war journal 14b: windows games on linux, snapshots

last time, we were talking about how things crash when running windows games on linux, via wine.

here are some screenshots from my amd64 box.

star wars: jedi academy, character selection

image 2:

star wars knights of the old republic, intro

after this shot, the game one wine crashes. what is suppose to happen is that this is suppose to go to the character selection box.

well at least there is some progress. i suspect my dated hardware needs some upgrading. those games are being ran off an amd64, 1.8ghz box, 1gb ram, ati (yikes!) 9250 radeon card.

war journal 14: running windows games on linux

one must always trust one's distro. for about a month now, i've been trying to run windows games on linux. a crazy notion, given the bleeding edge nature of wine. i went crazy and even went so far as to install ubuntu on my linux box--- as a separate partition beside my gentoo. i was desperate to get direct rendering running and thus opengl.

the applications for third world nations would be great! people can run games on cheap hardware, something most internet cafes would probably benefit from. after all, if you could somehow do away with windows and its inherent security flaws, that would be great isn't it?

i don't mean to emphasize the flaws of windows--- i rather think there is a place in the world for it. but given a public terminal that lets you browse the internet, play games and do limited word processing, one can not possible contain the myriad users who would be running the system. linux would be an ideal platform for a multi-role public terminal because you'd be able to limit their access rights. and no, vista would just be too darn expensive to deploy.

i've been going crazy trying to get gentoo to run direct rendering. i couldn't get it to work. and a quick look at the gentoo forums said that though ati's linux drivers are sucky, my radeon 9250 card should run. hmm. insane.

i decided to run ubuntu on a separate partition. i just need to know my video card could work.

ubuntu feisty is a great distro! it ran direct rendering out of the box. its installer is one of the prettiest i've seen--- and very easy to run. it was able to detect all my peripherals. my one comment is this: i had to manually run pppoeconf to get my dsl running and the network panel remains a close sibling of the one windows xp has. it may be because mac os x has spoiled me on that regard--- networking is a breeze on os x with zeroconf networking.

wine--- on the other hand wasn't available on feisty. it is on edgy and some of the drivers had to be installed. still: no big, right? so i did and winehq's wiki worked rather well.

knights of the old republic's install ran pretty well just as it did on my gentoo. it is my only game, so pretty much there isn't much of a choice. then i hit a snag. the game wouldn't play, wouldn't go past the menu. winehq's app db revealed that there have been successful installs of knights and that they were able to play.

i decided to copy my ubuntu's xorg config and transfer it to my gentoo box. after all if that worked... it should on gentoo right? it didin't. direct rendering wouldn't work.

i killed X, ran eselect opengl set xorg-x11 then, rsync'd and updated portage and downloaded the newest gentoo-sources (gentoo's patched linux kernel). i decided to remove the dri--- (it was recommended by the gentoo howtos for ati) from the kernel but i wouldn't be installing the ati-drivers. i fetched xorg-x11's drm instead. the compile was a success. reboot.

login to gnome and ran glxinfo | grep rendering yielded: success! direct rendering was working! i loaded up kotor's disc one. then ran wine. start game. and kotor's video came to life! yes!

then it crashed.

coming to the computer, sooner than you think

What would you do if you could touch your music, your photos, your videos and that report you need to submit to your boss... on a computer display?

Twenty years ago, the icon-window-mouse-keyboard quartet we are so familiar with today, changed the way we communicate and interact. It appeared on the Macintosh, then on Microsoft's Windows and into every desktop and notebook computer in the last two decades or so.

For the past few years, researchers have been developing 3D windowing interfaces. Project Looking Glass and Beryl are an examples of this effort, as is the work of Jeff Han. So it hasn't been a question of, "can we do it". The question is: how useful would it be?

Apple Inc., the maker of such iconic devices as the Macintosh and the iPod, launched the iPhone during Macworld last January 2007, which they promised will revolutionize the way we use, the umm... phone... to call. hhhmmm.

What has the iPhone got to do with a new window interface?

This is the biggest, most exciting potential of the iPhone and it is a feature called "Multi-Touch". This piece of technology allows the user to interact with the computer with just using your hands. Too science fiction-Minority Report, you say?

Macrumors.com in March 2006 posted this on their site:

"Operation of a computer with touch screen interface". Again, individuals at Apple appear to be spending a lot of time on the potential interface for users of a touch screen device. The patent describes the the possible advantage of touch screens by being able to "glean much more information about a user's actions" than from conventional keyboards.

The methods described are intriguing in that it appears that there could be a level of refinement to the touch interface that has not been present in previous devices. Again, Apple describes the utility of offering a multi-touch capable display which can process multiple figures and gestures to provide additional information.

