Older blog entries for spicyjack (starting at number 16)

PortaBoom

I've been spending a lot of time lately coding PortaBoom, so I've no time to spend writing. Things with PortaBoom are going great, this project is going to be awesome when it's done.

I was trying to track down a missing '}' today in a Perl module, and I came up with a novel way to do it. My Perl module must have about 10 or so functions in it now, plus a whole bunch of control blocks scattered all throughout the file. What I did is add an extra '}' at the bottom of the file, then move it up function by function until the program complained about having one too many of them. Below that function was the culprit.

I've feature frozen PortaBoom for a 0.4.0 release, I have a list of things I need to fix before I'm happy with it. 0.4.0 will most likely be the first release I tell more than 3 people about, so I should start getting some feedback one way or another. I plan on releasing to the PrBoom mailing list on Sourceforge first, as they are hardcore Doomers anyways, and would probably appreciate what's going on the most.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Another note from Andrew Wai <andrew {at} wild.com.hk>: As far as I know DRI on some PCI based ati chipsets are supported so agpgart is not actually necessary for DRI support. The r128.o module can load without agpgart.o on my laptop but is not used, even when trying to load dri support in XF86Config, ie glxinfo reports 'direct rendering: no'.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

I've been working unsuccesfully to get AGP working with this laptop.  I've said in the past that this laptop uses the Rage 128 video chipset from ATI, but myself and Andrew Wai <andrew {at} wild.com.hk> have both been unsuccessful in getting the agpgart.o module to load, which is what you need loaded before you try to load the r128.o module for the video card.  Other than that, everything is running fine with the new install.  All the packages are up to date, which is real nice.

PortaBoom

My new project, PortaBoom. I can now play a game of Doom from the CD ROM of any computer with a fast enough Intel x86 processor (probably a Pentium or better for the larger screen resolutions) and a working CD ROM drive. I've got ISO images posted, they actually work , with sound and networking. It's all command line stuff to run the GUI right now, the GUI doesn't start automatically yet. The GUI (tkboom) is still in the infant stage, but you can use it to launch a game after the PortaBoom CD has booted. I've got a shitload of work to do before I'll be happy with it, but at least I know now it's a workable idea.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Forgot a file.  Here's my /etc/modules file.  This file is what Debian uses to load the modules for the system when you boot it.  Compare it to the output of lsmod, and you'll notice that there's more modules loaded than what I ask for in /etc/modules.  Reason being, is that I only ask for the final module of a set of modules, and the kernel automagically figures out what modules the requested module depends on, then loads the dependent modules prior to the one I request.  Works great, and if I'm testing out things like ALSA, all I have to do is modprobe the snd-card-intel8x0 module, and the rest of the modules it needs gets loaded automatically.  After you build a new kernel, or build ALSA, you'll need to reboot for this to work, because the kernel builds a list of dependencies at boot time.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

We have Wood!  Woody is running very nicely on my 30G drive.  Cool thing about Woody is that most every package is only like one or two minor versions down, for example, libsdl is 1.2.0 in Woody, and the most current release is 1.2.2.  Migration was pretty easy from the old drive, however, I could not mount the Reiserfs partitions from the old drive.  I had to put the old drive back in, and then move the files to the ext2 partitions on the new drive with an external PCMCIA IDE adapter.  Here's my fstab and lsmod.  My drive is partitioned with a single 8G partition for Windows 2000, and 8G total for Debian Woody.  The rest (for right now) is unpartitioned.  Fujitsu has released a full set of Windows 2000 drivers, even the scroll button works in Windows 2000 now.  You'll have to come up with your own copy of WinDVD however :(.  I'm running the default kernel version that came with Woody (2.2.19), because I want to use VMware for another project I'm working on.  Here's my 2.2.19 kernel .config file.  Woody comes with recent ALSA (v0.9.0) drivers, but I could not get those to work using the Debian source package, so I went back to the 0.5.10 drivers, and they're working fine.  I've also got tarballs with WindowMaker and xmms themes on my server at home, which really helped me move over:

• Window Maker theme tarball (7.9M)

• xmms skins tarball (999k)

Note that there is a bug with theWoody X 4.1 package, X won't start correctly if run with [g|x]dm, there's a new Debian X package out that fixes it, do an apt-get update;apt-get upgrade to download it.  You can read more about the package bug on this Debian Weekly News page.

