Introduction

Writing reviews of Linux programs might sound like an easy option. I mean, some developers spend fantastic amounts of time honing their latest creation, making sure it’s exactly right. And all I have to do is load it up and destroy all their hard work in a few carefully chosen words. (I assure you that, despite appearances, most of these words are carefully chosen.)

I should make it clear that I don’t take my responsibility lightly. When I decided to take a look at FreeCiv, a GPL’d clone of Civilizations, I made sure that I thoroughly tested it before passing judgment. Actually, I spent much longer testing it that I’d intended but more of that later.

Starting up

At this point I’d normally report on the problems I had with the installation. Happily there’s nothing to report this time: the RPM’s installed and worked without issue.

The only ‘funny’ is that you can’t just fire up FreeCiv and go. First you have to start the server process, add any computer players (AI’s), set their level as appropriate, and tune any other parameters. It’s not really that odd or difficult, but it is different to the original, and perhaps it could be easier. (Perhaps the client application could default to being the server if there isn’t already one?)

Once the game has been started in the server process, a familiar looking screen appears. The icons are quite well drawn and will be familiar to anyone who has played the original. My flat-mate, a more experienced player than myself, claims that the graphics aren’t as good. (But then he still plays Civilizations version 1 just in case 2 isn’t as good!)

Play the game

In the same way as in Civilizations, each player gets a turn where they can give each unit orders, create cities and alter what ‘stuff’ each city produces.

It’s all very straight-forward. You can move units around using the cursor keys. You can give them orders using the ‘Actions’ menu. You can check out the composition of a city by double-clicking on it. I’ve never played Civ ‘in anger’ but I managed to pick up the mechanics of it all just by playing around.

If I had needed documentation, by the way, I wouldn’t have been disappointed. There’s rather a lot of it and it seems thorough. However, like much of the game, and Unix in general, it does assume that you know what you’re talking about. I don’t see that as a big problem, though, as there are plenty of tutorials and FAQ’s on the web, some of which are FreeCiv specific and some of which apply to Civilizations but will still be applicable.

There are a few small niggles, however. For example, after using the menus you can’t use the cursor keys to move a unit around the screen. (You need to click back on the main window first.)

Overall

I don’t think that it would be entirely fair if I said I didn’t like it because I never did very well at it! Firstly, it proves that the computer players are of a good standard (I set them on the easy level!). Secondly, even though I was losing I was enjoying it. With each game I became more proficient and lasted longer, although whether this was due to my leadership or the geography I’m not sure.

Either way, I’m inclined to try and find out more. This is, perhaps, the highest praise I can think to give to a game.

Note that at the time of writing the beta version of 1.8.0 had just been posted to the FreeCiv web-site.

Introduction

Many people believe that wine gets better as it gets older. This, however, is only partly true. Some wines taste much better young and all go bad eventually.

What does this have to do with Linux software?

Well, AfterStep is my window manager of choice (see my review of BlackBox for a discussion on what a window manager is) but, more because of laziness than anything else, I’ve been using version 1.0. I never got around to upgrading, but since I was going to do a review I figured that I’d better move to release 1.4 — the latest stable version.

Perhaps I’m getting old; perhaps it’s inertia of some kind; perhaps I just haven’t given 1.4 a chance to prove itself; but I prefer good old 1.0.

What is AfterStep?

I’m getting ahead of myself here. What is AfterStep?

Fairly apparent from the title, it’s a window manager that tries to look and feel like NeXTstep, Steve Jobs rather fabulous follow-up to the Macintosh.

Version 1 took that quite literally. It had a dock (“wharf” in AfterStep-speak) to the right of the screen, pop-up menu’s and gradiated title bars just like the NeXT machine. The dock is a column of large coloured icons that can either launch applications, shrink an application such as xload to display useful information, or both. It’s now in a number of other window managers, notably WindowMaker, but AfterStep was there first. 1 had little else — simple but effective.

For later versions, the authors obviously thought they needed to add stuff. (They seem not to subscribe to the ‘perfection is not when you can add nothing, but when you can take nothing away’ school of thought.) 1.4 takes the basics and adds more docks, more furniture on the windows, themes and support applications.

Installation

You know me by now — basically capable, but lazy. Rather than grab the source, I downloaded an RPM file and upgraded from 1. I expected 1.4 to take all my current settings, but it didn’t quite work like that.

In fact, the first time I tried it didn’t work. XDM simply flashed out of existence for a second and then reappeared.

Okay, dive back in as root and read the documentation. What’s needed is a GNUstep directory that can be copied from a shared directory. It’s not difficult and it is documented, but why can’t AfterStep do it for you? And how much do I have to copy? My home directory now have loads of icons in it — don’t think /home can put up with so much detritus for long.

And copying lots of configuration data from a central location meant that all my setting from 1 were lost. I’d quite like my old settings back, please.

In Use

It took me a while to get AfterStep to how I like it. I wanted a single dock filled with my favorite apps, a clock, resource monitor and something to track my PPP connection to the Internet. It’s all in a configuration file (much like AS1 but in a different place) the basics of which are relatively simple. I think I’ll use the separately available configuration program for anything more complex.

1.4 seems to have a much greater emphasis on multiple desktops, so much so that in the default configuration there are 16 of them! It’s quite neat that they can be split into categories rather (the defaults are Work, WWW, Mail and Games), but I suspect that most people would run out of memory before they run out of desktops. Personally I’ve never got used to multiple desktops and usually just have one very busy one.

