Reviving the Desktop

Been busy lately. The ~10 year old drive in my Phenom II box finally kicked the bucket (random chance whether BIOS would recognize it at boot, bad sectors galore, et cetera), so I bought a new one: A 1TB WD Caviar Black (WD10000LSRTL). I was a bit apprehensive shipping it from Newegg with all the horror stories of drive damage as a result of UPS' shipping procedures, so I opted for the retail packaging ($10 extra, w/o free shipping). The drive arrived, and was immediately plugged in so I could double check it's SMART attributes, as well as run badblocks on it to check for bad sectors and everything came back a-ok.

First a fresh copy of Windows 7 was installed (In a fit of rage, I formatted the NTFS partition on the old drive and turned it into an Ext4 storage partition). That went fairly without incident, save for the hours I spent finding and installing all the programs I use, updating drivers, et cetera. At this point I'm obligated to mention that whenever I install Linux, it takes me about 5 minutes to open a terminal and tell the package manager to download everything I need, and then I can go about my day until it finishes. In Windows, it takes significantly longer, especially with having to use your web browser to navigate to each program's site individually, and painstakingly sit through dozens of "Next, Next, Next, I Accept, Finish" install 'wizards'... But I digress. After all the programs were installed, as well as my full Steam game library, I let the disk defrag for a few hours. Defrag finishes, and I can get on with more important things; Namely, saving my Arch setup. I put way too much work into it with the compiz effects, my custom scripts, and everything else to just let it go to waste by reinstalling from scratch.

I used a fairly standard partition setup on the Arch box with separate /, /boot, and /home partitions. This was by far the easiest part of the day. I put both drives in the tower, and booted into whatever livecd I had lying around (I think it was the server edition of ubuntu 8.10) and mounted the partitions in the appropriate places. Then just copied everything over using the 'a' argument, which preserves the files exactly.

I.e.:

# mkdir /mnt/old /mnt/old/boot /mnt/old/home \
> /mnt/new /mnt/new/boot /mnt/new/home
# mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/new/boot
# mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/new/home
# mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/new/
# mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt/old/boot
# mount /dev/sdb5 /mnt/old/home
# mount /dev/sdb4 /mnt/old/
# cp -av /mnt/old/* /mnt/new/


Easy, peasy, and the box now runs fine (after making the appropriate changes to Grub's menu.lst and the fstab of course). Next in line is the netbook, which is going to get a fresh Arch install in time for LinuxCon (Currently running a rather useless Chromium OS since the wireless drivers are refusing to cooperate). Originally I was going to install Gentoo on it, but compiling on an Atom is a special kind of hell, and until I have the patience and the time to do it, Arch is a much better choice. Plus I can always use the Arch build system for the packages I'll be using the most.

Linux as a Gaming Platform

This past week, I've gotten more and more Windows-native games (as well as *nix ports) to run on my Arch x86_64 box. I originally built the computer with gaming in mind, but with Windows 7 getting worse and worse by the minute, booting into Windows just to play a game was becoming a more and more laborious task, not to mention that dirty feeling you get when you boot a computer and the Windows logo pops up.

I had originally used the latest stable version of Wine (1.0.1) obtained from Arch's User Repository, but found it was just as buggy as my previous Wine experiences. I managed to get Halo to run as mentioned in a previous post, however there were still relatively minor issues that persisted, such as the odd screen flicker, graphical problems on screen panning, and an odd box of discoloration that appeared in the top-right corner of the screen.

On a whim I decided to upgrade to the latest developmental version of wine (1.4.1), which was also in the AUR, though the PKGBUILD required some minor editing as wget was met with a 404 error trying to download the necessary files from the link given in the PKGBUILD. Luckily a fellow Archer posted a revised PKGBUILD in the comments, and it worked like a charm. Once the new Wine was up and running, I double-checked Halo to make sure the upgrade didn't brick it... Far from, it increased performance ten-fold, which is hard for me to say because it really wasn't bad at all to begin with. Suffice to say an immediate performance increase was more than noticeable.

After perusing the Wine AppDB for games I owned that were known to work well with Wine, I decided I'd give Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source a go. I encountered, and eventually fixed the same problem in both games. They would both load, but neither rendered any sound. After a quick trip through 'winecfg' I set the sound to OSS instead of ALSA, and it now works wonderfully. Not quite sure why, since ALSA is recommended explicitly over OSS for Wine, but with ALSA I can only play Halo, and with OSS all three games work. I suspect it has something to do with Steam, but I'll leave well-enough alone for now.

