Like many nerds around the world this evening I am prepping for what, odds are, will be the first of many all-nighters involving Blizzard’s soon-to-be-released Diablo III (which releases tonight at midnight!). If you have been by my blog before then odds are you will know that I prefer to do as much of my gaming as possible on my operating system of choice: Linux. Something else you may or may not know is that I am also a large fan of the company Code Weavers that produces the commercial Wine software Crossover.

Want to know the reason I am such a fan of Crossover? A few weekends ago I spent about 6 hours trying to get Wine sources to compile with various patches to make the Diablo 3 open beta work on Linux. The result? I ended up hanging my head in defeat and just playing on my OSx86 system so I didn’t miss the weekend event. At that point Diablo 3 didn’t work OOTB on default Wine builds or Crossover.

This morning I dropped by #crossover on FreeNode to check in with the Crossover folks to see what their plans were for the Diablo 3 release due out tonight - were us Linux folks going to have to wait?

Howdy All,

Just wanted to drop a quick note here saying I do still plan to maintain my lovely blog. Last month my school schedule got the best of me and I only managed to eek out a single post that was mostly related to the Diablo 3 Open Beta weekend.

The semester is out in 6 days though - so expect plenty of yummy tech goodness (including the first news of Bodhi 2.0.0!) coming this month.

~Jeff Hoogland

All materials Copyright Ted Brooks. http://www.litigationtech.com

So I’ve been tooling around with OSX on my Sager laptop again and spent a short bit of time running around in circles trying to get my nVidia graphics enabled again. Getting this done with a modern OSX86 release is fairly easy if you know how (it doesn’t even require installing a kext).

Simply open a terminal and run:

sudo nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

Type your password and press enter. In the file that is opened simply add the lines:

         GraphicsEnabler
          yes

Above the line that reads:

Press ctrl+x to close the file and press “y” followed by enter to save the changes. Reboot your Hackintosh and you should be good to go. I’ll be enjoying the Diablo 3 beta on mine.

As a side note sorry for the lack of posts this month. My school semester is coming to an end and life has been crazy of the late - expect some good postings come May (including hopefully a HOWTO for running Diablo 3 on Linux).

~Jeff Hoogland

I had the pleasure this week of speaking at the DRI Product Liability Conference on the topic, “There’s an App For That,” along with Josh Fleming (Frost Brown Todd LLC). Josh is an attorney who has truly embraced technology and the iPad, replacing a lot of books and notepads with the ubiquitous little tablet. It was a treat sharing the session with him, as we offered two very different perspectives on iPad apps for lawyers and trial presentation in general.

A nice collection of legal apps

Most of the apps discussed have been reviewed on this blawg, and you may use the search feature to locate any specific app or topic. In this article, links are to articles containing relevant links to other reviews (e.g., the ExhibitView link will lead to reviews of other trial presentation apps). Trial Presentation apps covered (and shown) were TrialPad, Evidence, Exhibit A, ExhibitView, and TDmobile — TrialDirector’s yet-to-be-released offering, which is expected to be available in a couple of months or so. In all fairness, I won’t write a review until the final release is ready to go, although I have been testing early versions. This app, according to inData, will be free. That could certainly shake up the trial presentation app market space.

One advantage TrialDirector has recently added is the ability to export a subset of exhibits all packaged for the iPad app. ExhibitView (for the PC) also has this capability, and according to Ian O’Flaherty (TrialPad), the exported data set will work with any of the trial presentation apps.

TrialDirector Export to iPad

In addition to these, Josh and I also covered several jury selection (voir dire) and monitoring apps, legal research and calendaring, and of course Dropbox, which seems to be the key to getting data into all of the apps. Josh also discussed several stylus options and keyboards for the iPad.

We wrapped our session by showing an actual “iBrief,” which contained embedded animation, video, and even a 3-D products model. This was probably the “ooh, ahh” moment of our presentation. It could be used for expert witnesses, mediations, depositions, and settlement conferences. The nice thing about the iPad is that you can easily capture the current screen at any time by simply hitting the two “on” buttons at the same time.

Please feel free to follow up with any questions either by posting them here, or by using the contact info links at the top of this page. I just had a couple of trials get pushed, so if you happen to need a little assistance in an upcoming matter…

All materials Copyright Ted Brooks. http://www.litigationtech.com

All materials Copyright Ted Brooks. http://www.litigationtech.com

I just wanted to take a moment to clarify the state of compositing with the Enlightenment desktop. In two recentreviews of Bodhi Linux the authors mucked up a few of the details concerning compositing and E17. I can’t really fault them for their misinformation (as a whole both are really good write ups) because the details about compositing and E17 aren’t very well documented. Today I would like to clarify a few things about using compositing with Enlightenment DR17.

First - there are currently two different compositing engines for Enlightenment. One of these is “Ecomorph” and it is the most commonly referenced when talking about compositing and E17. Ecomorph is not housed in the official E SVN and is not installed in Bodhi by default (you can find details on getting the Ecomorph source code here). Ecomorph is a slightly rough port of the famous “compiz fusion” for Enlightenment. It does not provide a consistent experience across a variety of hardware and it is no longer under active development - thus it is not recommended for usage.