Fujistu Lifebook S-4546

Just bought a 30G drive, it's an IBM IC25N030ATDA04-0, or a Travelstar 30GN 4200RPM Ultra-ATA hard drive, in english terms.  The drive replaces the Fujitsu drive that came with the laptop with no problems.  The machine booted right up with the new drive.  You could use a 12.5mm drive, by taking out the rubber pieces at the bottom of the drive bay, that way you could use the Fujitsu 30G drive, but I chose to go with a 9mm drive just like what came with the laptop.  I've already got Windows installed in it's own 8G partition, and now I'm giving Linux it's own 8G's of space to play with.  It's Debian Woody time.  I mean, how many other distributions say that they've got wood?  I'll post specifics of the setup at a later date.

tkboom

My new project, it's a Perl/Perl::Tk launcher for Doom ports. It just got posted to Sourceforge today. I'm using prboom for testing it, but eventually I'd like to make it compatable with as many Doom ports as possible. Making a GUI Doom launcher sounds kind of stupid at first ("I just run it from the command line"), but trust me, there's a master plan at work :). Perl::Tk is a lot of fun, I've been wanting to do something like this for a long time. And prboom is a blast as well, I've got the sound and MIDI music working for it nicely, it all plays at the same time as I'm listening to MP3's with xmms. People walk by my desk at work, and always see me playing prboom now instead of working...

misc

Yes, September 11th was a big day, and not in a good way.

I'm waiting on the DSL installer from Covad to install my SDSL line from Speakeasy

I've also gotten into some of the Doom (the game) ports running around the web. The one I'm using is called prBoom, it's a fork/merge of a bunch of different ports of Doom that are out there, but it's actively maintained, and of course it runs in Linux, with full sound effects and MIDI music, and a TCP/IP client/server network playing system that replaces the old IPX networking that Doom used to use. It's godly.

I'm thinking of starting up 2 projects that would be related to prBoom, one would be a version of LoopLinux that would let you pop a CD into a computer and already have things set up so you could use it as a dedicated Doom machine with a minimum of fuss. Another thing I'd like to do is write a front end to prBoom which would be like the old 'Doom Control Center' that I used to run when I played Doom on DOS. DCC basically ran the command line Doom engine, and it allowed you to load extra Doom PWAD's, specify extra command line options, and start networked games very easily, and it looked great too :)

I saw System of a Down about 2 weeks ago, it was a good show, but I'd like to see them in a longer set than the 45 or so minutes they had.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Kernel 2.4.12: here's the kernel config file, and the lsmod without the cpqpjb.o module, I've not gotten around to recompiling it for 2.4.12 yet.  Remember, if you are using ALSA, you'll need to re-install the alsa-driver package again so that all the libs get put into the new modules directory for the new kernel. Use modprobe snd-card-intel8x0; modprobe snd-pcm-oss to install the freshly compiled modules into the system, no reboot required :)

I've just figured out in the last few days that the ATI Rage 3D Mobility video chipset is basically the same thing as a Rage 128, so there's a lot of extra things in my kernel now.  If you want to get a good look at the differences between 2 kernel config files, you can use this:

diff -u original_file new_file | vim -

This will open the output of diff in vim, if you have vim set up correctly, it will do syntax highlighting, and you'll easily be able to tell what's changed.

