The Gestahlian Empire

Alienware, the Dell owned gaming computer manufacturer, is now offering Alienware X51's (My Machine) pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows 7 or 8. In my opinion I an quite excited, I love Linux, but the only area that it is not up to snuff with is high end gaming. Ever since Stream was announced for Linux , the opportunities for gaming on the OS has gone into overdrive, and looks like even Alienware is attempting to see what they can do with it. It looks like these computers will also come with Steam per-installed as well. Since Ubuntu Linux is free, the computer is even $100 less at $599 vs $699 for the Windows equivalent. As or the machine itself, I own the Windows 7 X51, and I'm quite pleased with it. It is a very compact, yet powerful machine, that I can connect to my own monitor or the HDTV in the living room. I run Linux Mint on mine through Virtualbox, and have a Windows 3.11 setup through DosBox. To read more info about these machines go here . To lear...

When using Linux, it is helpful to know the keyboard commands because unlike Windows, GNU/Linux is a command line based OS, and all the fancy GUIs are just that, GUIs. They are not necessary, basically. If you don't know the commands though  I found a handy wallpaper that shows several important commands for the terminal and also for VIM (A command line based text editor). I believe these commands also work for the most part on Mac OSX, since that is a UNIX based OS. (I don't expect then all to work though for that.) You can download the image  here .

I don't know why I didn't know about this until now, but Steam, the popular PC gaming platform created by Valve has released a beta version of their client on Linux. I have been a long time Linux fan, using it for my C++ programming as well has enjoying the overall freedom of the operating system. I use Linux Mint alongside my Windows 7, Windows 3.11 (Keep it around for some old school fun, and yes I use Dosbox as well), and Windows XP desktop setups. Now in order to get Steam for linux, I assume you will need a distro based on Debian (The downloaded file is a .deb) All you need to do is go to the  Steam Download Page  and click on the Linux (beta) download. Open the file and let your package manager install the necessary packages it needs. Afterwards Steam should open and start updating to the most recent version. There are even a few games that already run on Linux like Team Fortress 2. The full lis...