KrisCowboy's Journal: Fedora Core 3, Quake 3 Arena, Doom 3. That's all for a geek!

Finally Fedora Core 3 is out. Core 2 was good, but on 64-bit, it was unstable. My d4x wasn't working well and apart from that, I got nothing against FC2. Now, FC3 is really cool but very heavy I'd say. Installation remains same except that now you can choose XFCE seperately where as in previous versions, it came only with full-install. Firefox 1.0PR, Thunderbird 0.8, bzflag, Xcdroast and Helix Player now come bundled together.

GNOME 2.8 is too damn good. Although it has been floating around since months, I was too lazy to attempt an upgrade from the sources. Finally, I'm using Gnome 2.8. First things first - the sound events works perfectly. Nautilus is a bit improved - shows the time left when copying/moving stuff around. Improved MIME features like "open with..." in the right-click menu. The old system of choosing panel applets from a hierarchial menu has been replaced with an eye-candy applet chooser. The new theme Glider looks good - atleast on my system.

After all the usual addons like mplayer, xmms-mp3 and other stuff, I finally downloaded the drivers from nVidia GeForce FX 5200. Installation was easy..just switch to run-level 3 and run the .run file. Modify the xorg.conf to use the driver "nvidia" instead of "nv", the generic driver. Modprobe nvidia manually the first time and remove rivafb. Add the line "rivafb" to /etc/hotplug/blacklist. This didn't make much sense to me. Well, that could be because I don't know much about frame buffers and X in general.

The good thing about Quake and Doom is, they use the same files over various platforms. All I had to do was to drop the linux binary in my windows games folder and bingo, it runs. But I'm still having problems with sound in Quake and Doom - it wouldn't just work. I guess the workaround is to recompile the kernel without ALSA and then get the ALSA sources and to build it. Sounds too boring. Still exploring for something easier.

Doom 3 deserves a special note. It is amazing!!! I played it for like 3 hours in a dark room - sitting all alone. Man, that game scared the shit out of me. Zombies popping out from dark corners when I'm toggling between my flashlight and shotgun. It's good...it's really good. People said that Farcry is as good as Doom. But I guess I'll finish Doom first before moving on to others. Adios.