The framebuffer is for the Rage 128, and I also turned on DRI for X 4.x for the Rage 128 video card as well.  The end goal of all this video stuff is to be able to run the MesaGL version of prBoom, a version of the original Doom game engine that was GPL'ed by id Software.

php-stream

I was working on moving over the login/authentication code from the old codebase to the new one this week. It authenticates, but it does not set any PHP session variables yet.

stream-db

I got a copy of Ivan Woehr's stream.pl, he's got it doing a lot of neat things that I would like to put into stream-db.pl. Some day... :)

I'm fighting with my ISP, Cox@Home, over internet access. They've blocked incoming ports 25 and 80, so people can't run servers. Well, I run quite a few 'servers', so this effectively screws me hard. Here's what I'm doing to get things working again:

• Running an SSH tunnel from a server not on Cox@Home's network for port 25. So all of my mail is going to the remote server, the coming down the SSH tunnel to get to my server. This screws with a lot of stuff having to do with spam filtering, but at least it's still up.
• Using Apache's mod_rewrite to redirect web requests. This is really fun. Basically, whenever someone goes to http://www.sunset-cliffs.org (aka naranja.sunset-cliffs.org), they automatically get redirected to http://observer.sunset-cliffs.org:88 using the following rewrite rules:
  • RewriteEngine On
  • RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://observer.sunset-cliffs.org:88/$1 [R]
  Basically what the rule does is to
  1. match any text after the server name,
  2. and save the text you match (^/(.*)).
  The second half of the rule is to send it to the remote server, with the $1 at the end meaning "retrieve the text you saved previously from #1, and put it here". The [R] tells mod_rewrite to serve up the HTTP code 302, meaning "moved temporarily". Ralf Engelschall, the guy who wrote mod_rewrite, has an entire page dedicated to mod_rewrite here: http://www.engelschall.com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/#ToC23

Yes, I'm looking for a new ISP, but it's a pain in the ass to find cheap good bandwidth.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Flashed my SMC Wireless Barricade last night with the 1.93e flash image, and now the Lucent Orinoco Gold card works in Linux!!  Very cool.  Now the only excuse I have to be in Windows is to watch DVD's ;) This imwheel stuff is great, I'm still tweaking things, but it's a huge improvement in usability in the system as a whole to be able to scroll up and down inside of applications when I want to using the mouse wheel. Highly recommended to set this up. Oooo!  I also compiled kernel 2.4.8 last night, here's my config.  Remember when you compile you'll need to add the ALSA sound modules, plus for me I had to recompile the cpqpjb.o module.

misc

In order to fit 33 Gigabytes of MP3's onto the Personal Jukebox PJB-100 MP3 player I mentioned on the 10th, I'm reencoding most of my MP3 collection to 128kb/sec, as 99% of them are encoded @ 256kb/sec bitrate.  I'll be able to fit them all onto the PJB-100 that way.  That's going to be fun as hell, carry my entire CD collection with me.  Here's the script that I'm using with LAME to reencode.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Playing with imwheel 0.99.   So far, I've gotten Mozilla to scroll up and down, xmms and wmix to go up/down in volume, and BitchX to page up/down all with the mousewheel on my Logitech Optical Mouse.  Here's my imwheelrc and imwheel startup.conf (it should be called startup.conf).  I put both files into /etc/X11/imwheel/, and symlinked /etc/imwheelrc to imwheelrc in the former directory; you might create a ~/.imwheelrc symlink and point it back to the system imwheelrc file to keep imwheel from bitching.  I also had to monkey with my XF86Config-4 file, so pick up another copy if you are using mine.  I'm overriding Mozilla's mouse wheel support with that provided by imwheel, it scrolls a little smoother IMO; the imwheelrc has the dirty details.  imwheelrc is subject to change, so check back often.  I've also installed the aumix package, and I've got a startup script that uses it to set the voulme at boot time to 80% for the Master, PCM and CD volume levels.  Aumix works on ALSA because I have the ALSA OSS modules loaded.