Linux Frag

Replace Alsa With OSS v4

2008-10-30T03:36:00.000-04:00

Reason to move from alsa to oss v4:

Includes a transparent software mixer (vmix) in kernel space. This means multiple applications can access the sound device at the same time without problems.
The vmix mixer controls allow you to adjust the volume of each application individually.
Better support for some sound card models, for example for the Creative X-Fi.
Sound quality is usually better.
Better support for applications written for the OSS API, of course. The OSS API is widely spread and a lot of applications support it. The ALSA's OSS API emulation, however, is often buggy.

First head over to the Open Sound System website and grab the package for your plaform. Now we need to install some packages before we install OSS v4. Do the following:

sudo apt-get install build-essential sed gawk libtool libgtk2.0-dev binutils gcc libsdl1.2debian-all libesd0 libsox-fmt-oss mpg123 gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad libasound2-plugins

After those packages install lets hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and drop to the terminal. If you dont already have it installed, make sure you install htop.

sudo apt-get install htop

Now lets run htop and kill gdm in the process list.

sudo htop

After gdm has been killed its time to install OSS v4. Do so with the following command:

sudo dpkg -i oss-linux-4.0-1016_amd64.deb

* Note: package name will vary all depending on your machine architecture *

OSS v4 will start building the sound modules and once done detect your card. This is optional but lets reconfigure linux-sound-base to use OSS instead of Alsa.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-sound-base

Then choose OSS and your done. Reboot your machine and OSS will start automatically. To setup your mixer settings you can use OSS v4's gui mixer with the following command:

ossxmix

And to save your mixer settings you can use the following command:

savemixer

Roma Victor MMO

2008-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Looking for a sandbox mmo focused on open pvp and centered around Romans and Barbarians? Then maybe Roma Victor is for you. I used to play this MMO a good while back and it always ticked me off having to use Windows to play it. Well one day I had enough and vowed to never use Windows again. Well needless to say withdrawl hit me hard since I wanted to play my favorite game at the time (Roma Victor). I stopped over at winehq.org and peeked to see if anyone had got the game working. With my luck it was listed as not working period. So I began my attempt to get this game working on wine. Well in the end it proved successful so below I'm presenting a guide for you all which I had previously posted in the wine appdb and Roma Victor site.

1. Install the gecko rendering engine via this command:

wine iexplore www.winehq.org

2. Install the following using winetricks http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks or your prefered method:
* MS Visual Basic 6 Runtime
* MS Visual C++ 6 SP4 Runtime
* DirectX 9

sh winetricks vb6run vcrun6 directx9

3. Install Roma Victor:

wine RV-Patcher-230-setup.exe

4. Copy GZIPLibrary.DLL from Roma Victor directory to your windows/system32 directory and then register the DLL (adjust the directories accordingly if your locations are different):

cp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Red\ Bedlam/Roma\ Victor/GZIPLibrary.DLL ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/GZIPLibrary.DLL

wine regsvr32 CGZipLibrary.DLL

5. Override some configuration settings using the Wine Configuration manager:

* Applications tab: Add a new application, and point it to the Roma Victor Patcher executable; set the OS version to Windows 2000. Add another application for the Roma Victor executable and set its OS version to Windows XP.

* Libraries tab: override the following DLLs:
dsound - native/builtin
ole32 - native/builtin
oleaut32 - native/builtin

Optional Registry Keys

Start the registry editor via this command:

wine regedit

Then navigate and add the following:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\]

Add Key "Direct3D"

Add String to new key and name it "DirectDrawRenderer" then double click the new string and enter the value "opengl"

Add String "Multisampling" with value of "enabled"

Add String "VideoMemorySize" with value of "256" (use whatever your videocard memory is, for example mine is 320mb so I use "320" instead of "256"

Empathy vs Pidgin

2008-10-30T00:27:00.000-04:00

While Pidgin for the time being has loads more plugins than Emapthy one would have to think that Pidgin might be getting replaced in the near future. Empathy will try to fill the void of audio/video amongst the supported protocols, something Pidgin has yet to be able to accomplish. Lets have a quick look and the two apps side by side.

Emapthy is shown on the left while Pidgin is shown on the right. The differences are very few just glancing at the above two screenshots. One place empathy lacks atm for most linux gamers is that an Xfire plugin hasn't been made to work with Empathy yet. This should change sometime in the very near future since Empathy supports all of Pidgins protocols. So I'd imagine the Gfire team will either release a version for Empathy or some user will get tired of waiting and create a profile for Xfire for use with Empathy. The big hipe with Empathy is, is that it uses the Telepathy backend. I figure its only a matter of time before Ubuntu drops Pidgin in support for Empathy since Empathy has been adopted into Gnome.

Ubuntu Speed

2008-10-29T22:51:00.000-04:00

This article will go over the basic tweaks I use on Ubuntu after a new install to get the distro up2par with my tastes. Most if not all should be familiar to anyone who has previously tweaked their Ubuntu install.

*Note: This pertains to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex*

Processes Removal:

Network Manager (replaced with wicd)
Power Management (acpi-support,acpid,laptop-mode,hotkeys-setup,powernowd,vbesave)
Logging (syslogd,klogd,cron,anacron,atd)
avahi-daemon
pppd-dns
psad
rsync
speech-dispatcher
usplash
winbind
xserver-xorg-input-wacom

Some users are going to have a few gripes with some of these I know, probably mainly with system logging and cron. Just keep in mind everything I state is for gaming on linux. This is what we are gearing are distro around. But as always use your own discretion.

Ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall)

By default it is not enabled on Ubuntu so lets set that up with the following:

sudo ufw default deny
sudo ufw enable

Ufw will now start on system boot and use the default deny policy.

Readahead/Preload/Prelink

On Ubuntu readahead is already installed by default, but the other two are not. So lets go ahead and grab them both with the following command:

sudo apt-get install prelink preload

Prelink once installed will require some configuration so lets get started. Open the prelink config file with the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/default/prelink

Then change the first linke to say:

PRELINKING=yes

Now lets automate prelinking so that we dont need to manually prelink after installing new apps. Open the following file with this command:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf

And add the following line to the file...And the save it.

DPkg::Post-Invoke {"echo Running prelink, please wait...;/etc/cron.daily/prelink";}

Lastly lets run the initial prelinking to complete are install:

sudo /etc/cron.daily/prelink

Loading Desktop Backgrounds

Rather than have the desktop show the desktop color and then finally load the desktop background which makes for a very ugly appearance to the user, we will load the desktop background immediately after logging in with GDM. First install xloadimage with the following command:

sudo apt-get install xloadimage

After xloadimage has installed we need to create the following file...

sudo gedit /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default

And then paste the following into it:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Note that output goes into the .xsession-errors file for easy debugging
#
# Extract the wallpaper filename
WALLPAPER="`cat ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/background/%gconf.xml | sed -n -e 'N
s/^[ \t]*\(.*\)<\/stringvalue>.*$/\1/ip'`"

# Check if the wallpaper file exists. If yes - draw it, if no - use primary background color
if [ -e "$WALLPAPER" ] && [ -f "$WALLPAPER" ] ; then
xsetbg -onroot "$WALLPAPER"
else

PRIMARY_COLOR="`cat ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/background/%gconf.xml | sed -n -e 'N
s/^[ \t]*\(.*\)<\/stringvalue>.*$/\1/ip'`"
xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr -solid "$PRIMARY_COLOR"
fi

exit 0

Now make the script executable with the following command:

sudo chmod +x /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default

Lastly, move the following file so that it does not execute...

sudo mv -v /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default.bak

GTK Menu Speed And Icon Delay

To remove the menu delay use the following command from the terminal:

echo gtk-menu-popup-delay = 100 >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

Now update the icon cache with the following command replacing THEME with your theme

sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/THEMENAME/

Boot Concurency

Options = none, shell, startpar
Open the following file:

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/rc

Then change the line that reads CONCURRENCY=none to either CONCURRENCY=shell or to CONCURRENCY=startpar.

It seems at this time unless something has changed the startpar argument does not speed things up. So while this may be a bug for the time being the suggested method is to leave it set to none or change it to shell.

Desktops & Applications

2008-10-29T22:07:00.000-04:00

Well while in the previous post I talked about my luv for Gnome, I recently have moved away from it and have given my attention to Xfce. This came about for the reason that I found myself replacing alot of Gnome apps with mostly apps from Xfce. For example, I'd usually pull out gedit for mousepad, file-roller for xarchiver, f-spot for gpicview, etc. It had been some time since using Xfce but the speed increase was noticed right away. To jump back to desktops for a sec, I've never been to impressed with Kde. While I do believe Kde is faster than Gnome in many respects, I have no luv at all for its menu nor all the app dependancies it requires.

Kde 4.x seems like it will be a big hit in the future and I'm not sure how customizable it is now with the 4.1 series but the 4.x I tried was just hideous with its black bar and that very ugly new menu system it uses. Also another reason Kde just doesn't cut it for me is a couple major apps which use GTK, those being Pidgin and X-chat. I think the current best looking implementation of Kde 4.x I've seen thus far is in PC-BSD. They really pulled off a nice desktop with it also OpenSuse seems to have done a descent job(Little too much green for me though =)).

