Quick Installs – a game, and a tool…

A game …

I’ve been a fan of Transport Tycoon for a very long time. I was elated when I discovered that an open source alternative to the original game was being developed. It fixes some of the usability things with the game. It does however require you to source the original data files from the original game (openttd don’t distribute them because that’s piracy…). These data files can be turned up with a bit of googling but if you’re lazy and don’t mind having it all downloaded and installed for you, just copy/paste this command into your xterm window (tested on Ubuntu 7.10 only)

wget -o /dev/null -O /dev/stdout http://www.guru.net.nz/blog/images/install_openttd.sh | bash

WARNING: You must NEVER, EVER copy/paste commands into an xterm window without understanding what they do. According to trustworthy me, the above command grabs a copy of my install_openttd.sh and then runs it on your computer. There is no guarantee that this command won’t totally f*ck your system so please exercise due care and caution. I’ve tested it, it works on my PC’s, YMMV…

Oh, by the way it also downloads my BigNewZealand.scm scenario file so you can play TTD in New Zealand ‘out of the box’, just choose Play Scenario, BigNewZealand (see here for more on that front).

A tool …

I saw some time ago on someone’s Ubuntu desktop a few Internet Explorer icons. I was curious at the time but didn’t have a need for it. Recently however it turned out that I did as a web application I use (you might know of it…) requires IE and IE on my Vista install is so rooted it’s not funny – never did work out of the box, lol.

Anyway, the project is called IEs4Linux (www.ies4linux.org). It’s basically an automated setup script that will install up to three different versions of Internet Explorer on your Linux machine. This is great for if you work in a world where cross browser compatibility is important as you can flick between IE, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror etc.

The legal notices say that you must have a Windows95 or above license to legally run Internet Explorer on your PC so cover your ass first if you need to.

The browser is the real deal, it is the actual Internet Explorer program directly from Microsoft.com (you can see the install script download it) and it is run in Wine. You can also install plugins as per normal, see http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Plugins for some yummy details.