Some random ramblings...

If your Ubuntu desktop crashes and you lose all your desktop icons, open a terminal and run nautilus to bring it back.

If you have custom made .desktop launchers on the desktop, you can copy the files into /usr/local/share/applications so the Dash Home search can pick it up and execute them.

Uninstalling Adobe Reader 9 Linux (SH installer)

I found out a tad bit late that Adobe didn't package 64-bit versions of the Reader so my 64-bit Firefox machine couldn't pick up the plugin.  I went ahead and dug up how to uninstall this dumb plugin.  Most of it is in /opt/Adobe/Reader9 which contains most of the stuff, but you might discover that you still have shortcut icons on it especially if you use the Dash Home search.

Check /usr/local/share/applications and your desktop for the AdobeReader.desktop file and purge them.  Then, look for the nppdf.so plugin install paths in /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins and /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.

I didn't find anymore traces after that so you should be fine after.

Star Wars: The Old Republic and Wine Update

From last night's update, it seems that SWTOR has been improved to a point where the game actually starts from the launcher window.  I am unsure as to whether or not it's a fluke, but when it did, I got the Star Wars splash screen but the game did freeze after that.  I then went ahead and used the same workaround to get the game running, but I will perhaps improve the script to make sure it's getting the right hash, if it turns out the launcher just doesn't work at all even with this new progress.

Where's Google Play Store??

Interesting problem last night.  One of the Android tablets we own had its Play Store missing from the app drawer page, which was just baffling to me.  Noting that the Play Store is a preinstalled, you can't just uninstall and zap it to kingdom come.  After poking around and even going as far as downloading an apk for the Play Store (which didn't work), it turns out there's an easy fix for this.

Go to Settings > Apps and tap the menu button (3 vertical dots).  Then check Show Google Apps.  Why is this even an option?

Most Favourite Nolan Films

I'll keep this brief.  I always wanted to keep track of the rankings I've put on Chris Nolan flicks.  Here's the rankings.

1. Inception
2. Memento
3. Following
4. Batman Begins
5. The Dark Knight Rises
6. Prestige
7. Insomnia
8. The Dark Knight

As always, these lists are subjective.  So, it's just my personal opinion on which is better.  The Dark Knight in particular though... is a very, very distant 8th.

Android Wifi Indicator - Blue vs Grey Signal

In the household, we have our 5th Android tablet and while it's nothing to write about, it is pretty much functional.  Something that bothered me though was that the wifi signal was always grey for some reason.  Past experience leads me to believe that the grey signal means the tablet is attempting to connect, but for this tablet, it seems to surf fine.  After a bit of searching, I finally found out the reason for this.

If your indicator is blue, it means you are connected to the internet and have Google services in sync and connected.

If your indicator is grey and you have Google services saved on the device, it is attempting to connect to a wifi hot spot.

If you do not have Google services set on the machine, your wifi indicator will always be grey.

Reference

*UPDATE* Star Wars: The Old Republic Free to Play Emotes

UPDATE:
Well, as it turns out, clicking the upper left corner lists down the emotes you can do, which renders this list pretty much obsolete.

I figured it would be helpful to provide a list of the emotes that the game provides free players since it seems that when you try to type something, you get the "Restricted to Preferred and Subscribers" message.  The list of emotes was derived from this original list I found: Click Here.  It is unclear if it is an exhaustive list or not.  Either way, the list after the jump.

*UPDATE* Star Wars: The Old Republic - Free to Play - Script Helper

*UPDATE*
The script has been updated to handle multiple running SWTOR processes.  The launcher was updated to also run the server side process that runs the game (although it still freezes on the splash screen).  This update will get the appropriate SWTOR.EXE process' arguments and terminate the running copy.

I wrote a bash script that will help with those pesky arguments when getting the game to run on Wine.  Run the launcher, and click Play.  Then run the script and copy the arguments.  Paste it on Play on Linux and then enjoy the game.  The script is quick and dirty.  As usual, no explicit warranty.

Bash Script *version 2*

Bastion Update

One quick word on Bastion.  The new nVidia drivers 310.14 from Ubuntu's experimental repositories have fixed the performance woes.  It's running now at a very slick frame rate.  Cool.

A Few Wine Thoughts...

I've been sinking my teeth on the Free to Play SWTOR for about a week now and the Wine workarounds are fairly reliable.  One word of advice is to avoid logging back into the game using Windows as you get stuck again with some insanely long loading times.  The game runs pretty fine, but the map and the mouse roll over on objectives are major cause for game freezes, so avoid using them as much as possible.  Also, I'm on the verge of quitting because the Sith Inquisitor quests have become next to impossible.  If this doesn't change anytime soon, I will purge this game and never look back.

I've also tried the following games on Wine and Steam: Mark of the Ninja, Just Cause, Velvet Assassin, and The Walking Dead.  They all work splendidly and without issues whatsoever.  Of the four, Just Cause is just plain crap.  Velvet Assassin is good, but insanely difficult even on the easiest difficulty setting.  Both Mark of the Ninja and The Walking Dead are crazy good and deserve some serious kudos.  I'd give all four games the platinum ranking!

Star Wars - The Old Republic Free to Play on Wine

Time and time again, I've tried to get this blast game to run on Wine.  As fate would have it, no such dumb luck for me.  I knew it was only a matter of time before the game hit the free to play model, and it happened.  So after some more fighting and tussling, I finally got the game to work.

