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Games on PCQLinux 2006
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
PCQLinux has always been a serious home and professional
user's operating system with different applications for serious desktop work
and hard core server level stuff. However, something that users have always
wanted is some small games for entertainment – and for the first time,
PCQLinux does have some small but nice games to play with.
XScorch
Ever played the classic DOS game “Scorched Earth” or it multitudes of
clones like the GWBasic “Gorillas”, Pocket Tanks, etc? Well, whether you
have or haven't, believe me, that this is one game that you can get very
addicted to.
| Fine tune your
workstation |
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Switch
off services
After Installing PCQLinux 2006 on your workstation, you have to
fine tune the OS. First of all remove unnecessary services that may not be
required, but are still running and hogging system resources. You can
switch off these unnecessary services in a following way. Open a terminal
window and issue “Setup” This will open a CLI interface showing
various options, here select the 'system services' option and press
the enter key. This will show you the list of services running on that
machine, scroll down the list and check out services that is not required
on you machine at this time. Running services are denoted by the star mark
next to the service name. To switch off a service,
just press the space bar after selecting it. Once you have switched
off services that are not required, press ok and save the settings and
reboot your machine.
Remove
unwanted packages
You may have to resort to this, if you run out of disk space. To
remove packages, you can use synaptic package manager or kpackage. To use
it launch Kpackage from
Start>System. It will open a GUI interface divided into two panes. The
left one will show you the package name and right show the details of the
package. Now from the left panel, select the name of the package that you
want to uninstall and click the uninstall button given just below the
right-panel.
Swap
off
The swap partition plays a very important role in determining your
system's performance, It is recommended to keep the swap partition
double your systems RAM. System performance can decline if your RAM is
larger compared to swap partition size. In such situations, its better to
switch off the swapping process. To switch this off, open the terminal
window and issue the command. 'swapoff –a '.
If you
want to switch back the swap again then issue command 'swapon –a'
Enable
DMA
By default PCQLinux 2006 has DMA disabled, and this can lead to
performance degradation. So you need to enable DMA on your PCQLinux 2006
workstation. To do this, open the terminal window and issue the command.
#
hdparm - -u1 -d1 –A1 /dev/hda
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The goal of the game is to eliminate enemy tanks on various
terrains in a turn-based play. For doing this, each tank gets a turn where the
player can use a variety of weapons to cause havoc.
There are a number of weapons in XScorch – all the way
from the humble missile to nukes, dirt bombs, cluster bombs, napalm, plasma
weapons etc. When a player gets a turn, he can select the weapon he wishes to
use and target an enemy tank by changing the firing angle and speed of the
weapon. If the target is fine, the enemy gets destroyed – if not, he gets a
turn to try to destroy you. Be ready to waste tons of time with this one.
Fortune
This is yet another UNIX classic for you. Fortune prints out a random quote
from the many different themed databases available. You can use this random
quote in many different places – for instance a popup quote of the day every
time you login, an email signature, etc.
We've also included a number of optional, but interesting
fortune cookie databases – such as BOFH, Star Wars, Calvin and Hobbes, etc.
After it's installed, simply type 'fortune' at the shell to get a new
fortune every time.
LinCity-ng
A city simulator like SimCity that let you create and manage a complete
city. The objective of the game is to build and maintain a city. You need
to feed, house, jobs and goods for the residents of your city as well as make
sure the city is environment friendly and has a good economy. Of course, since
you are the creator of the city, this is just a guideline – you can go the
opposite way and have a crime ridden city where you are the big boss as well.
BZFlag
This is an online-only multiplayer game that can become very addictive
quickly. Battle Zone Capture the Flag is a fun filled game of action and mayhem.
Teams of tank-like vehicles can steal the flag of the
opposing team and try to get it back to their own team area – in essence
capturing the enemy's flag – at the same time preventing the enemy from
doing the same. The game can be fast based and frantic depending on the server
you connect to and very addictive. If you are a fan of first person perspective
shoot-em-ups, try this game for some frantic first person action.
NeverBall
This is a game that requires a lot of concentration, great reflexes and a
quick eye.
The objective of the game is to guide a ball from a
starting point to the ending point through a series of ever increasing
difficulty of mazes. You also need to collect points on the way by picking up
the small gold coins and other gifts.
Now this may sound easy, but the difficult part comes in
guiding the ball. The maze exists in a 3-dimensional space and you have to tilt
the platform to get the ball moving in the direction you want it to go. And the
more you tilt, the faster the ball moves. So getting the ball to go exactly
where you want is very, very difficult without a lot of practice. Prepare to get
highly frustrated, but with a lot of fun, in this game.
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