS'.