Tag Archives: Linux

Unreal Tournament Server on Ubuntu Linux (10.04)

I’m putting together a server for some friends to play Unreal Tournament (yes, the original). I had heard this was doable on Linux, and I have a friend’s old laptop here to play with. I’ll be putting good links here that have helped me to get this working.

I got it all setup in a VirtualBox VM, but need it on the separate machine. This old laptop has a broken screen and no hard drive…no problem! It will be running headless anyway, and I’ve also got a 16GB flash drive. Ubuntu Lucid installs fine on a flash drive – the only recommendation being that you use ext2, as it’s not a journaling file system (it doesn’t write as much to the drive).

Helpful links:
Playing Unreal Tournament on Ubuntu Lucid
Unreal Tournament Server Setup for Linux
Loki Installers for Linux Gamers

Playstation 3 and Hulu

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From all the research I’ve done, and the actual experience of trying it, Hulu does not work with the built-in browser on the Playstation 3 (PS3) as of this writing. The flash version is not new enough to support the site…which is too bad. From what I’ve read regarding Flash for Linux on the PS3, no official Adobe plugin exists – as the PS3 uses a PPC based processor…meaning that you’re stuck to the free alternatives, which do not yet support the type of streaming required for Hulu.

With all the hoopla regarding the PS3 being the center of the media center (and I’d love for it to be – the interface is wonderful), not having a modern flash version cripples any online video potential. Here’s hoping future PS3 updates will make this post irrelivant.

eeePC – not for the masses

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I managed to purchase one of these little gems in late April. I’ve been a longtime fan of Linux and Asus in general, so the thought of a little laptop running the free OS was enough to keep me dreaming until I broke down and ordered one. I bought a 7″ model with the4 gig hard drive and an extra 2 gigs of ram. I did the ram install myself and setup the Advanced Desktop to my liking. The first several days were wonderful. I intended to use this to check email, read the internet, and watch streaming video piped to my TV. Then I started to notice some things…the newness was wearing off.

First – this thing is tiny. I knew that going in and anyone thinking about one should know that too. The idea of a tiny laptop didn’t scare me – I have medium to large size hands and work with computers every day. If anything a little less weight to carry would be good. I found the weight to be fine. However, I found the keyboard to be of just plain bad quality. What most have blamed on big fingers – I believe is a flaw in the design. My O and N keys consistently required more force to press than others in order to register a keystroke. In addition, the cramped spaces inside the device made it such that using a headphone plug on the side of the laptop was extremely difficult – hard to put in and hard to take out. The microphone port was fine…

Second – Linux is good. Asus branded Linux…not so hot. Initially, I was overjoyed that the flavor of Linux on the eeePC was Debian based – gotta love apt-get. However, repositories of definite quality and dependability are slim to none. Luckily, the eee has most of what you need – just hope you don’t need to update in the future.

Third – drivers within the default Linux for the wireless nic are just poor. Posts on eeeUser.com can confirm this for anyone. If you’re connecting to an unsecured wireless access point – you’ll be pleased with the eee. I don’t give away my internet connection, and so have a standard Linksys WRT54g configured for WPA with a typed in key. Connecting to this with the eee got worse every time I booted the device – to the point of waiting for up to an hour for it to connect. It just didn’t seem to receive DHCP offers. Contrast that to my workhorse Lenovo laptop that connected every time before I could even log in to Windows. I don’t doubt that Asus used good quality parts – I believe that using hacked up drivers on a commerical product that results in a boot time of under 1 minute and a WPA access time of an hour is poor form. Shame on you Asus. I love Linux – and I even prefer Asus for my motherboards. But surely there are better supported wireless chipsets out there for Linux they could have used…

Fourth – Adobe Flash on Linux works well, for the most part. However, the speed of the eee coupled with poor Flash performance on Linux makes playing back videos on Hulu jittery and unwatchable. I tried every trick I could find, stopping only before overclocking (not worth it in my book). Perhaps the next Flash version will make this better? Let’s all hope so.

I could have lived with everything above except for the 3rd point. A device meant to be instant-on taking that long to connect to a wireless network I know is in good working order is infuriating. If I can boot up my Lenovo laptop with Visual Studio, Office 2007, etc. on it and beat the eee to the Internet – the eee is now just a paper weight. For that reason – the eeePC was the first item I’ve sold on eBay. I have no doubt that 90% of the audience of the eee loves it. Heck – I think it’s a brilliant device and one we’ll see cloned 100 times over. I’ll probably buy one of those clones. But of all the praise for the eee – it is still a niche product meant for a select few. Namely those with: small hands, limited application needs, unsecured wireless routers, and flashblock installed in FireFox.