Overall

Much in the same way that people use Windows because they don’t know anything better exists, I’ve used AfterStep for well over a year. I thought doing this review would kick start me into using something newer and better.

It didn’t. In many objective ways the newer version is an improvement. It looks better, it’s more configurable and more easily configured and it’s more standard. But something is missing. It doesn’t seem to be a huge improvement over 1, yet has a much larger memory foot-print and popular support is waning in favour of WindowMaker which seems to be advancing much more quickly.

So, sorry guys, but I’m sticking with version 1 and am very tempted to take a look at some alternatives.

Introduction

The choice of window manager is often a very emotive subject for a Linux user. Some swear by the simplicity of Fvwm2 — often a standard install for a Linux distribution. Others prefer something that looks like Windows 95 (there are a number that do this). Yet another group prefer a more all-embracing ‘environment’ such as KDE or GNOME.

Now I’m not advocating any particular manager here (for the record, I normally use AfterStep), I just want to get my work done.

So, we come to one of the newer, lesser know alternatives called BlackBox.

What is a Window Manager?

I suspect that most people here know what a window manager is, but for people that are more familiar with the way Microsoft Windows does things I’ll give a quick overview.

With all versions of Windows, the look and feel — the way that every window has a minimise button and that the desktop has a taskbar and a ‘My Computer’ icon — is tied directly to the underlying GUI framework (without getting into some programming jargon it’s difficult to be much more precise).

With Unix and X things are different. X is the underlying GUI framework. Using it you can paint things on a ‘generic’ screen rather than worrying about what graphics card you have, you can find the location of the mouse and what the keyboard is doing. But X doesn’t say what the windows look like (in fact, it doesn’t even insist that you have them), which buttons go where or what they look like. Window Managers (and widget libraries such as Qt or GTK) add this on top of X.

Like most other things, the Unix approach is far more complex but more powerful.

Look and feel

First impressions are good. When BlackBox starts, an almost CDE-like tool bar sits at the bottom of the screen, resplendent in its 3D-effect, gradated-filled boxes. On the right is the time; on the left is a box showing the current work-space (virtual desktop) and the number of windows open (why?); to the right of this are buttons to move around the various workspaces and to switch to minimise windows; in the middle is a huge gap that, as far as I can tell, serves no useful purpose. Perhaps the authors have plans?

The default application menu, available by right-clicking on the desktop, has a number of useful programs immediately available. Again, it looks good but is not entirely intuitive. For example, menu items with a circle to the left open out sub-menus. Would it not make more sense to have an arrow on the right?

Small programs such as xterm appear immediately, showing that BlackBox is relatively efficient.

Window furniture is fairly standard. The ‘minimise’ button is in the top left, and makes the window vanish. It can be restored by clicking the ‘Icons’ button on the tool bar and then the window name. I generally prefer a more visual approach such as the way Window 95 does it, but this is a perfectly valid and popular approach. On the far right is the close widget and to its left is a ‘fill the whole screen’ button.

Window sizing and moving is implemented in a Mac-like way: drag and drop the title to move the window; drag and drop the bottom right of the window to resize. It might be considered heretical to say so, but I think I prefer the Microsoft drag-and-drop-any-corner approach.

Configuration

Black box is easy to install. Type “xmkmf -a ; make ; make install” and you’re well away. There are a few options that you can change before you start the build, but nothing much worth changing. No option for the installation directory is given which is a shame as I prefer to put non-RPM software in /usr/local rather than any of the ‘normal’ locations.

Like almost everything UNIX, to alter any configuration options on a day-to-day basis requires the editing of a text file (the short-cut menu has a promising sounding ‘Reconfigure’ option, but this just re-reads the file). While the format of the file isn’t too daunting, I’d have preferred a dialog based interface. This is a very common problem with window managers.

All the standard things can be changed, the font, the colours, etc. The configuration file looks similar to the Xdefaults file rather than the more usual Windows ini file — it’s good that BlackBox has some consistency with the rest of X.

Conclusion

BlackBox is a neat piece of software. The look and feel are impressive, the performance is good, installation is simple, stability for beta software is excellent (one crash during testing), but there is something missing.

I think that something must be individuality. I don’t see much here that can’t be achieved by configuring many other window managers.

What’s here?

Welcome to “The Penguin Says,” the Linux application review site.

There are many sites providing links to Linux software, but very few that rate and review them. That is what you’ll find here. Although I fully support free software, you’ll find open and honest reviews here. If an application is a load of rubbish, or too flaky for real use, I’ll say so. But then, if it shows promise, I’ll mention that too.

You can find more about The Penguin Says here. When you read that text, bear in mind that it was written in the summer on 1998, before Linux became the ‘media-darling’ that it currently appears to be.

The reviews

Here is a list of all the Linux application reviews. Note that they are in alphabetical order rather than the order in which they were written.

• Abacus
• AfterStep
• BlackBox
• Cooledit
• FileRunner
• FreeCiv
• GIMP
• LinCity
• Linux
• LyX
• NEdit
• Netscape Communicator
• Psion Series 5
• SFM (Simple File Manager)
• Siag — Pathetic Writer
• StarOffice 4
• StarOffice 5
• tkCVS
• UAE
• WindowMaker
• WINE
• Corel WordPerfect
• WWWThreads

All reviews were performed on my Pentium 120 with 32Mb of memory, running RedHat 5.0 with all patches up to June 1998.