The upcoming OpenOffice.org 3 features a new solver in the OpenOffice Calc module. The solver is built on the lp_solve engine, a mixed integer linear programming.

Now how to make use of this in Eternal Lands.
Say you need 103608 points to reach the next Alchemy Level. You decide to make steel bars. These require that you also make fire essences. Both fire essences and steel bars give alchemy points. Now you need to make just enough fire essences and use them all to make just enough steel bars to reach your next level.
OpenOffice.org 3 helps you make that combination.
First install and open a OpenOffice.org 3 beta build. The create a table that resembles the table below. Click on it to see it in bigger detail.

Follow the following procedure:

1. Set cell D4 to 0.
2. Set cell D3 to 3*D4 because you need 3 fire essenses for each steel bar.
3. In cell C5, insert the points you need to reach your next alchemy level.
4. In cell E3 and E4, insert the points you get per fire essence and steel bar made respectively.
5. Set cell C3 to D3*E3 and C4 to D4*E4.
6. Now set C7 to C3+C4.
7. Next open Tools > solver and copy the data from the screenshot. Basically, you set target cell C7 to a value of C5 by changing cells D4. Your only condition is to set C3 to > 0.
8. Then click solve.

The solver will fill out cells D3 and D4 by the approximate minimum number of fire essenses and steel bars you need to reach the next alchemy level. This is done with the condition that we are using all the fire essenses we just made to make just enough steel bars to reach the next alchemy level.

Happy playing Eternal Lands.

I started working today with DHT on the new MWAR website. It uses drupal. The website is pretty new but it should serve for now. With time, new features will be added. This is thanks to the fact that drupal is very rich and extensible. Still, I’m open to suggestions as how to improve the website including content or maybe even a better theme (maybe something RPG related).

Today was peace day in Eternal lands. Peace day is always a good time to go see extremely dangerous monsters that would normally kill you. On peace day, creatures cannot attack each other. Therefore, I went to the cave where the dragon was on Irilion, otherwise knows as continent two. I’m not sure whether some players placed them there or not, but there were a lot of mines around. The dragon started to lose health when it stepped on them. I managed to take the following few screenshots before my connection to the game started to lag too much and I had to log off. The screenshots are high quality png images and are around 1.4MB each.

With Firefox 3.0 being the first release of the popular browser to pass the Acid2 test, an new web standards test is completed. The Acid3 test is now released, and browsers can be tested at this page.

Firefox3 howerver doesn’t pass the test. I didn’t test any other browsers but it is unlikely that any will do better. I repeated the test 10 times using a recent cvs snapshot. Each time, firefox scores 67/100.

The reference image can be found here.

If anyone has the a screenshot representing the results of other browsers such as IE6/7, Opera, Konqueror or Safari, I am interested in posting them here.

One of the great things about Firefox 3 is that it has received a lot of love and attention in the Linux department. So many things have been accomplished including native gtk+ themes in html content, better gnome-vfs support, use of stock gtk+ icons in many areas and countless other improvements.

The latest improvement comes in yet another feature that makes Firefox better integrate into the typical gtk+/gnome environment. The latest nightly builds of Firefox 3 use the native gtkprint dialog instead of the old xul one. This is mainly thanks to the work of Michael Ventnor in bug 193001.

A screenshot is available here.

The next major release of metacity, the gnome window manager, will have a built in composite manager that will build enabled by default if libxcomposite is installed.

To try this without installing it, install subverion and run the following in a terminal:

mkdir metacity-trunk

cd metacity-trunk

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/metacity/trunk metacity

cd metacity

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr

then run ‘./src/metacity — replace’ to run it directly from the source tree.To activate the composite manager, run the following command in a terminal window.

It performs quite fast although not as fast as xfwm4 but lacks the extra eye candy offered by compiz. Still most users should find it sufficient. Another good thing is that it doesn’t need libcm installed.

It should look something like the picture below. Note that transparency works in gnome-terminal.

If you decide to install it permanently, simple run:

su -c 'install -m755 ./src/metacity /usr/bin'

This will replace the installed metacity binary executable  with the new one. It works perfectly on my Nvidia card despite my old AMD 2300+ Sempron processor.

Initially done solely to show us that even Novell, a big Linux vendor, admits that Linux breaks Microsoft intellectual property, Microsoft has now found that their agreement with Novell has proved to be very profitable.

According to informationweek.com, “Microsoft has now sold more than 40,000 SUSE Linux certificates to businesses and governments around the world. The company does not, in its own financial statements, report how much revenue that represents. But given that Novell credits the interoperability alliance for generating $356 million in cash inflows, then Microsoft, too, must be raking in millions from selling SUSE Linux service and support.”