Anybody have one of the eee Clones with Linux and good WPA wireless? Maybe I’ll try my luck again.

Getting rid of errors

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I’ve been getting an odd error ever since I started wanting to play anime subs with gmplayer. Specifically – this error says:
Error Requested audio codec family [mp3] (afm=mp3lib) not available Enable it at compilation.

So, I did a little searching and found that there is a very easy fix for this! Simply go into your gmplayer preferences and select the Codecs and Demuxer tab. From there, change your Audio codec family to FFmpeg. That’s it! No more annoying error!

Doing your taxes with Linux

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Many people use computers for real purposes…not just to tinker. Although I’d rather tinker than do anything else, I did have an opportunity to test Linux’s readyness for a real purpose. I did my taxes!

I’ve been using Turbo Tax online for a few years – and decided I’d like to do the taxes from the couch this year. Of course…the media center PC runs Ubuntu. Years ago – this might be have been a problem – but not this year. With the adoption of Firefox as an accepted browser (for all operating systems), Linux can now do 95% of what every PC user does…use the Internet. Coupled with the latest flash 9, I was set. The only problem I ran into was Turbo Tax gives you a warning that you’re using something other than what they recommend (which is Windows or Mac OS X). They do support Firefox though, so I plunged ahead. Everything worked as expected, even being able to view their PDFs with Acrobat Reader.

I guess doing my taxes isn’t something that nerdy. However, it’s nerdy when you’re doing your taxes on an up and coming operating system and run into zero compatibility issues. If only everything was this easy.

Increasing the Wine font size

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Thus far in using Ubuntu, I’ve been able to use only Linux applications. I’ll admit that some of them were just ports of their Windows or Mac OS X counterparts…but I never had to install wine (a compatibility layer for running Windows programs). Well you know that torrent app I recommended? kTorrent? It’s crashed on me several times in the last couple days…and ate up every bit of memory the system had this morning. I went looking for a better alternative and my only choice was to use uTorrent under wine. No problem!

Wine is only a synaptic click away. Running utorrent under it is a simple affair too. I found this tutorial very helpful: Using utorrent with wine – Ubuntu Forums

However, since my primary monitor is a 32″ LCD and I’m at about an 8-10 foot distance from it – the font size needs to be increased. Under windows this is a simple task…but under Wine = not so much. I think this is something that NEEDS to be put into the wine configuration app. Anyway – here’s how it’s done.

First – close any applications that are running under wine.

To change the size of any menu font – you’ll need to edit the win.ini under the following folder:

/home/yourusername/.wine/

Add the following information to the win.ini file:
[Desktop]
MenuFontSize=18

You can change the 18 to whatever size you need – but that worked for me. Now we need to change font size of the rest of the application. To do so, use the terminal and launch wine’s regedit:

wine regedit

You’ll want to browse to this value:

HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Software\Fonts\LogPixels

and change it to something larger. Make sure to change the selection to “Decimal”, as you probably don’t natively speak hex. It’s default in decimal is 96. I upped mine to 120 and it worked nicely.

When you’re done doing that, close out regedit and restart your wine application. Enjoy your larger font sizes and lack of squinting!

Here’s the best resource I found on this matter after a bit of searching:
http://www.winehq.com/pipermail/wine-users/2005-April/017810.html

GCfilms

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I’ve been working to organize my movie collection on this Ubuntu computer. I’m a big fan of nice GUIs, and found a pretty good one for organizing any film/TV collection. It’s called GCfilms. It has an entry in the Ubuntu repository, so installing it is a cinch through Synaptic. Here’s a screenshot from their homepage:

GCfilms Homepage
GCfilms can even launch the video file you have linked from it in your favorite media player. It is default set to mplayer, so if you’re using a GNOME desktop like Ubuntu – you might want to change that to gmplayer. Gmplayer is mplayer with a nicely done GUI, enabling you to change preferences of the video you’re viewing on the fly.

Forced Enjoyment

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This isn’t the first time I’ve tried Ubuntu (or Linux for that matter). Several times in the past few years (since 2002 actually), I’d get the “Linux Bug” and repartition my hard drive to be able to try out some new distro. This would normally come about after I’d read some positive review of said distro (or from a friend). What have I tried in the past? I started out on Mandrake (now Mandriva), moved to SUSE 8 & 9, then MEPIS (great distro btw), and now Ubuntu. At each step, the experience has gotten better – but I’d always switch back to using Windows full time for some reason or another. This typically took about 2-3 days. Sometimes only hours.