For those who want a pleasant compositing experience with Enlightenment the E team has been developing their own compositing manager from scratch. E’s compositing manager functions either via a software engine or with OpenGL support. This compositing engine is not based on, nor does it have any ties to Compiz. This is also the compositing engine you will find in use on the “Compositing” profile Bodhi ships with. This engine is not as feature rich as Compiz as of yet, but slowly it is gaining more and more advanced features.

If you have any questions or if anything is still unclear feel free to drop a comment below.

~Jeff Hoogland

When you are trying to show a classroom full of students how to enter a complicated equation into their calculator it is pretty much always best to give an example. In order to do this in an effective manner I like to be able to display the calculator on the projector. Most students today have a TI83/84 model so being able to have an emulator for one of these on my laptop is essential. The following is how I went about getting a TI-83 emulator setup on my Bodhi Linux machine:

First - Download, Compile, and install Tilem

My TI emulator of choice is called “Tilem”. It is an open source project and you can download the latest source code here. Extract it’s contents and do the:

./configure
make
sudo make install

dance that compiles so much software. If the software doesn’t compile for you first try be sure to check the README file and the configure script output - odds are you are simply missing a build dependency. If you can’t figure out the issue on your own pastebin the error message and post it in the comments - I’ll do my best to lend a hand.

Second - Obtain and use a ROM Image

There are a few different ways to get an image of a TI-ROM. You can dump the ROM off of a physical calculator you own (mildly complicated, check that README file for details on this) or you can hit Google. I found a good TI83 download here.

Once you have your .rom file (mine is called ti83_1.rom for example) you need to place it in the proper TilEm folder. If you look in ~/.TilEm in your home folder you will see folders have been created for several different TI models (for example I place my rom in the “ti83″ folder). Place the .rom file in the proper model folder and you will be good to go. Simply launch

tilem

in terminal and your TI emulator should appear on screen:

Finally (Optional) - Creature Menu Entry for Tilem

Believe it or I don’t like having to pull up a terminal every time I launch a program. This means I quickly created a .desktop file so Tilem would appear in my menu (and Run Everything). To do this I ran:

nano ~/.local/share/applications/tilem.desktop

Then in the file that is opened I pasted:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Ti-83 Emulator
Type=Application
Comment=tilem
Exec=tilem
Categories=Education;
GenericName=TiEmulator

Save and close the file and Tilem should now be in your menu. Enjoy!

~Jeff Hoogland

• KDE 3.5
• Gnome 2
• XFCE
• LXDE
• Openbox
• KDE 4.x
• Unity

The important thing is that whatever desktop you are using allows you to be productive and doesn’t hinder your work flow (and if it is pretty that is a plus).

If you are unsure about which desktop is best for you with all the recent changes that have come about in the Gnome/Ubuntu camps I encourage you to go grab some LiveCDs that feature the latest versions of the various desktops and give them a try. By that I mean a real try - don’t just boot the system up, use it for 15 minutes and think you are an expert. Use the desktop for your everyday tasks for a few days, see if it feels right. Find out things you like/don’t like and discover things that make each different desktop unique.

Everyone knows I love E17. I enjoy using it because it is fast, flexible, and when I want it to be flashy.

 
What is your desktop of choice on your FOSS operating system and why do you stick with it?

~Jeff Hoogland

The end of March is approaching and that means our first quarter update release is here! As is the case with all our update release packages are fairly fresh. Enlightenment has been built from a fresh SVN pull from March 20th and the default Midori browser has been updated to the latest release:

A more current build of the Linux kernel is in use as well. We are using the 3.2.0-19 build from upstream Ubuntu sources this release:

Beyond that you will find current versions of other non-default software in our repositories including Firefox 11, Chromium 17 and LibreOffice 3.5

A new feature this LiveCD sports that previous releases lacked is the ability to boot fully into system memory (RAM). Selecting this option will take slightly long for the live environment to boot - but once it is fully loaded things will run much quicker than they do from the CD and you can even eject/remove the disc! Neat right?

We also implemented a number of minor improvements to the base system. These include resolving an issue that had prevented PCManFM’s application menu from working:

E17’s everything module calculator feature now works out of the box:

Enlightenment’s notification module is now enabled by default in our profiles:

Our setup wizard got some much needed color improvements:

and finally - as always - the default theme selection got a rotation:

On the release schedule I posted back in December I detailed that we would be having one more update release (1.5.0) to our 10.04 base before Bodhi 2.0.0 releases based on Ubuntu 12.04 I am currently undecided if I still want this to be the case or if the team and I will move directly to working on 2.0.0 - at any rate don’t expect our next stable release till some time in June!

Oh - almost forgot. If you want to download our 1.4.0 release you can find a directly download hosted via source forge here (torrent download will be live by the day’s end). Current users please remember this is simply an update release - meaning you can upgrade your current Bodhi release to 1.4.0 by following the instructions found here.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland