Pan revert

I’ve been using Pan for a long time as my primary newsreader in Linux.  It has a great interface, and it does both text and binaries well.  Recently, there has been development activity on Pan; its author has essentially rewritten the entire codebase in C++, rearranged a few things, significantly decreased its memory usage, and added new features.

However, some older features that made me like Pan, like global default download locations (even with the ability to sort each group’s binaries into their own directories), saving header sorting and filters per-group, the ability to have separate group servers (the new Pan betas have merged all servers into one in the interest of multi-server downloads, something that doesn’t really interest me at all, and have no way to separate servers out like the old Pan), and other minor things that have yet to surface in Pan despite my requests in the Pan mailing list.  Plus, recent builds have had serious issues with stability; Pan just keeps crashing over and over, and it’s really getting on my nerves.

Of course, the right thing to do is to report these bugs, but I really don’t have the patience to deal with an unstable news reader that doesn’t behave like I want it and doesn’t let me have multiple news server sources.  Therefore, I’ve reverted to the old Pan “unstable” (0.14.2.91), which isn’t really unstable at all, and will continue to use it for the foreseeable future.

I’ll check back in with “New Pan” eventually, and if it still doesn’t do what I want, I’ll consider doing a fork of “Old Pan”.  Maybe I’ll call it “Lap ” (Lap Ain’t Pan).

What’s the password?

Haven’t posted here in a while since I lost my WordPress password, and had deactivated the E-mail address used to register without thinking about not being able to get my password back.  So I temporarily reactivated the E-mail just to reset it, so I’m back in the saddle, now.

Anyway, I’ve been playing with Gentoo again just to see what’s going on with the old distro I used before I went to Ubuntu.  Able to set everything up without too much difficulty, but I’m sure something down the line will cause major breakage, just as it always has.  There was a post about how Gentoo’s finally moving over to GCC4, and how they recommend completely recompiling your system when it happens.  They haven’t done it yet, but I’m sure something will break when the time comes.

Reason I’m doing some experimentation is that Ubuntu has a few things that really bothers me.  Most notable is that it can be rather slow at times, especially when playing games.  There will be visible pauses in gameplay for reasons completely unknown to me, and some games just play a lot slower than they have in the past on other distros like Gentoo on this same system.  Reinstalling Gentoo has confirmed this — games like Doom and Unreal Tournament play noticeably smoother (not tremendously, but there is a difference).  I would like to try recompiling the kernel or remove some boot processes, but this has caused nothing but trouble in the past — doing either has caused booting up Ubuntu to just freeze, and there’s nothing I can do except use the stock kernel or re-enable the boot processes I disabled.  And sometimes, even that doesn’t help, which is why I had to reinstall Ubuntu a few months back.

Ubuntu just doesn’t like me disabling certain processes, and absolutely hates new kernels.  I’ve even followed a forum “howto” on compiling the kernel (even though I can roll my own kernel with ease in Gentoo — Ubuntu seems to require certain things in there that I don’t provide, or something).  At the end of the day, I’m left with all the processes running, even if they’re things that I don’t need (like RAID management), and with a stock 386-optimized, debugging-enabled kernel.

Still, I really can’t complain, since it works better than any other distro I’ve come across (and miles better than Windows), but I wish I could fix it up a bit to really have a lean, streamlined GNU/Linux distro I can do it all in.

Shotgun Debugger

I actually found this game quite some time ago, but it really is so cool that I have to mention it again.

Shotgun Debugger is an overhead action shooter that follows some random guy into the world of a secret underground complex filled with robots, and it’s up to you and a variety of weapons to escape.

The game is hard. Very hard. In fact, the first level is probably too hard for most people, but with a little persistance, experimentation, and luck you’ll be able to figure out how to get out of it alive and go on to the later levels.

The gameplay is excellent, allowing you to switch between a fixed view and a rotating one following your point of view, both of which are useful in different situations. The graphics are very nice and the music is a cool technoish soundtrack.

And it’s open-source, and free. Can’t get any better than this, my friends. Download and run it, and praise open-source software for bringing such cool stuff to us.

3D Desktops

I’m sorry, but I don’t get the big deal about 3D accelerated desktops.

There is no real functionality added by having wobbling windows, workspaces changable by rotating cubes, and so on. It’s essentially a waste of processor and videocard resources that take away from other application’s uses.

I’m a huge believer in minimalistic desktops. Just enough stuff on your desktop to launch programs and do basic window management (move, resize, change to new window, change workspace). It’s one of the reasons I use Fluxbox as my desktop window manager — it barely uses any resources, allows me to easily do basic window management without consuming system resources.

“But resources are plentiful on modern computers,” you might say. Still, it’s not very smart to be wasteful; just because you have 1GB of RAM doesn’t mean that using up 256+MB for a desktop environment that exists only to launch programs and manage windows is not wasteful. All the resources wasted on your desktop affect the speed of your applications, where it matters most.

I’m not saying that everyone should use a minimalist window manager like Fluxbox — just turn down the amount of resources your desktop is using, and show off your computer where it really matters — with the programs it runs.

Zenity

Okay, how in the world could I have not known about Zenity for this long?

