Wednesday, January 23, 2002

Loki: RIP -- 11:03 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Linux Games got word that, effective January 31, Loki will suspend operations. Loki is the major porter of Windows games to Linux. I won't say that this is a crushing blow for gaming in Linux, but it certainly doesn't help. Here's the news:

After 3 wonderful years, Loki will be indefinitely suspending operations on January 31.

We understand that many of you have come to rely, at least in part, on reselling Loki products. In order to protect your ongoing business, we are granting you the first opportunity to purchase our existing inventory.

All orders are subject to the following:

-Effective immediately, Loki will no longer offer end user technical support for any of its products
-All purchases must be paid in full at the time of shipping
-All sales are final
-All shipping costs will be paid by the purchaser

Remember that after January 31 these products will no longer be available anywhere.

Hyperion has no plans for another Linux port last I heard and their distributor, Titan Games, no longer distributes Linux games. Some companies, like id, make Linux ports of their games on general principle. I think it will be a very cold day in Hell before another company tries making a go at porting.

The Master comments: Unfortunately, the problem here is the size and attitude of a sizable portion of the Linux community. It's a very small group that consistently demands that everything must be free. However, software companies need to make money, and none of the companies porting Linux games were making any. I think A.T. is right--it will be a very cold day if another company comes along and tries to make a business out of Linux ports of Windows apps.

J.t.Qbe comments: I suppose this isn't totally unexpected, but it is too bad. Loki does/did some very high-quality work. I bought their port of Heroes III for Linux and it's great. On the other hand, I'm surprised that anyone was able to make a go of porting Windows games to Linux at all. Why not just buy the Windows version? Windows 9x is decent for games (and that's about all it's good for); the number of gamers who only run Linux has to be very small.

KDE 2.2.2 RPMs -- 5:58 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Red Hat has released RPMs of version 2.2.2 of the popular K Desktop Environment (KDE) for Linux. It is available through their up2date tool. Naturally, their servers are getting pounded. Thankfully my download is now going faster than 1K/sec.

Tuesday, January 22, 2002

KreateCD -- 8:00 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just discovered a new CD burning program for Linux called KreateCD. I've never been thrilled with XCDRoast's interface. KreateCD (which requires KDE 2.x) is much slicker, using a drag-and-drop interface for data CDs and including cool features for burning audio CDs (even Ogg Vorbis support!). Check it out.

Past Two Days' News

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