So lets talk applications. While I'm not going to go into depth on the apps I choose I'll try to give a few details as of why. First off, I like lightweight applications when necessary that fullfill their purpose and dont try to take on anything and everything mentality. So for a complete desktop system in my case it is as follows:

Accessories

Xarchiver (file archiving, faster loadup then file-roller)
Screenshot (part of gnome-utils package)
Mousepad (text editor, faster loadup then gedit)
Calculator (gcalctool)
xfce4-terminal

Graphics

gpicview (fastest image viewer I've come across)
gimp (kind of a must have if you do anything with graphics)

Multimedia

vlc (my movie player of choice, plays anything and is fast)
decibel audio player (music player, supports cd's and mp3)
kino (video editor/creator)
gtk-recordmydesktop (screen recorder)
xfburn (cd/dvd writer)

Network

firefox 3 (soon to be replaced via webkit)
balsa (email client that starts up instantly)
empathy (messenger that supports all of pidgins protocols)
xchat-gnome (irc chat, xchat with a cleaner look)
deluge (bittorrent client, better than transmission-gtk)
frostwire (limewire like, mostly used for music)
mumble (ventrilo/teamspeak like and linux native)
teamspeak

Office

open office 3
evince (pdf viewer)

System

synaptic (package management via gui)
system-tools-backends (provides gui apps for system tasks)

At this time I have been running the latest Xfce 4.6 beta without problems. For some reason Packagekit seems to be broken for me in Ubuntu Intrepid but in the future I'd like to basically replace Synaptic with it. This post and the previous post might seem a bit useless but I'd like to give ppl a feel for what kind of Linux setup I run and my taste to lay the groundwork for future blogs.

Which Distro?

2008-10-29T10:05:00.001-04:00

Okay let me start off with saying mostly everything I post will be personal opinion so please dont flame me =) So which linux distro is choice? Well when it comes to distro's my first rule is, if its not Debian based its not worth using. Debian's package management is so wonderful that I am completely closed minded about using another system. I imagine the other package management systems are on par with Debian by now but back when I first used a Linux distro, think it was something like Redhat 5.2? WoW, did I ever hate rpm hell. All the bullshit with missing dependancies and whatnot.

Then theres source based distro's like Gentoo etc. While theres nothing particularly wrong with them I just cannot see spending hours to compile every single package. Okay lets get back on topic. So debian based is where it's at, but now I hear you say, "Ok, well theres lots of Debian based distro's". True, so now to take another step forward my opinion is Ubuntu, whether it be Xubuntu/Kubuntu/Ubuntu it doesn't matter.

Ubuntu in my opinion has taken Debian to a much needed direction. Ubuntu seems to try to be cutting edge, doesn't install loads and loads of useless apps bloating the distro, and gives Debian its needed polish for new users. In a few days 8.10 will be released which I've already been running for quite some time. It brings in alot of updates and fixes, among them are Gnome 2.24, Xorg 7.4, Kernel 2.6.27. I wont go into alot of the apps etc that Ubuntu packages with its distro since I have alot to say about that and will leave it for another blog. Ubuntu also fills my need for the latest and greatest since it follows a 6 month release cycle.

While Ubuntu seems to be labeled the neophytes distro I just believe thats untrue. I think it all comes down to getting sh!t done. I've used pretty much all the big named distro's (Redhat, Suse, Slackware, Freebsd, and many others) but I've finally found the one that keeps me happy. I'm a huge Gnome fan also and with KDE 4.x being out now and having tried it, well lets just say it makes the choice of using Gnome much easier. Anyways I dont want to get on a desktop discussion in this blog so I'll just chill =)

Random And Useless

2008-10-29T09:32:00.000-04:00

Well decided to see what the hype was with blogging and frankly seems maybe I'm coming in far too late on this stuff. I'm going to give this blogging stuff a go. This post is mostly to see how things are put together on this blogging site and I'll have to check out more features as I go, so bare with me. Mainly this blog will focus on Linux and Gaming. So I'll try to post some content that doesn't utterly bore everyone, and if that fails, well...just see the above title for this blog entry =)

I'll have to give some attention to these templates or something to make this place(wonder if calling this blog a place seems strange? umm..) look a bit more appropriate and appealing. Hopefully after a bit of time today I'll get the feel for this stuff and be able to post up a blog a little more interesting then this bullsh!t test message. Anyways off to learn some of this blogging stuff.