Test Drive: Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” on the EEEPC

Less than a couple of months passed from latest Ubuntu arrival and the new Linux Mint 15 (codenamed Olivia) also has been released. I prepared a bootable USB disk in order to give it a look. I was, as usual, mostly interested to the new Cinnamon version (1.8) it comes with.

First impressions

Linux Mint welcomes you with a reassuring plain old styled desktop.

The application menu is responsive and it fits quite well even on the small EEEPC screen.

Ubuntu 13.04 on Veriton S661 (Full Install)

It's time of major upgrades for my desktop computer: I just bought a graphics card and a bigger hard-drive. Knowing I was going to hardware-upgrade kept me from upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 as soon as it's been made available. I was going soon to have to install it on the new drive.

To be precise I didn't exactly put the new drive on my desktop computer: I bought a new 1TB hard-drive I put on my NAS. It's the 500GB drive I previously used in the NAS the one I placed in the desktop.

So, after copying all the data to the new drive I booted from a USB drive and I begun to install.

Partitioning the disk

I've never been a many-partitions advocate but, with a 500GB disk, some partitioning is needed. I decided to partition the disk with GParted before starting the installation. I split the disk in two partitions of about a one-to-four ratio plus a little 5GB partition to be used as swap.

since I use my desktop computer mostly for home video and slide-shows editing the bigger partition will be destined to be mounted as /home folder.

Slick2D on Netbeans (and the EEEPC)

This post is sort of a corollary at my previous post: after trying Slick2D on my desktop computer, and Eclipse, I decided to port the demo projects to Netbeans, on the EEEPC, where I do many of my programming experiments.

The use Slick2D with Netbeans is covered, in the site wiki, as well as the Eclipse case. The first step is creating a Java application project

once the project has been created Slick2D and LWJGL Java libraries must be added to the project class-path. This can be done by selecting one-by-one the needed JAR files but, if you're going to make more than one project setting-up a custom library will be handier.

So I, from the project properties, I selected the libraries folder then the “Add Library ...” button.

Fun programming: Java and Slick2D

Many may not believe me but programming can be fun. If you really love programming even watching a XML file going to, or coming, from a remote server can be fun but, of course, if your program produces something funny then programming is also more fun. So, while looking for something to relax after watching too much XML files, I decided to experiment with some 2D game engine. 2D gaming has been for many years confined to the Adobe Flash or J2ME “mini game” context. More recently , with the ever wider smart-phones diffusion, 2D games have known a real revival.

Among the many 2D games engines available I first restricted my choice to the Java-based ones. After a short examining of available features and documentation I decided to try first the Slick2D engine.

Slick2D

Slick2D is a Java game engine mostly based on the LWJGL (Light-Weight Java Game Library) library. The aspect of Slick2D the more appealed to me, and triggered my interest, is the ability to begin coding a simple game by just extending a class and writing three methods.

Slick2D offers in fact an abstract class BasicGame, once this class is extended just three methods have to be implemented:

• init() : is called once when the game is started
• render() : is called every time the screen is refreshed
• update() : is called when controls (keyboard, mouse, joystick, ...) are read

The programmer can mostly ignore the other aspects of the game and concentrate on these three events.

Of course writing a complete game will still be a complex task but, Slick2D makes very simple the initial approach to game programming easing a lot the learning curve at the beginning.

First project

To prepare my first project I first downloaded Slick2D jar file and LWJGL zip archive, I then extracted it in a convenient folder in my home directory. In Eclipse I first made a standard Java application project

Happy Easter

To all my readers and visitors my warmest

Happy Easter!