Why only hours? HP Laserjet 1020. I bought this excellent printer a while back and absolutely love it. No more expensive ink every 2 months for me! One problem though…this printer has some odd quirks under Linux. Last I looked, the best support for it had gotten was having the ability to print up to 20 pages – then you’d have to power cycle the printer. So this PC has been only Linux for over a week now…why? I don’t print from it.

With Windows XP still on my main PC, I’ve been free to continue my fun Linux project without interruption. The more I use it – the more I discover that it has every bit of functionality my Windows box has (except printing of course) and then some. Some favorite applications I’ve discovered:

Amarok – best media player I’ve used in years. I’ve been using Winamp since the 1.x days…and still do (5.x) on my Windows machine. I’d tried iTunes but didn’t like it. Amarok is fantastic and truly deserves a Windows port.
kTorrent – BitTorrent Client. On Windows I’ve stuck with Azureus. It’s stable, has lots of features, etc. I tried it under Ubuntu and had lots of little issues…overdownloading, NAT/DHT connection problems (not fixed by port forwarding, etc.), and even the occasional lock-up. I researched a while and lots of people say to run uTorrent under wine. No thanks. kTorrent apparently is much like uTorrent anyway. It’s completely stable, no NAT problems (or DHT). Even integrates well into GNome (despite it’s KDE roots).
GKrellM – System Monitor. Nice small out of the way utility that’ll let you know CPU/memory/ethernet details.
MPlayer – Media Player that will play ANYTHING. For all your avi/h264 needs.

These are pretty standard apps for Linux users, it seems. They’ve got equally viable ports or competitors on the Windows front – but I’m just happy they exist for Linux and have fairly decent GUI design (excellent in some cases). GUI design has always been lacking on Linux, in my opinion (specifically programs that you want to use on a typical desktop that have no GUI frontend). I’m really enjoying my current setup and don’t have ANY plans to change back to Windows on this media center Linux box.

Weird GNome issue gone

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Happy to report that using the non-beta drivers (8776) stopped that odd issue from happening again. Hope those beta drivers get that issue fixed. Suppose I’ll look for a place to report the bug.

Also – if you’re using an HDTV with a PC…you’ll soon find out that everything looks washed out. You can fix some of that using the nvidia-settings tool. To access it, run this in the terminal:

sudo nvidia-settings

You’ll soon find out that your great settings aren’t being applied when you log out and back in (or reboot, etc.). You’ll need to load this utility’s settings when ubuntu starts. To do so, add this line to the System->Preferences->Sessions->Startup Programs area:

nvidia-settings --load-config-only

That should do it! Soure: Ubuntuforums

Ubuntu + HDTV + Nvidia Beta driver =

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Odd GNome issue.

I’ve been busy reinstalling Ubuntu Linux today. Everything was working dandy except for the fact that I had partitioned my / too small and my xfs partition WAY too small. Some may say that I could have enlarged these – oh well.

My first round of reinstallation used the Nvidia beta drivers & Beryl. I had 2 system freezes while updating packages and decided that Beryl just wasn’t going to cut it for me. I’m sure it will improve in the future…so I’ll install it in the future. I quickly disabled Beryl and was back to using Metacity with the Nvidia beta drivers. I moved the PC back to my HDTV (as the Ubuntu Live CD uses a refresh rate too high for my HDTV to install) and changed the resolution to match the widescreen goodness. Everything looked great so I shut it down and did some non-nerdy things for a while. Upon coming back and booting up the box, I was greeted with some odd issues in GNome. Specifically – the little red shut down button in the top right had moved several inches to the left. The trash can did the same thing. Odd! I couldn’t find any help on the Internet for this issue…and no configuration menu. That’s one thing that GNome really needs – more configuration options for panel stuff.

Back to the office with the PC. I figured this had something to do with the leftover of Beryl. I reinstalled everything…and moved back into the living room. Same results. Yuck!

Back to the office again and here I sit. It’s updating right now, then I’ll proceed to change the kernel and install the non-beta Nvidia driver. Seeing as how this is what I did when the partitions were too small and this little quirk NEVER happened…

I found a great thread about changing your kernel in Ubuntu. It’s not compiling your own or anything – but it’s what I needed: Ubuntuforums . One odd thing I noticed is that your new kernels are signified in GRUB as being generic. I suppose I was expecting something about K7-SMP. It is in fact using that kernel though. Definitely shows 2 cores when monitoring the system.

UPDATE: According to page 25 of that thread, Ubuntu 6.10 has made several kernel options obsolete…so don’t even bother following the guide if you’re on 6.10. Just check your kernel with [ uname -a ] in the terminal to see that you’re already running a 686-smp kernel.

I’ll update here in a while on the strange HDTV/beta-Nvidia/Gnome issue. It’s truly annoying and I hope it doesn’t decide to continue happening.