While it is evident that Microsoft’s agreement with Novell is different that the one made with other distributions such as Linspire and TurboLinux that did it out of fear of the whole IP propaganda, any financial profits Microsoft does make is still negligible when compared to how much they make from selling Windows and Office to big comapanies and users.

After ftp issues with zymic.com, I moved again to ht990332.googlepages.com

The new pacman configuration is:

[hussam]

Server = http://ht990332.googlepages.com

I came across this possibly old article by Microsoft where they compare Linux to Windows. The article is found at the following address Windows Linux Comparison.

Here is part of the article:

According to Microsoft, an updater tool isn’t good enough because it only “updates”. Of course Microsoft isn’t attacking Redhat personally, but rather the use of Linux as a workstation. 

If we are talking about software deployment, it seems Microsoft has decided to ignore Redhat Network and Novell’s ZENworks. If we are talking about ease of system administration and configuration, Yast2 is obviously a myth according to Microsoft. Even on Ubuntu, the home desktop oriented Linux distribution, you simply apt-get install one package and you have a mailserver. It is extremely easy to badly judge other people’s products when when we choose understand much about them. This allows Microsoft to bad mouth Linux in front of its customers.

It has been years since I last tried ReactOS. For those who aren’t familiar with ReactOS, it is an open source project aimed at writing and operating system from scratch that is compatible with Microsoft Windows drivers and software. I went ahead and downloaded a svn build from here . I extracted the tarball using p7zip and placed the boot installer iso on my desktop. I already had qemu installed so I opened a terminal and ran:

qemu-img create  hd.img 5G

qemu -m 384 -boot d -hdd hd.img -cdrom bootcd-31182-rel.iso

This created a 5GB disk image and launched the React OS installer.

I was presented with the following installer screen

I clicked Next then I clicked ‘C’ to create a new partition to install ReactOS on.

The next step was to format the new parittion using Fat filesystem. ReactOS doesn’t have NTFS support. I hope this get’s implemented somewhere down the line before ReactOS 1.0 is released.

Next is the installation path. Leaving it the default should be well.

ReactOS then copied the files which was pretty straight forward.

ReactOS installer then installed a bootloader to the disk MBR

And that’s it. The installer now rebooted to the newly installed system

On the first boot, I was presented with a wizard to configure the system.

After creating a default user, I added a hostname for the computer, set system time and created a administrator password.

I rebooted again to the new desktop. The default ReactOS desktop resembles very much the windows 2000 desktop.

Command line work in ReactOS similarly to Windows XP. It would be nice however if they could bundle a scripting language similar to bash. Bash should work via cygwin though.

ReactOS includes a file manager ‘ReactOS Explorer’ which uses some nice Tango icons. Using Tango icons is a smart move because the Tango project aims at providing a common feel between different desktop environments though similarly designed icon themes.

When it comes to bundled software, ReactOS includes two games, a minesweeper clone and a cards game. This isn’t much but it is does serve as a proof that certain applications do work. It is also visible that ReactOS makes heavy use of wine which shows the power of open source.

Since ReactOS is still in early development stages, some features are not yet implemented including certain networking applications.

As a clone of Windows, ReactOS borrows a lot of its design. This includes the different system properties panels. ReactOS also includes a device manager similar to Windows 2000 and XP. It was however hard to judge the device manager since I tested under qemu where hardware is labeled differently and acts differently. The device manager only lists hardware at the moment and doesn’t allow uninstalling or installing drivers.

The usual desktop utilities such are the ‘Run’ command are already implemented. A nice character map application is also installed by default.

Frontends for typical system adminstration tools that a user might expect to find in a modern user friendly operating system are found in the start menu but there are currently no backends for them so they aren’t very helpful. However, this does mean that we can expect to have them working in later development releases.

ReactOS additionally includes a startup service manager similar to the one found in Windows 2000 and XP. It also includes a power management applet. Hopefully as the ReactOS kernel improves, it will support modern ACPI functions similar to Windows XP and Linux 2.6

The main question here is “Why ReactOS?”. Isn’t it better to advise people to switch to Linux instead of a Microsoft Windows clone? Linux is already more manageable, more secure and definitely much more stable than windows. The answer is that over the last 12 years, a lot of work and energy has been placed into writing applications tailored for the Windows platform. Although Linux is getting rich with graphics applications such as Gimp, Inkscape and Blender and there are lots of games that run natively on Linux, it still lacks engineering applications such as H2Omap, AutoCAD and Sap2000. Such applications are unlikely to be ported to Linux. This makes the need for a Windows or a Windows compatible platform a definite need. Another point is that once ReactOS matures enough to reach a usable state, it is likely to become more secure than Microsoft’s Windows due to it’s open source nature.

In the next part of this review, I will try a new svn snapshot and I see how applications such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org run.