BZAnywhere

[Legolas_]

Keep on working saturos!!!! Stuff to include possibly?

1). Link to BZPod (in your links for firefox and opera, ext:http://web.mac.com/twgin/iWeb/BZFlag/Podcast/Podcast.html)
2). BZmanager
3). (You probably already have thought of this one) BZFlag 2.0.6
4). Manual Files of bzflag

______________________________________________________________

Legolas_

[Saturos]

1) I'll consider it.
2) Doesnt make sense since your settings will be gone after you shut down your PC... so the primary purpose of BZManager (storing profiles, managing several players) would be gone for good.
3) Sure.
4) Dont they come with a typical BZFlag-installation?

Oh well... I am working on it! Really!

[Winny]

I can also host it if you want, then we can have multiple mirrors, so if one is slow then the person(s) can use another.

[Legolas_]

4) Dont they come with a typical BZFlag-installation?

Not on a mac afaik, besides, what if they dont install bzflag?

[the Red Commander]

Will my schools network guy smash me over the head for using this thing, I mean, won't it override stuff that would make it illegal to me because I signed an agreement thingy.... Man I hate user agreements...


NO BZAnywhere...

[Longhair]

Basically, as long as you are allowed to reboot your computer, you can use a live CD. It affects NOTHING on the computer itself. I repeat NOTHING. That being said, if you choose to, you can install something to your hard drive, but if you're going to do that, you may as well get a GNU/Linux that is meant to be installed that way.

Some of my favorite live CDs:

Knoppix: http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Knoppix is a popular general purpose live cd. Uses the KDE graphic environment.

Elive: http://www.elivecd.org/

Elive is a demo of the enlightenment desktop environment, containing both DR16 (the old, stable version) and DR17 (the snazzy new version under major development)

Linux System Rescue CD: http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

The System rescue CD is an all around rescue cd for fixing a system that you hosed by messing around as root It's also able to resize and clone Windows partitions too.

[TD-Linux]

I would most certainly be expelled for using this, btw. You better be careful.
Maybe also include a build of BZFlag from the latest beta CVS.

How about making a BZFlag menu in the KDE menu, and mounting that menu on the panel? Make another BZFS menu, and fill it with many scripts to start a bzfs server with predefined settings and a map (one script file for each map). Include 10+ of the most popular maps, to make it easy to start a quick LAN party. Stick that on the panel, too.

Because you don't need to do much else besides BZ, you can fill up the panel with all sorts of buttons - the taskbar isn't going to grow very big.

How about having quick-start directions on the background picture?

[ziliss]

Why not use another windows manager than KDE which takes a lot of the CPU and of the RAM ?
I am not against KDE, but it would help for slower computers (after all, is it not called "Anywhere" ?).
I think it would be better to keep more RAM for the game when we want to play and/or host for a LAN game. This is the main goal of the cd. Also, a browser like firefox doesnt need all the power of KDE, and anyway we wont use the harddrive

(Maybe we can have KDE on the cd but not using it by default.)

ziliss

[darth_sith]

I agree ziliss.
A livecd needs to allocate room in realmem.
In addition KDE will consume addition and important RAM.

Maybe fluxbox can be used. It's light and easy to customise to setup
all bzflag menus.

This way all cpu / RAM power can be dedicated for bzflag game, even
for small hardware configs.

PS: sry did not read all ... but the hard part of this livecd is to include
propietary drivers for ATI / NVIDIA to have 3D acceleration enabled,
otherwise bzflag won't run fine.

[ziliss]

Another thing is that it can be difficult for someone that has never used linux before. So maybe you can lauch automatically some kind of window (something simple) with buttons like "Play BZFlag", "Shutdown", and run a pre-configured server from a list ? (see also TD-Linux's post 4 messages ago).
Or if you choose Fluxbox, you can easily rewrite the menu and put them directly in the menu, with some explanations on the background picture.

I am impatient to discover and test your first release

Another question: how do you make the connection to internet ? This can be another problem. (Or to get connected to other computers in a LAN).

