Episode: 1764
Title: HPR1764: Introduction to Rogue Class Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1764/hpr1764.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:00:53

---

This is HPR Episode 1764 entitled Introduction to Road Class Linux.
It is hosted by Frank Mel and in about 17 minutes long.
The summary is Road Class Linux in a specialty distribution of Linux for playing the old games.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello, this is Frank Bell.
Today I want to talk about a special purpose Linux distribution called Road Class Linux.
Road Class describes itself as a toy Linux distribution for playing games and reading books.
It features turn-based games such as puzzles and road-like games.
It gets the name Road Class from the idea of the road-like games.
I've never been much of a gamer.
I watched my son play games.
Both of them, there are a few years apart.
The older boy grew up when video games at the mall were still a thing.
And then when we got a computer, he loved himself some computer games.
He particularly favored strategy games.
So I just say civilization, he liked war games, but he liked the ones where the strategy was more important than the shooting.
Whereas my younger boy pretty much liked first-person shooters.
Those were the kinds of games that he would go to.
Whereas my younger boy pretty much liked first-person shooters.
Duke Nukem and others that I can't remember the name of.
I watched how much effort they put into becoming good at the games and beating the levels and progressing.
And I realized I had too much real life to get good at those games.
So I never really had been much of a computer gamer unless you count double-canfield solitaire in the PSOL fan club package.
Which is a two-deck solitaire game where strategy actually does influence the outcome.
So how did I get interested in road-class Linux?
I ran across a post at LinuxQuestions.org which mentioned that it had a Sherlock Holmes mystery book called Murder at the Diogenes Club.
And I remember my kids using the Choose Your Own Endings book where depending on the choice you made on page 85 it might send you to page 43 or to page 22 for the next step.
And although I'm not much of a game or I am very much a Sherlockian.
I've read the canon numerous times, I have several biographies of Holmes.
The copy of the Sherlock Holmes scrapbook is staring at me from the bookshelf right now.
I've got the annotated Sherlock Holmes by WMS Baringold which if you like Sherlock Holmes is a must have.
So that piqued my interest. So I went looking for road-class Linux.
The website of course will be in the show notes. It's road-class. Let me check my notes here.
Russell the paper lightly so everyone knows I'm checking my notes roadclass.org.
It's heavily based on Slackware. I have it loaded up in virtual box. It's really designed to be run in a VM or possibly in some kind of kiosk mode and is highly specialized.
Now before going farther what is a road-class game? Not being a gamer I had no idea.
So here's a description taken from a link provided at the road-class website.
The road-class games focus on tactical play. The unit of action is based on the individual adventure.
It's not twitch oriented. There were not mine. Like Quake rewarding reflexes in well trained actions nor is it strategy oriented like civilization or warcraft.
It's based on hack and slash. It's not really about plot development or telling a story. The game is about killing things and acquiring treasure.
And again I remember my older boy looking at his collection of hit points and how much of this and how much of that he had with some of the games he played.
They are random games. A road-like is a dungeon crawler where no two games can be the same. There's variability. You might get different maps, different patterns as you play different games.
Another characterization is permadeath. When you die you die. You can't restore from a save game. Also complex interactions of properties.
While the commands are simple the potential interactions are not. This writer's favorite example is equipping a silver ring as a weapon in order to damage a creature vulnerable to silver but not one's other weapons.
There's an editor comment here that this matches what he calls the hack branch, hack being one of these games of the road-like games but not the Ang band branch. Ang band being another one of these games.
And the last characterization that this description includes is theme rolling monsters. In other words if a monster is in your way and you are stronger than it you can simply plow right through it and it won't affect you you won't notice it.
The road-class Linux comes on in two CD star dot ISO images. One of the neat things I learned when I was installing this in virtual box was how to use the machine item on the virtual box menu to eject the first CD ISO and load the second CD ISO.
The second CD is just more games. If you just want to play some games the first CD is the only one you need. When you first boot up it boots to the system menu.
And that includes items for the joystick setup your mouse setup network clock audio display and so on. I did find in both the instances I've installed this on two different machines that it did not automatically configure the network.
I had to actually go into the network setup item on the system menu and tell it to connect to the wired network or in this case virtual boxes net connection.
The navigation I found with the mouse in both my installations can be a little flaky especially around the edges of the virtual box screen.
But the navigation using the arrow keys and the inner key is extremely reliable so I just scroll down to the end of the system setup menu to the item back to the main menu.
And there you have favorites which is empty unless you add a game to it. The games item for apps and back to the system menu.
So we'll take a quick look at what's included under apps and then there are various manuals, a file manager, a web browser.
The default web browser is links LINKS. There's a text to speech which I have not tested on IRC client. Again I have not tested it.
A screenshot item and the command prompt and a VNC item and a place where you can look at your user installed apps.
For the VNC item if you open it up at a place where you can enter a VNC server or address and I click cancel out of there.
There are several different command prompts none of which are the common command prompts.
There's SDL term, VIN term, FPcon and even DOS box as some of these games actually run under DOS box.
So let's navigate back to the main menu and get to the important thing.
I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the games. If you're interested in these you'll be able to figure out pretty nicely yourself.
But just to give an idea of what some of the games are, I'll just read some from the menu. There's Adam which I've never heard of.
Ingband which I had, a D&D game, something called Fargo. There's also GNU chess and we'll take a look at the GNU chess and I can run it.
And what I'm not saying it doesn't seem to be a way to play interactively with other players. That's what I was curious about and the skate takes me back.
Just to look at the menu for under GNU chess, there's an item to run the game, there's an item for documentation and there's an item to add it to your favorites.
Sometimes in addition to the documentation item there might be a fourth item for manuals depending on what kind of documentation is available for that game.
But that's a fairly typical arrangement of any one of the menus for any game. Let's see, other games, Hydra Slayer, one called Ivan, Last Rogue, the original Rogue, Miningband which is like Ingband.
The one I was particularly on, the Sherlock Holmes is under the menu item Esprots, Esprots is the Esprots Z machine interpreter and that's what runs the game books. One game book comes with it, there's Z Rogue and there's Murder at the Diogenes Club and some links where you can find additional games.
And this particular menu item Esprots actually opens in links, in the links browser so I go to File and Exit to get back to the main menu.
One other item I want to mention in particular, there's an item called Puzzles and when you get in there, there's a whole load of puzzles, most of which are things you're familiar with.
They may have different names but they're very similar to puzzles you might have played with, if you played GNOME games or KDE games or even certain Windows games, there's Mind Sweeper type games, there's a slide the little squares around, type of game, there's a snake type of game, but a whole bunch of them, if you like puzzles this will keep you busy for quite a while.
So that's it, that's a little introduction to Rogue Class, the website's pretty straightforward, there is a forum, they have a forum hosted at linuxquestions.org, the link for the forum will be in the show notes and there is a post at that forum which if you want to see a diagram or graphic illustrating the different graphical subsystems that are used in Rogue Class Linux,
you can follow that link and see the representation of all the different graphical subsystems that the distro maintainer has put in here.
And now to get out of this, I'll simply paste down to the end of the games menu, go back to the main menu, go back to system and go to shutdown and I will select power off.
If you like the old games, the ones that people played before all the fancy color and movement stuff came along, you really would want to give Rogue Class a try.
I gave a short presentation on Rogue Class, just you know, here it is and this is what it looks like to my love and the conversation quickly went to my fellow attendees reminiscing about how much time they had spent playing this game or that game.
Thank you very much.
You've been listening to Hecker Public Radio at Hecker Public Radio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hecker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the infonomicon computer club and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution, Share a Light, 3.0 license.
