Uncluttered Minds Do Not Care...

There are no profound revelations here...at least not in this post.

It just serves to reinforce something we already know.

Chase, Ami and Zeneda are three fairly recent recipients of HeliOS Project computers, ages 12, 13 and 11 respectively.

When we go into a home to give a child a computer, one of the first things we do is explain to them that we have installed Linux on their computer, not Windows.

This announcement is usually met with even stares or shrugs.

They don't care...they are just jacked that they are finally entering into the tech age at home.

Most times, any concern expressed is with the parent.

Of course it would be.

Their minds are locked into doing things one way.  We often address this concern quickly.  Once we boot the computer, the machine becomes the realm of the child and aside from parental controls, the machine belongs to the child.  We explain that explicitly.

If the child had any qualms about what Linux is, they evaporate once we start the computer and click the Applications menu.

Our custom distro (made possible by Uck) is a playground completely filled with learning opportunities.  Many of the applications were taken from the Uberstudent distro, but most of them are standard Linux educational apps available from the regular repositories.  The 1.7 gig ISO file produces a live cd/install disk that not only provides hours of entertainment, it includes educational software that meets most any academic need the child will encounter.  Most of our kids however are at the age where they like to play simple games.  We've provided an abundant environment for that.

Once the kid sees and understands the opportunities available to her, any questions or concerns about this not being Windows evaporates.

We haven't explored the correlation yet but many of our students are musically inclined or gifted.  Along with Audacity and score-writing software, we include an application called ZynAddSufFX.   This is an open source synthesizer that absolutely competes, and in some cases outshines commercial offerings costing hundreds of dollars.


We also include some planetary and space exploration software.  Through user comments and interviews, we've found that Stellarium is the best program to offer our star-watching kids.

No installation would be complete without a way to teach our kids typing.  Knowledge of the keyboard is becoming increasingly important so we give them several programs to choose from, including some excellent. online teaching tools. Parents come to realize the importance of these educational programs quickly.

However, we've had our speed bumps.  Recently we gave a student entering his first year of college a Dell D610 laptop.  The next week, the father called us and asked if we would install Windows on his son's computer.  He stated that the small community college "required" Windows for the coursework.

Of course, after contacting the school, we finally drilled down to a two man IT staff that both sported MCSE certs and considered Linux a "hobby" for geeks.

We pick out battles now...a small junior college in South Texas just isn't worth the effort.  Now the Texas Workforce Commission is.  Stay tooned for that battle may be played out publicly here...probably near the end of October.

So yeah, we occasionally run into people who have re-installed Windows.  We refuse to do it for them even if they supply the legitimate copy of Windows.  Many of them have called to ask for help with virus or malware infections.  We simply tell them that if they had left Linux on their child's computer, we would not be having this discussion.

We have yet to discover a situation where the child wanted Windows installed.  To this point, it has always been the parent or guardian.  I tell every parent that if Windows is installed on the computer, we will not support it further.  Sometimes they forget that part of the visit.  We remind them of it and politely point them to Microsoft.com.

Fortunately, we've only encountered this 8 times in the last year.  We've installed 276 computers in that time frame.

One theme we've found to reoccur is that when our kids do have to sit down in front of a Windows machine, they complain about how "hard" it is do do things in Windows.  I find that mildly amusing myself, but then again, I would.

A small victory of sorts occurred in late August with one of the kids I mentioned above.  Ami had sent her Aunt a document she was preparing to turn in for homwork.  It was an .odt file and on que, the aunt called and said she could not open the document.

Ami could have done the simple thing and opened the assignment and then saved it as a doc file.

But she didn't...




She sent her Aunt the link to OpenOffice with installation instructions for Windows.

Geez, I love the audacity of children.

One thing I would like to mention...your support for our HeliOS Project store is beginning to help us greatly in meeting the needs of the project.  Thanks to your purchases, we no longer have to postpone installs and trips to the shop because we don't have the fuel to do so.  This link will take you into our electronic wonderland.

Thanks a bunch.

All-Righty Then

The Consensus is in - Getting Amnesia is Frightening.

I know we covered Frictional's latest release, Amnesia - The Dark Descent on an earlier blog but I cheated on the review and asked you to click on another article to read the excellent one they published.

Oh, you think I'm gonna review this game now...?

No.

It takes me much too long to get through a game of this nature.  Instead, we asked our friend Jaco to play the game and give us his thoughts. 

Just let it suffice to say that this game is freakin' great. And without hype or hyperbole, if you are easily upset or frightened, this is not the game for you.

Trust me.

So Jaco, what do you think of Amnesia, The Dark Descent?

If you are someone who watches a horror movie, and you try your darndest to get the soon-to-be victims on screen to not die of pure stupidity by giving them handy advice like "Don't go into the attic!", "Turn on the light, fool!", "Run AWAY from the guy with the chainsaw!", then this might be the game for you. Time to be the hapless victim.