A few days ago, BingeBoy posted this amazing video:

In the next three months or so, Apple is not only launching iPhone... it is also expected to launch the next version of its flagship software: Mac OS X 10.5 (code name:Leopard). The rumor mill has been buzzing with the tantalizing possibility... that Multi-Touch could make its way to the desktop sooner than most of us may think, "as in, is three months or so, too soon?"

what makes people say this? A quick look at this short preview from Apple about one of the corner stones of Leopard, called Core Animation promises that Leopard will not only bring a better User Interface but also this same capability is found on the iPhone. How difficult would it be to enable multi-touch for the desktop when you've done it on a small device like iPhone?

The potential for this kind of user interface will usher in a new universe of how we interact with computers. No longer will applications be chained to the limitations of the GUI and the keyboard-mouse-display. we can build interfaces that are application specific. For example, you can interact with your photos as if you were holding them and shuffling them or arranging them as you would, developed film. the same with video, with music. you can re-arrange your report to your boss in potentially the same manner and configure, theoretically, a keyboard you are comfortable with writing. the possibilities are endless.

With two applications known to be using it, Time Machine (which will be part of Mac OS X 10.5 is an animated way to interact with your data backup) and iPhone multi-touch will be part of our daily work-flow. Whether or not Multi-Touch ready displays will be around, or if Leopard will have Multi-Touch for the desktop enabled, the fact that this piece of technology will be functional in a computer called iPhone, only time will tell when we can expect to be touching our data, our photos, our music, our videos, and working with it on the desktop.

Don't Do This @ Home

I must really be getting good at this. This is my second time to fatally crash the mac in a year. to this day, i don't know what The Faithful call it, when your mac says in a black screen to press the power button because the system did something fatal. in this case, user (i.e. the guy whose blog you're reading now) did something stupid.

panic(cpu 0 caller 0x001A429B): Unresolved kernel trap (CPU 0, Type 14=page fault), registers:
CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0x00000000, CR3: 0x01753000, CR4: 0x000006e0
EAX: 0x00000000, EBX: 0x00134b5e, ECX: 0x000036b8, EDX: 0x0000dae0
CR2: 0x00000000, EBP: 0x1d0bbf88, ESI: 0x0585b624, EDI: 0x00000000
EFL: 0x00010206, EIP: 0x001963ce, CS: 0x00000008, DS: 0x00190010

Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x1d0bbdb8 : 0x128d08 (0x3cb134 0x1d0bbddc 0x131de5 0x0)
0x1d0bbdf8 : 0x1a429b (0x3d0e4c 0x0 0xe 0x3d0670)
0x1d0bbf08 : 0x19ada4 (0x1d0bbf1c 0x12d99c 0xdae4 0xe)
0x1d0bbf88 : 0x35695712 (0x22 0x4ba970 0x1d09bba4 0x0)
0x1d0bbfa0 : 0x35634177 (0x297 0x1d0bbfc8 0x356aabaa 0x1d09bba4)
0x1d0bbfac : 0x356aabaa (0x1d09bba4 0x1d09bba4 0x2d4cb000 0x1d09bba4)
0x1d0bbfc8 : 0x19ac1c (0x1d09bba4 0x0 0x19e0b5 0x4c99640) Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0x0
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
org.openafs.filesystems.afs(1.5.15)@0x3562d000

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.9.1: Thu Feb 22 20:55:00 PST 2007; root:xnu-792.18.15~1/RELEASE_I386

Model: iMac4,1, BootROM IM41.0055.B08, 2 processors, Intel Core Duo, 1.83 GHz, 1.5 GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon X1600, ATY,RadeonX1600, PCIe, 128 MB
Memory Module: BANK 0/DIMM0, 1 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
Memory Module: BANK 1/DIMM1, 512 MB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0x89), Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (4.80.79.1)
Bluetooth: Version 1.7.14f14, 2 service, 1 devices, 1 incoming serial ports
Network Service: Built-in Ethernet, PPP (PPPoE), ppp0
Network Service: Parallels Host-Guest, Ethernet, en2
Network Service: Parallels NAT, Ethernet, en3
Serial ATA Device: WDC WD1600JS-40NGB2, 149.05 GB
Parallel ATA Device: MATSHITADVD-R UJ-846
USB Device: Built-in iSight, Micron, Up to 480 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Bluetooth HCI, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: IR Receiver, Apple Computer, Inc., Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Hub in Apple Pro Keyboard, Mitsumi Electric, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Optical USB Mouse, Logitech, Up to 1.5 Mb/sec, 100 mA
USB Device: Apple Pro Keyboard, Mitsumi Electric, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 250 mA

what crazy thing did i do? installed openafs 1.5.15 (distributed file system) on the imac. the install never did get to finish. anyway, don't worry, this isn't a sign of bad design on apple's part. the tech IS bleeding edge and most users will never ever touch it.