Category: Kev’s Blog

Alienware, longtime PC manufacturer of high-end high-powered machines aimed primarily at gaming enthusiasts, has been bought by Dell. This will surely give Dell’s machines a credibility boost amongst the gaming community, if they can keep manufacturing the machines to the same quality.

Alienware products will continue to sell through their own website and will not be promoted on the Dell site.

Linux Fedora Core 5 is now available for download from the Fedora porject site.

As well as the usual upgrades to the kernel, Gnome and KDE, there are some interesting new features added, particularly the addition of the virtualization software Xen, which allows you to host multiple installed OSes on one install of Linux (similar to VMWare).

Windows has had the monopoly on Blue Screen of Death crash screenshots from machines in various unlikely places for the longest time, but here’s a screenshot of a Linux crash of the multimedia entertainment system on an Airbus.

I’m actually less interested in the crash itself since I’ve been running Linux on my desktop, my laptop (although I do run XP as well) and my webserver for a number of years now and have *NEVER* had a single crash where the whole OS went down or hung, similar to what you get accustomed to on Windows. I found this picture more interesting for the fact that I never would have guessed that Linux was being used for the inflight entertainment on planes.

To get a real understanding of how far the gaming industry has developed, check out these screen shot comparisions of similar games from the 1980s, compared with similar games on the XBox360. The level of detail in the next-gen consoles really is truly amazing.