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Implementation Guides

Games on PCQLinux 2006

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

PCQLinux has always been a serious home and professional

user's operating system with different applications for serious desktop work

and hard core server level stuff. However, something that users have always

wanted is some small games for entertainment — and for the first time,

PCQLinux does have some small but nice games to play with.

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XScorch



Ever played the classic  DOS game “Scorched Earth” or it multitudes of
clones like the GWBasic “Gorillas”, Pocket Tanks, etc? Well, whether you

have or haven't, believe me, that this is one game that you can get very

addicted to.


Fine tune your

workstation

Switch

off services 



After Installing PCQLinux 2006 on your workstation, you have to

fine tune the OS. First of all remove unnecessary services that may not be

required, but are still running and hogging system resources. You can

switch off these unnecessary services in a following way. Open a terminal

window and issue “Setup” This will open a CLI interface showing

various options, here select the 'system services' option and press

the enter key. This will show you the list of services running on that

machine, scroll down the list and check out services that is not required

on you machine at this time. Running services are denoted by the star mark

next to the service name. To switch off a service,

just press the space bar after selecting it. Once you have switched

off services that are not required, press ok and save the settings and

reboot your machine.



Remove

unwanted packages



You may have to resort to this, if you run out of disk space. To

remove packages, you can use synaptic package manager or kpackage. To use

it launch Kpackage  from

Start>System. It will open a GUI interface divided into two panes. The

left one will show you the package name and right show the details of the

package. Now from the left panel, select the name of the package that you

want to uninstall and click the uninstall button given just below the

right-panel.



Swap

off



The swap partition plays a very important role in determining your

system's performance, It is recommended to keep the swap partition

double your systems RAM. System performance can decline if your RAM is

larger compared to swap partition size. In such situations, its better to

switch off the swapping process. To switch this off, open the terminal

window and issue the command. 'swapoff —a '.



If you

want to switch back the swap again then issue command 'swapon —a'



Enable

DMA



By default PCQLinux 2006 has DMA disabled, and this can lead to

performance degradation. So you need to enable DMA on your PCQLinux 2006

workstation. To do this, open the terminal window and issue the command.



#

hdparm - -u1 -d1 —A1 /dev/hda

The goal of the game is to eliminate enemy tanks on various

terrains in a turn-based play. For doing this, each tank gets a turn where the

player can use a variety of weapons to cause havoc.

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There are a number of weapons in XScorch — all the way

from the humble missile to nukes, dirt bombs, cluster bombs, napalm, plasma

weapons etc. When a player gets a turn, he can select the weapon he wishes to

use and target an enemy tank by changing the firing angle and speed of the

weapon. If the target is fine, the enemy gets destroyed — if not, he gets a

turn to try to destroy you. Be ready to waste tons of time with this one.

Fortune



This is yet another UNIX classic for you. Fortune prints out a random quote

from the many different themed databases available. You can use this random

quote in many different places — for instance a popup quote of the day every

time you login, an email signature, etc.

We've also included a number of optional, but interesting

fortune cookie databases — such as BOFH, Star Wars, Calvin and Hobbes, etc.

After it's installed, simply type 'fortune' at the shell to get a new

fortune every time.

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LinCity-ng



A city simulator like SimCity that let you create and manage a complete

city. The objective of the game is to  build and maintain a city. You need

to feed, house, jobs and goods for the residents of your city as well as make

sure the city is environment friendly and has a good economy. Of course, since

you are the creator of the city, this is just a guideline — you can go the

opposite way and have a crime ridden city where you are the big boss as well.

BZFlag



This is an online-only multiplayer game that can become very addictive

quickly. Battle Zone Capture the Flag is a fun filled game of action and mayhem.

Teams of tank-like vehicles can steal the flag of the

opposing team and try to get it back to their own team area — in essence

capturing the enemy's flag — at the same time preventing the enemy from

doing the same. The game can be fast based and frantic depending on the server

you connect to and very addictive. If you are a fan of first person perspective

shoot-em-ups, try this game for some frantic first person action.

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NeverBall



This is a game that requires a lot of concentration, great reflexes and a

quick eye.

The objective of the game is to guide a ball from a

starting point to the ending point through a series of ever increasing

difficulty of mazes. You also need to collect points on the way by picking up

the small gold coins and other gifts.

Now this may sound easy, but the difficult part comes in

guiding the ball. The maze exists in a 3-dimensional space and you have to tilt

the platform to get the ball moving in the direction you want it to go. And the

more you tilt, the faster the ball moves. So getting the ball to go exactly

where you want is very, very difficult without a lot of practice. Prepare to get

highly frustrated, but with a lot of fun, in this game.

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