From Frictional Games, the studio that brought you the Penumbra series, comes a new game in the survival horror/adventure genre. The Penumbra games were quite well received, but they did have a definite "indy" feel to them. With Amnesia, all the lessons learned from their previous titles seem to be bearing fruit. The end result is a slick and well polished title that looks and plays every bit as well as any big studio game.

The story is of a fairly standard "we unleashed something bad and now it's chasing us" variety, but the real genius here is the implementation of it. The game manages to place you on edge and unnerve you in ways that few other games do. From the start, two things are made clear to you. Firstly, play the game to immerse yourself in the experience, not to blast through it as fast as you can. Secondly, the importance of light. More about this later.

You play a character named Daniel, who wakes up in a dark Prussian castle with no recollection of who he is, and from here the story gets revealed to you through various clues and notes that you left to yourself prior to inflicting this amnesia upon yourself, for reasons unknown at the beginning.

You learn that something dark is following you, and that you must head down into the "Inner Sanctum" to kill someone, as this is your only hope of escaping the horror. So you plod hopelessly into the darkness, blindly trusting that completing this disturbing task will achieve this. 

Normally, with horror survival type games, you are always scrambling around for limited resources like ammunition for your shotgun, minigun, flame thrower, or plasma cutter. Not here. In Amnesia: The Dark Descent you are completely defenseless. And what's worse, the castle is unnervingly dark. Your best friend is a lantern, with a pitifully limited amount of oil, and you are always on the lookout for tinderboxes with which to light lamps and candles.

Light is an integral part of the experience. If you are in the dark too long, you start losing your sanity. If you lose your sanity, you start hearing things. And the last thing you need is to be hearing things that aren't there, when there ARE things there lurking in the dark. Things that you cannot defend against. No, your best defense will be a tactical retreat.  Run, don't look back, close doors behind you, barricade them with furniture if you can. You will spend a fair amount of time hiding in dark corners, wondering if the horrid thing chasing you is gone. While hiding in the dark you will hear footsteps, wondering if you are imagining them or if there is still something around the corner.

The end result is consistently creepy. It plays on the trope Nothing Is Scarier (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NothingIsScarier). You are not under constant assault by monsters like with zombie type games, but there's is always a real and dangerous lurking threat and you always need to be on your toes.

Layered underneath this well-crafted visceral experience is an adventure game. You will need to solve some puzzles to progress through the game. Nothing here is particularly innovative, as it mostly just features straight forward "use object on object" and environment/physics type puzzles, but having to do these tasks while constantly on edge is something else.

I am reminded of the tire-changing scene from 28 Days Later. Same here. Imagine having to escape through a door that opens slowly by turning a crank. You physically have to turn the crank, and you know the creature is behind you - on its way towards you - because you can hear it coming. But you don't know how far it is because looking back means you have to stop cranking. So you crank faster.

We mentioned the game on our Wordpress blog host, and someone from there bought the game shortly after. In fact he went from "frankly it looks like a game that I will be too afraid to play" to buying it, then posting a day later with "I've purchased it and started to play. I’m not sure but I think my hair turned gray…. o.O" and a few days later told us that he has to keep a sitcom playing next to the computer to prevent him from having a heart attack.

The graphics and sound get top marks. Even with the limited light, the castle is beautifully rendered, and it makes good use of graphical effects like distortions to depict your fluctuating sanity. The handling of light is also realistic in that if you stand in a well lit room, you can't see out into the dark exterior at all, but if you are completely in the dark, your eyes will slowly adjust.

If your heart can stand this sort of thing, then I fully reccommend this game. However, I have read some comments on discussion forums of people that chickened out partway through. The constant tension is a tad much for some people, and quite understandably so. Amnesia: The Dark Descent does what it does well. 

I tested on a 64-bit Linux Mint, and am impressed that it includes 64-bit binaries. Frame rate was smooth and flawless on my 3 year old Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS with all the settings turned up.

Overall I give it two shivering thumbs up.

- - Jaco Gerber

All-Righty Then...

Frictional Nails The Fear Factor

It's no secret that we're big fans of Frictional, the game company.  Not only do they write great games, they've open sourced their game engine so the rest of the world can learn from it.

Frictional's physics-based engine is different than most any other gameplay in that the "bump and acquire" method of doing things isn't used.  During the game, you must grasp, inspect, move or throw items in the field in order to survive.

And in their newest release, Amnesia...survival is the name of the game.

I played the entire Penumbra trilogy.  I was chased, stomped, torn, shredded, bitten, and most generally ripped asunder.  In the Penumbra series, you could stand and fight if you decided to...not a smart move but you could still do it with a slight chance of surviving.  Frictional game monsters are ultra-powerful and you didn't really stand a chance against them.

In Amnesia, to try to fight them results in 100 percent suicide.

Run and hide...crouch in the darkness or escape to a room, slam the door and barricade it with anything you can.

