One thing my games tutor Brad suggested was learning Linux and C++, both which are useful things to know and understand. Both of which I have actually wanted to know for a long time.
Strangely enough I had actually downloaded a version of Linux a week or so back, openSuSE 10.4. My Dad and I had previously experimented with this distribution of Linux back at versions 6.4 and then again at 8.0. We had always had problems with the operating system, never quite working properly. However, since I had been ill over the weekend and stuck up in my room and bored I decided to get Linux installed on my barely used laptop. After having some difficulties with swap partitions and the boot record (I had managed to mess the hard drive up some how) I managed to install the operating system and everything has worked perfectly from then. All the hardware compatibility issues I had found with previous versions were gone, and I am very happy with the system, and my laptop is at last getting use again.
While exploring the installed programs included with the OS and the other software on the disk I came across a program under development called qt designer. Bored, and having no idea what it was I opened it and found it was a widget maker. This uses C++ as the language for programming these widgets. I have worked my way through a couple of the basic tutorials, managing to get "hello world" and similar stupidly basic examples working. Hopefully as I continue with this I will learn C++ (which seems very similar to the actionscript I was using in my Flash Game project, so hopefully this won't be too hard).
So not only am I learning Linux and C++, I am learning C++ in Linux. I am also playing the Curse of Monkey Island which has nothing to do with anything, but its fun! (apparently using ScummVM this can be run on Linux, which if I was doing would actually tie in to this post but....I'm not.) :)
Also working on my website, started from scratch again. I wouldn't like to think about how many times I have done this. I guess its because I never really spend all that much time and effort making it look how I want, so whenever I come back to it I don't like it. Anyway I'm keeping it simple for now and will upload soon and hopefully put stuff on it. I keep writing about it in my posts so that when I read them back I will feel guilty and get on with it :P
The fact I have been posting so much lately shows how bored I am lately! The next thing I need to do for my course is get hold of Unreal Tornament 2003 (think thats the version I need) and a book on the game engine as we will be designing a level for it next term, which I am looking forward to but can imagine will be quite difficult so I should really get learning it now!
web pages I looked at and used to fix my hard drive issues in linux:
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-to-repair-corrupt-mbr-and-boot.html
http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialAdditionalHardDrive.html
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/mounting.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-33858.html
