Today I wanted to take a second to shine some light on a blog by one of my readers, which I have thoroughly enjoyed reading. As he himself puts it, the goal of his blog is to…

[...] help console owners get the most out of their gaming machines. As far as this site is concerned, that typically means the things that it can do other than simply playing games. With a little tweaking, either the PS3 or the XBOX 360 can be used as an HTPC, media front-end, or simply become more functional in a variety of ways.

The PS3 can even be dual-booted with Linux, giving it a variety of new abilities, and turning it into a stripped down desktop computer, if one so desires. However, the information for doing some of these tasks is alternately vague, nonexistent, or found in a variety of places that can be difficult to find. That’s where this website comes in.

There will be an attempt to create fresh, novel uses for the consoles and to record those results here; in addition, where useful information already exists, we will supply links to the relevant sites and descriptions of the information and its value to readers.

So if you have an Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3, I definitely recommend that you check it out. In fact, if you are fortunate enough to own a Playstation 3, you just have to install Linux on it. There’s no debating this - just do it! If you can play twenty year old games on a console that is brand new and costs more than a fully working car, you just have to!

www.consoleoverdrive.com

Welcome to part two of my article series on console emulation in Linux. In the last article we were discussing emulating the various Nintendo systems, anything from NES to Nintendo DS and even the legendary VirtualBoy. If you haven’t read that article, or have no clue what emulation is, I suggest you take a quick look at that one first. This time we’re going to shift our attention from Nintendo and instead take a look at some systems from SEGA, as well as the Sony Playstation.
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When I first started using Linux a few years ago, I could not for the life of me understand why anyone would want to use the command line for anything as long as there was a graphical alternative. After all, I belong to the group of people who grew up with graphical interfaces. Sure I’ve enjoyed more than my share of DOS games and text-based MUDs, but that command line business was very scary to me up until just a few years ago.

Then I started using Linux. In the beginning I always used graphical applications for everything from managing files and directories to setting file permissions, but somehow, slowly but surely I started noticing that some things could be done so much easier and faster if done in the command line, compared to the graphical alternative - and then I still didn’t know about scripting! Once I figured out that you could automate tasks by writing bash scripts, I was in love.

Throughout this article I will list and explain what I think are the ten most useful bash commands. Whether you’re a bash guru or a command-line newbie, keep reading to see if there are any commands that could be useful to you.

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Welcome to this blog’s first article series! Over the coming weeks we are going to be discussing console emulation in Linux, and what options there are for us out there in the Linux world. Throughout the articles I will focus on regular consoles as well as portable ones. I might go into older consoles (meaning anything that came out more than 10 years before I was born), but I don’t have as much experience with those as more modern consoles - so I don’t know yet. But for this article, we are going to take a good hard look at the Nintendo family, from the NES to the NDS!

If you’re more of a SEGA or Playstation guy, hop on over to my article on those systems!

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An acquaintance of mine from an internet forum has created a survey regarding the demographics or Linux users, and he’s asked that the survey be passed around to other Linux users. So I figured I’d post it here and maybe get some more results for him.

The questions pertain to your sex, race, religion, political affiliation, age, and of course your Linux usage. However, it’s completely anonymous. You don’t have to enter your name, email address or anything else that may reveal your identity.

I think the results may be very interesting, so if you have a minute or two, go ahead and fill it out. Of course you’ll be able to see the results once you’ve finished the survey.

Linux demographic survey