And in Frictional games, due to their unique game engine, you can physically carry things to the door and do just that.

Just hope you use enough stuff to keep out the thing that wants to kill you.

Look, I suck at traditional shooter games.  I most usually end up as a unrecognizable and clumpy puddle of DNA in most of them but in Amnesia, I get to use the strongest muscle in my body...(not saying much there).  I get to use my brain.

Now as far as reviews I am going to defer to the gaming website; Rock, Paper, Shotgun.  Their findings mirror ours here almost exactly.  Susan Linton over at Tuxmachines.org has also played this and offers her opinion for Linux Journal readers.

If have been authorized to give 10 free download links to anyone who reviews and blogs about the game.  Hey, play a game and get a 20 dollar deal in the meantime.  Email me helios att fixedbylinux dott kom with the link and I will take care of it.

I played this game at 12:30 AM, in a dark room with the door closed and using high quality head phones.  It scared the crap out of me.  No, I mean it scared me.  Not a simple sneak-up-from-behind-and-yell-boo scared.  I'm talking about crescendo-swelled music and sound effects.  I mean, they let you know the horror is approaching and it still frightens you when you see the threat.

One thing to remember.  You don't play Amnesia - The Dark Decent to win...you play it to survive.

Good luck with that.

You can get the game here.

All-Righty Then...

HeliOS Store opens to fund the HeliOS Project

I don't know why it took me so long to get this rolling...part of it was the logistics, the other part was just being slammed with work.  Some recent and significant publicity gained us a ton of great equipment donations.

It also caused a huge influx of requests for computers.  But we have that handled, at least for now.

On top of the busiest time we've ever encountered, we need to move from our current digs.  On September 18th, we are having a recycle day out at our shop in Lakeway.  We tentatively have a Boy Scout troop coming out to help but that is not yet nailed down.  If you have some time to come out and help us sort through the mountain of stuff to get recycled, I would appreciate your participation.

So, as you all know, this is going to cost us some money.

Instead of just posting our current needs, we've decided to open a store of sorts to raise the money we need.  We have some cool and useful stuff and more will be added in the next two weeks.

We recently received a huge donation from Dell.  It wasn't computers or monitors but boxes and boxes of stuff we probably will never use.  But that's not to say that it isn't valuable to someone else.  With that in mind, The HeliOS Project has established a presence on Amazon and Ebay.  Since Ebay and Paypal are joined at the hip, our preferred way of doing business is through Amazon.

I despise Paypal and their horrible business practices but they are a necessary evil for many so I held my nose and had Diane set up a store on Ebay.  However, I will only talk about the Amazon store and let you know what we have.  Some of it is pretty cool stuff.  You can click the appropriate links to see about each of the items.  Make sure the one you click is being offered by The HeliOS Project.

Belkin Surge Protectors:  When we got the 9 pallets of the Dell donation into our warehouse, we found boxes and boxes of these.  Most are 9 or 10 outlet protectors.  These have the phone/cable/LAN protectors included in the build.  They were all used for Dell kiosk openings but you know how long those lasted...about as long as it takes to order a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Dell 2216 PowerConnect 10/100 Switches.  We have a few of these as well.  Some have minor surface scratches but are all tested and work.  We're offering a pretty good price on these but we only have about 20 of them so it's first come first served.

Aten 4 port DVI Video Splitter:  This is probably a special-use item but we have 7 more of them and Aten makes the top-of-the-line model.  These allow you to show what you have on your computer or projector on 4 other monitors or screens.  They sell new for 300-400 dollars but because they are used, we are letting them go for a fraction of that.

Dell Multimedia Keyboard:  We took enough to last us the next three years, based on the past two years numbers and are offering the rest for sale.  What surprised me most about these keyboards was that the function keys actually open what they are supposed to open in Linux.  The home button opens Nautilus or Konqueror, the mail opens whatever client you have installed, (tested on Evolution, T-bird and Claws) and the sound knob works to adjust your system volume.  We've cleaned these inside and out and they all test to work perfectly.

 Laptop RAM - DDR2 PC5300  When we did our bi-weekly pickup at I-Tech Electronics, we found half a shoe box full of donated DDR2 PC5300 laptop RAM.  This is great RAM but honestly, we've only just begun getting laptop donations that take this DDR2.  Most of the laptops we get still demand DDR PC2100, 2700 and 3200.  I don't think you'll find a better deal on used RAM.  We will test each piece as we get the shipment order.



We still have several HeliOS Project t-shirts available for sale at 12.00 per shirt.  Contact Skip Guenter at skip at skipsjunk dottt net to make sure he has your size and color. 


At any rate, thanks for looking at what we have.  If you rather deal with Ebay, email me as stated below and I will send you the links.  If you want to be updated on new items, email me via the contact us page at http://www.heliosinitiative.org and let me know.

And as always...thanks for helping us do what we do.

All-Righty Then