So it’s been around a month since I ditched Windows and moved to Linux. I’m sticking with Debian and it’s getting better by the day, in the beginning lots of stuff didn’t work but lately I’m finding that as one thing gets fixed, sometimes several things start working. A perfect example was WINE which I was trying to get working for about a week, and gave up. Today I was trying to get Steam working on Debian, found an installer and installed it but it just wouldn’t work. Eventually I found a fix in the shape of some extra driver libraries which needed installing for Open GL to work with Steam. Once I installed them Steam worked, and it was just the same as in Windows, I really didn’t fancy buying any of the available games right now.
The good news was that as I had installed an open GL library for Steam I gave Wine another try, and it worked too. Also another couple of things started working (Amiga Forever for one although sound and video is choppy via Wine) so things are looking up, and Linux still starts and stops much faster than Windows did, and Youtube video still plays much better and smoother. So not only are things getting fixed, I also haven’t broken anything … yet.
Onto other fun stuff, my daughter has been learning to program in Scratch at school. When I was at school I wrote a few programs in ZX Spectrum BASIC and I’ve wanted to try it again but haven’t really had the patience in the last few years. Today I installed Scratch and had a dabble, a lot of it was similar to BASIC as I remembered it (or maybe it is just logical program flow I remember) and in just over an hour I had written a simple catch the baby game. Phoebe came in and between the two of us we added a backdrop and adjusted the difficulty. I have programmed something again and me and my daughter did something fun together, and it was done in Linux. I will post the link to the Scratch script soon so you can all tell me how sucky it is.