Now for the less-troublesome ports. There are countless remakes of the original DOS doom, most adding additional functionalities such as the ability to jump/crouch or have crosshairs, et cetera. Chocolate-Doom (AUR, detecting a trend here?) is a play on 'Vanilla Doom', as in the untouched original DOS version. It is as close to the original as possible, and preserves only original functionalities, as well as the original bugs. Using chocolate-doom I was able to play Doom 1, Doom 2, TNT, and Plutonia, just by setting the -iwad option on the command line and the path to the wad. Now I bought the id Super Pack on Steam some time ago, so I have access to the WADS on my Windows partition. Of course starting the game via a rather long terminal command isn't exactly efficient, so I wound up toying around with my ~/.bashrc file and got a rather satisfactory result.

~/.bashrc is used to create 'Aliases' for commands entered into the shell, using a very simple configuration file. Here's the portion of my ~/.bashrc pertaining to chocolate-doom:

alias chocolate-doom1="chocolate-doom -iwad ~/Data/DOOM.WAD"
alias chocolate-doom2="chocolate-doom -iwad ~/Data/DOOM2.WAD"
alias chocolate-doom-plutonia="chocolate-doom -iwad ~/Data/PLUTONIA.WAD"
alias chocolate-doom-tnt="chocolate-doom -iwad ~/Data/TNT.WAD"

Now instead of using the -iwad argument and specifying the full file path, I can just append a bit to the end of the command, so 'chocolate-doom1' will launch chocolate-doom using the DOOM.WAD. Much more efficient.

Getting away from the first person shooter category for a bit, Astromenace(AUR) is an extremely addictive space-scrolling 3D spaceship shooter, that is open-source. It also features RPG elements, as you buy a spaceship (from a rather large selection), and set about custom-configuring it with various hardware components such as shields, power-sources, engines, and of course weaponry. You earn money at the end of each level, which you can spend on these things as well as hull-upgrades. The difficulty level is also very customizable, you aren't presented with a simple easy/medium/hard menu, you actually get to specify various game mechanics such as damage bonuses, armor bonuses, and the like. You can also speed up/slow down the game in play using the F5-F7 keys. It is extremely addictive, and took up a few days of my life, but it is by far the best native Linux game of its kind I have ever seen.

My only hesitation about Linux originally was having to sacrifice quality gaming time to gain all of Linux's other benefits, but thanks to an increase in the availability of native/ported games for Linux, and the truly fantastic work Wine's developers are doing, I may eventually be able to rid my HDD of that ugly NTFS partition for good.

Windows 7 & Debian Dual Boot

Quite a long day today. My school is enrolled in MSDNAA, which is basically free software from Microsoft, which as a CS student I am entitled to. So I woke up this morning, checked my student e-mail and read the account activation letter I'd received from them, and followed the link to their site where I discovered a venerable treasure trove of Microsoft software. Granted I wouldn't use most of it to save my life (the Office '07 suite is just indescribably horrendous) but also available for download was Windows 7. Now my Desktop is running Win7 so I've used it and despite my obligatory scorn for all things Microsoft, I have to admit it's the best OS they've ever put out. It's certainly better than Vista (from which there is nowhere to go but up). It's more stable than XP, and (obviously) more updated. Let's face it, XP's felt antiquated for quite some time.

What bothered me though was that you were not able to just download the .iso. You had to download an 'installer' (windows format .exe of course) which would download the file for you. I can't think of any reason for this other than to restrict the downloads to people already running a Windows operating system. At this point it doesn't get them any more customers, it certainly doesn't make them lose any, so why limit the availability of the software all students enrolled in the MSDNAA are entitled to based upon their current operating system? That would be like an electrician refusing to work on your house after you've already payed him because the wiring was put in by another company. It is an absurd ideology and quite frankly I don't see how consumers can tolerate it to the point where Microsoft's stock is selling at almost $30 a share.

I did wind up getting their pseudo-installer to run in wine, and then burned the iso all without ever having to leave backtrack, but it was still an unnecessary annoyance... But I digress. With the new Windows 7 (x64) disk in hand, I set about wiping my laptop clean and installing Windows. It went of without a hitch and everything's working fine. A rather rare occurrence. That being said, I only spent about 20 minutes in the OS until I had accepted one license agreement too many which, in turn, drove me to download and burn a Debian disk (Lenny main x64). I have never had a Linux install give me this many problems.

