BenV's notes

Yay a new Xen version. Well, it’s not that new, but I’m upgrading to it today. And while we’re at it, Jeremy got his pvops kernel almost to version 3.1.0 (it’s at rc9 today, good enough for me atm).
So what’s new in this latest Xen version? First of all it has finally ditched the xm command for good. Well, it’s still there, but it’s really deprecated now because it has been replaced by xl. For a nice overview of what has been improved since Xen 4.0, they have a nice list over here.
One cool thing in the later Xen releases (that is: 4.0 and up) is the integration of Remus. We’ll test that out later. (continue reading…)

Seems like they released a new patch for World of Warcraft, increasing the version to 4.3.3 build 15354.
Obviously this broke on my wine64 installation of the game:
* Start wine64 Wow-64.exe
* Login
* “Patch required” -> OK
* “Downloading Update” -> OK

(continue reading…)

Earlier I reported on my first World of Warcraft under 64 bits wine experience. It somewhat worked but couldn’t play the game because it got stuck on the loading screen.
Just now I decided to give it another shot and pulled the latest wine from git. Currently we’re on wine version 1.4-rc4. Before building that I upgraded my NVIDIA driver to their latest as well, 295.20.

After compiling and installing the new wine release candidate the results are in:

So it seems like the guys working on Wine did some good work!
Loading the initial screen is still a bit slower than the 32 bit version, but apart from the it seems good. Haven’t tried any dungeons yet, so I have no reports on ingame performance, but I might complain on that later if it sucks 🙂
If not I have another reason to move my old 32 bits slackware partition to the shredder.

In an attempt to try out the latest DRBD version (8.4.1 atm) on a new Xen installation, I ran into some issues.
Initially I built the kernel with the included DRBD module, but I soon realized that this version was older than I wanted to play with (the included version was 8.3.11), so I grabbed the source and tried to build it myself. (continue reading…)

Yesterday Slackware64-current gave me Firefox 3.6. So far I’m happy to note that this broke more than half my addons, but that’s to be expected with that addon-hell.
Wonder when they clean up that act and start including required stuff like firebug. Anyway, a while ago I built google gears for firefox 3.5. Since Google is too incompetent to provide a 64 bit linux version, you have to do it yourself, which I did. However, with the Firefox 3.6 upgrade this addon also broke. (continue reading…)

Don’t ask me why, but for some greasemonkey script that I wanted to run in Firefox I needed Google Gears.
So I went to the gears site with Firefox, and it told me that it needed to install some plugin. Yeah, whatever.
I hit the big Install Gears button, completely ignoring the tiny and almost invisible for my eyes 32-bit OS (64-bit not supported) notice below it.
Needless to say it went on to download a 3.5Mb package, started some popups and other junk after which it notified me of my grave mistake.
Aha. So for some reason Google is too incompetent to work with 64 bits software…. even microsoft can deal with that these days guys, geesh. (continue reading…)

A while ago I talked about emulators and my quest to run them on 64 bit linux.
Today I stumbled upon pcsx-r or PCSX-Reloaded. Basically the same thing as the old pcsx emulator, only better 🙂
Why? First of all it builds and runs on my slackware64 without 32 bits garbage attached to it. Second of all, someone is actively developing it which means it’s still being improved. Finally, the interface is slightly better.
I know it’s good since slackbuild compiled it without problems 😉
Here’s the thing running on my slackware 64 install:

I loaded final fantasy 8 on it:

And to prove it does more than just the intro screen, here’s a shot from the intro movie 😉

Offtopic: Do you know what really annoys me in games?
UNSKIPPABLE CONTENT!
In this case the intro movie, but it goes for countless of things: cutscenes (either ingame or fmv), “game over” screens, long talks that I don’t give a damn about when I already know what they’re saying… I’m sure there are plenty more examples of this. If you’re developing a game, make sure you don’t force your gamer through this nonsense. Yeah, it’s cute, and we understand that you spent countless of hours wasting your time on fancy graphics, but after the first time I really don’t want to sit through it again. Especially if I just died and am forced through it -again-.

So now that I had it running in the background and could rant while it showed the intro, here’s an ingame shot 😉

Keep up the good work PCSX-Reloaded guys!
And fix your homepage.
Things that are currently wrong with it:
* It doesn’t tell me anything ABOUT the product, except for that it’s a fork/branch of PCSX
* It doesn’t have any screenshots (what is it with graphical programs that don’t have screenshots on their website? That’ s a FAIL right there)
* It doesn’t have any information on requirements etc, I just tried to compile it on 64 bit linux because I hoped it would work, not because your site tells me it does.

After toying around a bit on the news sites I decided it would be interesting to see if qBitTorrent would run on slackware 64.
So we go to the download site, copy the url, and see if Slackbuild likes it. Slackbuild leeches, untars, gives the configure options (which are a bit buggy, I know, will be fixed next release), runs configure. Configure crashes out with “blabla boost blabla”. (continue reading…)

You read it right, time for fun!

First we build ourselves a nice cute little server in a 2U rack case made by Chenbro (sounds like Xenbro to me ;)).
Inside we stash a quad core Phenom X2 810, 2 western digital 1TB disks from the “green” series and of course 8GB of DDR1333.
Could be faster, but this should do for not too much coin. (about 600 euros).
(continue reading…)

So I was bored and went through the usual slashdot, kernel.org, freshmeat.net, etc.
Once reading through the news on happypenguin.org I noticed it must be mario season or something.
After checking the descriptions I decided to check out Super Mario^W^WSecret Maryo Chronicles.
(continue reading…)