[Saturos]

It is based on PCLinuxOS, a full-featured, easy-to-use linux-distro. I just customize it to my needs and voila - we have BZAnywhere. Therefore I am not worrying about network-connection at all. And it will have KDE as standard DE/WM. Why? Because KDE rocks! And because I love KDE. People can switch to a light-weight window-manager if they like but the default will be KDE.
Oh well... I need to work on the thingy. I want it to be released... but very few time.

[Tanner]

How far is it in completion? (4 months, 4 pages )

And I am also willing to host.

-Tanner

[Tanner]

Also, heres a question that popped into my head while looking at Linux LiveCDs. You say theres going to be lots of stuff (p2p, email, chat....) programs besides BZFlag. Would that require us to set up each one everytime we use BZAnywhere? Not sure about you, but I think that would get a bit annoying after some time of using the cd.

-Tanner

[TD-Linux]

If you had too much time, you could have it try to mount /home on a floppy disk so you could keep your settings for BZFlag and other programs. If the mount fails, then just mount it on the ramdrive as normal.

[goblin]

Also, heres a question that popped into my head while looking at Linux LiveCDs. You say theres going to be lots of stuff (p2p, email, chat....) programs besides BZFlag. Would that require us to set up each one everytime we use BZAnywhere? Not sure about you, but I think that would get a bit annoying after some time of using the cd.

I carry a DSL around with me on a USB pen-drive. Very cool, very convenient. Since such a pen-drive is read-write, I can also store files on it.

If you can put BZAnywhere on a USB pen-drive of 1GB, then you should be able to save your settings on it too. Truly BZAnywhere!

[ajh60]

i no --- hard 2 imagine but not all people have a flash drive. but however i think it's a great idea to allow saving to a floppy and maybe if you have one to a usb stick. it would also help if you had a splash screen something like this:
http://ajh60.byethost13.com/avs/splash.PNG
(lol, paint'd and sorry its so big). and support for proxys (suprise suprise DeCS havent blocked bzbb).

[Saturos]

I am the art-man!
Be sure that BZAnywhere will feature a good looking splash-screen if it will be released somewhen.

[ajh60]

lol satu, i need a copy of fotoshop... lol

[Matt?]

what is the expected dilivery date?

[Sonnentier]

The project sounds very interesting, but I wonder if it would work in my school. I mean with the network, I'm not sure how the Address releasing works. And if a BZAnywhere would work.
We have Celeron 2,4Ghz and a Springdale Intel Extreme Onboard GPU.

[A Meteorite]

The project sounds very interesting, but I wonder if it would work in my school. I mean with the network, I'm not sure how the Address releasing works. And if a BZAnywhere would work.
We have Celeron 2,4Ghz and a Springdale Intel Extreme Onboard GPU.

Being on a school network they probably use static DHCP, but that won't make a difference as the school's router will still hand out IPs (because your MAC address doesn't change, and "regular" DHCP will just hand out IPs to whatever computer that is connected to the network). The only problem I see is if your school uses special software to get in on the network, which I doubt...

You're going to want to make sure you have at least 256MB of RAM otherwise it will be really slow (or possibly not run at all). A Celeron 2.4Ghz will work quite nicely.

[romfis]

Knoppix 5.0.1 Released!

Download:
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/
Torrent:
http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/

CD: 696.26 MB
DVD: 4.04 GB

And BZFlag 2.0.6 is on DVD Edition, not on CD Edition!

romfis

[silvercat]

umm... OC3 isn't 100 mbps, its 135. Ah well...

[ajh60]

progress?

i'ts been a long time.

[Saturos]

It's done when it's done.

I dont have much time for it at the moment due to school-stuff. In the next week I cant do anything, the weeks afterwards are reserved for BZAnywhere. I aim to release in mid-july, maybe in the end of july.
The problem is the following: I use PCLinuxOS as a base for BZAnywhere - but the last PCLOS-version is very old, it has KDE 3.3 for example. So it might be better to wait for a new release to have all the cool new programs.
We'll see.

Edit: I just discovered http://www.capnkirby.com/MiniME.html ! Wow. That seems like its exactly what I need. I hope it has the mklivecd-scripts...