Apparently the kernel that Debian 5 ships with doesn't play nice on this particular build. For a distribution so well-known for stability, I was rather surprised. After an install that seemed to go off without a hitch, when I would boot into Debian it would hang on several different items. After 20 minutes I gave up, boot wasn't happening. At first I thought the install disk was faulty so I MD5'd it and compared it to the MD5 on Debian's site: they were identical. After two more installs with the same result I logged onto the IRC channel to see if anyone else had ever experienced this. After spending some time in #debian, the nice folks there pointed me to backports.org, where I was able to obtain a newer version of the kernel that worked with my box. Aside from a few minor hiccups that were later ironed out, I was now able to boot properly. After booting into the OS, it took me a while to figure out that the reason apt wasn't working properly was because I didn't have the right repositories in my /etc/apt/sources.list. After adding them, I went about configuring the OS. The wireless card works out of the box, but the network manager did not, so after creating a shell script that would launch netapplet, and throwing it in /etc/init.d/ that problem too is rectified.

The result of the day? Laptop wiped, dual boot with Windows 7 x64 and Debian 5 Lenny x64. I originally wanted to do a multi-boot with those OS's and BSD as well, but it's 10:00 and after spending about 8 hours doing this I simply don't have the energy. Maybe tomorrow If I get around to finishing all the other tech-stuff I need to do.

New Router, New OS(s)

My Phenom II x4 (965 Black Edition=Unclocked Multiplier Goodness) has been giving me wireless problems since I built it. I tried a consortium of pci cards, and a menagerie of usb wireless devices but Windows 7 x64 couldn't do zip with them. All the devices worked fine under Linux, Windows must have been set to boot into useless-mode. There was something in my device list (in control panel) called "Teredo Tunnel Adapter Pseudo Interface" that was giving me a code 10 (device unable to start). After a quick bit of googling I learned that it had something to do with IPv6... undoubtedly Microsoft has found a way to screw that up too. I took it to the knowledge bar at my local Microcenter and after about an hour of troubleshooting we just did a clean install using a different OEM disk (theirs) than I had been using. Now it works just fine with my new D-Link DWA-552 PCI card.

So with a clean install of Win7 I went about configuring the system and downloading all the software I need. Firefox, Songbird, Pidgin, PuTTY, TightVNC, Zonealarm, AVG, about 25GB of games on Steam, et cetera. Having done all this fairly rapidly my NTFS partition was now fragmented pretty severely. After finally configuring all the programs, all my drivers, and everything else I set the machine up to defrag while I ate dinner. There's productivity for you.

So with the new computer fully functional, I set about throwing the obligatory Linux distro on it. I usually go with the latest version of Linux Mint, although I have been known to use Debian. This time I went with the newest incarnation of Backtrack and am liking it so far. It takes a bit of getting used to working in KDE as I've only used it briefly before but I do like the feel of it. After a rather lengthy installation (not ubiquity's fault, I botched up the math while partitioning) I booted into it from a rather flavorless grub compared to Mint's, but who cares? It's a bootloader.

While at Microcenter I also got a new router. My Trendnet router's been giving me nothing but problems ever since I bought it. It's a Netgear WNR3500 and I can conclusively say it's the best thing since sliced bread. Then again my opinion may be slightly biased on account of me being able to successfully forward ports seeming like a miracle. The Trendnet didn't forward ports, it just opened them. Ok for bittorrent, useless for ssh or VNC. So I set up the new router (breeze to configure), and promptly forwarded ports for VNC, SSH, and bittorrent to my torrent-slave/htpc/media-server after already assigning it a static IP address.

What wasn't so easy was installing the router. Previously my modem, router, and answering machine had been in the living room of my house. We have optimum online so the phone service comes out of the modem. The router and the phone were not playing nicely with each other and caused sever static on the cordless phones that made them unusable, and caused the router to randomly drop connections and have really poor signal strength, despite being wireless N. So the modem and router are now in my bedroom. I wanted to keep the answering machine in the living room so I had to run a 100ft phone cable up into my ceiling, through the attic, and into a newly drilled whole in the corner of the living room ceiling behind some furniture (so it's out of view. Kinda tacky to just have wires coming out of the ceiling in random spots).

Now everything is as it should be: Wireless networking on the computer on multiple OSes, New router up and running alongside the modem in the bedroom, and the phone in the living room. With any luck tomorrow I'll add "print-server" to the list of things my P4 box can do.