GRG's Miscellany

This is a record of my experience of setting this up.  It's meant more as a record for my future self than a tutorial, but maybe somebody will find it useful. 1 - Install DCS First step, install DCS World via the Steam client as normal.  2 - Install LinuxTrack Linuxtrack Download here: https://github.com/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/Downloads   Instructions here: https://github.com/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/universal-Linuxtrack-package   Using the gui (ltr_gui) requires qt4 libraries, which I could not find in my standard Ubuntu repositories, so I had to use the ppa instructions here: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2020/07/install-qt4-ubuntu-20-04 Run ltr_gui from linuxtrack's bin directory to check everything works so far before moving on to get it running under Proton.  3 - Install LinuxTrack into the DCS World prefix NOTE: Attempting to install for Wine games WON'T WORK e.g. here https://github-wiki-see.page/m/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/Wine-Games   Th...

 A good while back, I ordered an ISA network card for my socket-5 Pentium machine.  Finally today I managed to get it working with EtherDFS .  Finding the right steps involved a lot of web searching. First, I had to figure out exactly what model the card was.  Thankfully, it says it right on the chip: RTL8019AS .  I have spewed much bile about Realtek and their crappy audio drivers before now, but I was seriously impressed that they still had a page where I could download the packet driver for this ancient NIC. As far as I can tell, there are two types of NIC drivers for DOS-era machines: an NDIS type for Windows things, and a 'packet' driver with an open interface.  EtherDFS needs the packet drivers, and I don't care for Windows guff, so I'm happy with just that. I found a page at legroom.net which had the info I needed to install the packet driver.  That page has a whole wealth of stuff, but the bit I needed told me to save the packet driver (pnppd....

So moving house has been an absolute pain in the plums.  Monthly projects are on hiatus and until the start-of-term chaos has died down, I'm working on the odd piece of project here and there. The first such project is doing some C64 development, which I've wanted to do for literally years.  I bought an SD-card reader from the future was 8-bit and when it arrived, I dug out  my C64 from storage and powered it on... ...and it was dead. Not fully dead, just...weird.  Blue border and blue background are fine but the screen is filled up with garbage text. So step 1: order a new power supply.  The PSU I was using wasn't a Commodore original, but a replacement from the late 80s.  The problem could still be a b0rked or loose chip, but I got paranoid about using a vintage PSU anyways so I ordered one from Poland.  If that doesn't fix it, I plan to follow some of the procedures here . In the mean-time, I decided to search for an IDE that would run on linux and...

Today I completed the transition of my NAS machine from RAID 6 to a ZFS pool.  To document the process for my future self and any semi-interested rando who stumbles across this, here is an outline of how I did it. Part 1 - Research I found this 'ZFS for Dummies' post really useful to re-familiarise myself with the core concepts.  Once I'd done that, the Ubuntu examples here were really useful as well as this post with more detailed information than I would ever need. My RAID was nowhere near full, which meant I could manage the process without having to restore everything from backups (although I made damn sure I had working backups before I messed with it). Part 2 - Degrading the RAID and pooling the freed-up drives First, I marked two drives from the RAID as failed so I could use them in the zfs pool.  I changed their partition type with cfdisk but I had trouble making a pool out of them because they kept on being picked up and re-started as a raid device.  In ...

So for some reason I decided to really get my geek on and make an entry for the DOS Game Jam on itch.io. Whilst the game jam rules are really relaxed, I decided to head straight for making a game for real DOS-era hardware.  Then I decided making a game for mode 13h or mode X was a path too well trodden.  So I started messing around in mode 12h (640x480 16 colours). First, the tools: I went for Open Watcom to build and DosBox to run it.  They are both mature tools and work well on Ubuntu (Open Watcom under WINE). I very quickly decided I didn't like Open Watcom's code editor though, so I only use the IDE for building the code.  Geany is a lovely little editor which I like a lot more. Thence into the dark realms of x86 interrupts to set the video mode and direct-writes to hard-coded memory locations.  Coding ground to a halt immediately as I proceeded to read what felt like the entire internet . I had to learn about what an I/O port was and how to ...

...can it be that this is impossible without Windoze in a VM? Specifically for WYSIWYG dialog editor: Visual Studio Community runs like a dog in a VM.* Visual Studio Code doesn't appear to have one. Monodevelop only has a GTK# one** Jetbrains Rider is a 'cross platform' IDE but the WYSIWYG tool only works on Windoze . >_< SharpDevelop is built in .NET but for some reason uses Windoze-specific code . Is the only serious option to dual-boot with Win7/10?  SERIOUSLY? Who ever said that .NET is cross platform? Gromgromgrom. So I'm left going with a Win10 VM running on a ramdisk and a second virtual drive on HDD to hold the code.  Seeing as I want to commit and push the code straight back to source control, it shouldn't be a problem that the local copy of the code is trapped in a virtual disk. *it isn't _all_ that bad in qemu/kvm if you're running Win10 from a ramdisk, but make sure you get your syncing to HDD right or you could lose a lo...

It's been a while since I played around with qemu-kvm, but there's an app I have to use for work which only has a Windows installer. BOO! Setting up qemu on Linux was as simple as following these instructions: https://www.linuxtechi.com/install-configure-kvm-ubuntu-18-04-server/ Getting Windows 7 to install without taking a million years required the virtio drivers as described for Windows 10 here: http://bart.vanhauwaert.org/hints/installing-win10-on-KVM.html I then had problems with a seriously annoyingly jerky mouse pointer.  Searching around told me to add a USB tablet input device through virt-manager's VM setup.  That got that sorted. So, some hours of searching and progress bars later, I have a working Windows 7 VM with the work app installed!  Hoorah! Addendum: I did try to get Windows 10 to work in a VM first, but it was sooooooo sloooooooow it was unusable.  Once I've got a server with more RAM, I might try to set it up with a main disk image...

Windows lets me have sound through my speakers and headphones simultaneously, which is great for not having to plug in/unplug my headphones when I want to switch.  I just have to don the headphones and turn down the volume on my speakers.  No fiddling about with jacks. However!  Ubuntu seemed to have no way of sorting this out. This post, however, describes how to change your line-in into an output jack! http://askubuntu.com/questions/225017/how-do-i-change-which-audio-jacks-are-used-for-input-and-output It uses the HDA Analyser tool from the Alsa Project.  Not a well documented tool, but the post above has all the information you need.

DAMN, this has been a total pain in the backside. I wanted to record a video of my latest game writing developments with commentary.   (Ubuntu 12.0.3 LTS, with KDE desktop) The normal desktop recording applications failed to cope with OpenGL, which is understandable, really.  So then I found glc . glc looked like it would do everything I wanted, and after a couple of frustrating hours, it turns out it actually will.  This is good. The bad is that the documentation is non-existent, and figuring it out has got me VERY CROSS, with quite a tension-headache to boot. Command line which finally worked: glc-capture -o blah.glc -j -a 'sysdefault:CARD=camera,48000,1' java -jar MyGame.jar Gotcha 1: It doesn't tell you how to specify the application part (java -jar MyGame.jar).  It took me ages to realise that it cannot deal with quotes .  Just put the application in as you would type it normally in the command line. Gotcha 2: Finding the ALSA device nam...

Why? I've been using OpenVPN for gaming.  I have heard of Hamachi , but open source tastes better. I wanted to have an OpenVPN client running 24/7, so I tried running it on a low-power laptop.  This led to unacceptable latency and disconnects.  The encryption load was just too much. Having a powerful desktop running would solve that, but running costs build up all too fast. What? Via produce processors with low power consumption and hardware acceleration for encryption with their Padlock system. After quite a lot of searching for a cheap Via machine, I found this on eBay .  It's got a Via C7 processor (all of which have Padlock), and it turns out to use less than 30W even on peak load. How? I replaced the 1GB Compact Flash card with an 8GB one, then installed Ubuntu Server 12.4.1 via a USB stick.  (Choosing to install the OpenSSH server). I had found plenty of sources telling me to check which engines were available.  However, when I t...

http://thelinuxexperiment.com/guinea-pigs/tyler-b/how-to-test-hard-drive-for-errors-in-linux/ "badblocks -b 4096 -p 4 -c 16384 -w -s /dev/sda" WARNING: This test wipes all data on the hard drive

Fix here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1861865

Installing stable ati drivers on Ubuntu 11.10 is a pain in the backside, but here's the latest attempt: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aRlqZkHo_JQJ:linux-software-news-tutorials.blogspot.com/2011/10/ubuntu-1110-oneiric-problems-with-ati.html+ubuntu+11.10+x64+stability+issues&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=ubuntu