If Linux man pages bore you, it’s a simple commandline tool to allow showing simple GTK dialog boxes from scripts. Zenity returns whatever information the user provided as a return code or as standard output. In other words, it makes creating simple GUI elements for BASH (or Perl, or Python, or any other scripting language) wonderfully simple.

I’ve already put it to use, too: I am using a nice multisystem emulator called Mednafen, but just for Gameboy Advance use (I have the other systems it provides covered, and the standard VisualBoyAdvance doesn’t use OpenGL rendering to speed up the emulator; offloading the drawing of the emulated screen to the video card speeds things up). Unfortunately, it’s commandline only, and while I am certainly able to use the commandline to run it, I am terribly lazy, so anything I can create to help my laziness is great.

So I whipped up the following bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# This should be wherever your GBA images are

cd /media/hda5/Emulation/gba

while /bin/true;

do

GAME=$(zenity –title “Select a GBA game or Cancel to exit” –file-selection)

if [ -n "$GAME" ]; then mednafen “$GAME”;

else exit

fi

done

It pops up a little file selector where I can just doubleclick the game I want to play and off I go. Awesome.

It’s little tools like this that make me really love Linux.

Note: the above code might be messed up by WordPress’s formatting, so here it is in plain text.

Taking care of Gaming in Linux

I admit it, I can’t quit Windows. (Cue Brokeback Mountain music here.)

It’s the games, you know? Being a gamer, I need my gaming fix somehow, and if I don’t have that much to play in Linux, what can I do?

Fortunately, I’m trying to cut myself off from the Windows-exclusive stuff I’ve been playing lately, and installing pretty much everything I can find to play in Linux so I won’t have to return to that… that other OS. My ultimate goal, of course, is to erase Windows and keep it erased, which I have tried to do before, but my weakness for certain games always force me back into it. But my gaming collection is growing in Linux, and maybe I can keep myself entertained enough to stay away from Windows for good this time.

Linux already has lots of small, opensource games, but I like to have some of the big, professional games on top of that to help keep me happy, ya know.

So far, here’s what I’ve got for commercial games on Linux:

First Person Shooters
DOOM, DOOM II, Final DOOM, Hexen, Heretic, Quake 1, Quake 3, Duke Nukem 3d, Unreal Tournament, Doom 3, Tribes 2

Flight/Space Combat
Freespace 2

Role Playing Games
Neverwinter Nights, Ultima VII, Ultima IV

There are a few more I’d like to get running, but for various reasons have not yet:

• Quake 2. I can’t seem to find a native port of this game that works well. The one in the Multiverse repositories of Ubuntu runs, but has issues with the mouse Y axis being inverted and it picking up a constant backwards motion from somewhere (possibly the gamepads I have plugged in), and I can’t disable either (the “Invert mouse” option won’t stay off, and it doesn’t recognize the “don’t use joystick” option). UPDATE: see comments.
• Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Last time I tried this one, it had serious issues on a few levels, but multiplayer seemed to work, so I’ll eventually end up putting this one back on; I’m not really in a hurry to though.
• Serious Sam, Serious Sam: TSE. First, I can’t find my disks, and second, the Linux clients are kind of buggy. The games are a blast though.  SSTSE UPDATE: see comments.
• Any Wine/Cedega games. Games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, GTA3, Max Payne, etc, supposedly work in Wine and/or Cedega, but I’ve really had trouble getting anything working well in them lately. I’ve got GTA:VC up and running, but it’s far too slow to be playable, which is odd since it runs perfectly smooth under Windows. Oh well.

Come on, game devs, please support us. Kudos to Serious Sam 2 devs for making a client for us (see last post); let’s see the rest of you follow their shining example.

Welcome to the old days

DOSBox is a very nice piece of software that emulates the old DOS shell from back in the day. It does so very well, too — enough to emulate games and all manner of old business and productivity software.

Today, while browsing Slashdot, I happened upon this news post about Borland bringing their “Turbo” line of development tools back. Ah, yes, I fondly remember Turbo C and C++ (I’ve never really had a thing for Pascal, so Turbo Pascal never interested me). In fact, I still have a boxed copy of Turbo C++ 3.1 in pristine condition, with all the disks (both 5 1/4″ and 3 1/2″ floppies) still working.

But since I have no floppy drive, I really had no way to reload that software now. Fortunately, I found something on Borland’s site to get me pretty close — Borland’s Antique Software page, where they allow anyone to download free versions of some of their old software. I grabbed the Turbo C and Turbo C++ versions they had on there, and while they weren’t the versions I remembered, it was very close, and brought back some memories of compiling old DOS programs when ran (perfectly) under DOSbox.

Yeah, besides DOSbox being a Linux program (and Windows too, but whatever), this doesn’t have to do much with Linux. I just figured I needed to share the warm fuzzy feeling I got from Turbo C/C++ with the world.

Serious Sam II

Well, I didn’t even know about this:

Croteam’s site – look at the July 12, 2006 post:

Linux update on Serious Sam 2 and Serious Editor 2

They are working on both a client and level editor for SS2 for Linux. Check the screenshots — looks like it’s coming together well. No date given on a release, but I hope it’s soon.