This is also my first time using PlayOnLinux and it's a splendid tool that makes maintenance of my Wine builds easy.  What you need to do to get the game to work is run the script after downloading the exe installer from the main website.  This should pretty much run without issue.

If you run the launcher afterwards, all you'll get is a black screen.  You can set your Wine virtual desktop to 1000x600 to get the launcher to appear.  The game won't run afterwards, so I had to poke around a guide.  This one from the SWTOR website was extremely helpful.

Essentially, you'll need to get the password hash and other parameters of swtor.exe that the launcher runs and create your own shortcut that runs the exe directly.  My guess is that the long winded paths are messing up the game if executed by the launcher.

Performance seems OK, but it's only the starting planet.  Hope this little entry helps.

Hipchat and Ubuntu 12.10

Update:

http://www.ubuntukiller.com/2013/04/how-to-install-hipchat-in-ubuntu.html

There's a deb client for hipchat.  I haven't gotten around to trying it, but it should be interesting figuring out how to uninstall the old client!

Old instructions after the jump!

Bastion - Horrible Frame rate

I think the title pretty much says it all.  The last time I played a game that had such horrible frame rate,  it was Witcher 2 and that game had much more splendid than Bastion.  I don't know why it's slow as hell, but it's really killing the experience.  I also tried dropping the resolution, going window mode, disabling vsync and using nofixedstep.  None of it really helps me.  This is incredibly annoying for a game that hasn't really convinced me it's worth it to power through it in its entirety.

Creating Custom Launchers

The change to the Unity desktop brought along with it some oddities including missing features that normal GNOME desktops used to have.  I figured I'd post what I did to get my custom ssh apps to work in a console.

The easiest way without having to drag up in and install GNOME stuff is to create a .desktop file that appears on your desktop.  These are the file contents:

[Desktop Entry]

Name=ShellScriptApp

Exec=gnome-terminal -e /full/path/to/shellscriptapp.sh

Type=Application

StartupNotify=true

Comment=Your Comment Here

Path=/full/path/here

Icon=/icon/path/to/the/png/file

The contents will run a gnome-terminal and execute the command you need so you get a nice terminal window with the app running.

Gee... Check Point, Thanks!

As I work on this, I'm beginning to see that Check Point is the culprit of Virtualbox throwing up with the networking.  This is utterly annoying and something unexpected.  If I cannot fix this, I may have to repeat the entire process again.

The Final Stretch... hopefully

Slowly but surely, I'm starting to settle in on the new Ubuntu install.  I like the Unity desktop generally speaking.  There's a few oddities here and there like the lack of screensaver and how the UVC drivers are broken thereby rendering the web camera completely and utterly useless.

VirtualBox is giving me problems when I transferred my VM images from Ubuntu 9.10.  This has simply forced my hand into installing a new Windows 7 image for my work.  Shame but it had to be done.

Pulse Audio is much better here than in 9.10 but it still suffers from the HDMI issue where the audio cuts for the first few seconds.

Looking forward to the new Steam Linux release and have begun fiddling with Wine and the CrossOver Flock the Vote software.

Next time, I hope that the upgrade path will be smooth.  I'd hate to fight with it like this all over again.

Demystifying the network woes

I've noticed that my network is (mis)behaving in pretty much the same way as it did in Ubuntu 9.10.  I've begun digging up some resources to see why it's happening and it looks like a BIOS/firmware issue where the interrupts are not being set correctly by the BIOS.  You can read more about it here and here and here.  The problems described are EXACTLY THE SAME as the ones I'm having.  The question is, which one do I grab for the motherboard DP55WB?

Handy command here:

sudo lshw -class network

This will spit out the UNCLAIMED output.

Bonus:
When my portable hard disk started to spew stupid crap about not being able to mount using ntfs.  I needed to run chkdsk from Windows.  This command was helpful:  chkdsk /f [drive letter]:

Ubuntu 12.10: nVIDIA Oops!

I thought installing the nvidia drivers would be very easy.  Turns out, I was wrong.  I ran sudo apt-get install nvidia-current which failed because apparently, it didn't include the kernel headers.  I ended up with vesa and without the taskbar, rendering the desktop useless.

To fix this, I went to the commandline screen (ctrl+alt+f1) and logged in.  Then sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic and then sudo apt-get remove nvidia-* to get rid of the currently installed nvidia drivers.  Lastly, I ran the nvidia driver install again: sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-updates nvidia-settings to recompile the drivers (and slipped in the config app).  After reboot, all's well!  Special thanks to this forum thread.

Pulse Audio still exhibits the same issues with HDMI where the audio being played misses a few seconds.  Typical of this POS audio layer.

Now it's about trying to get this Logitech Quickcam to work which used to work splendidly on 9.10.  Oh well, time to see what's going on.

Ubuntu 12.10 - Growing Pains

I guess no matter how good things get with Ubuntu, you still get the usual first boot scares.  In my case, it's the video display (surprise! surprise!).  I run a GeForce 9500 GT and it's an old card for sure.  When I got to finally boot, I got a purple screen and then no video signal issue.  Poking around I realized I had to set the kernel options on grub to nomodeset but it's been a while since I last mucked with grub.  So, I wanted to do a post here that summarizes everything I've learned.

If you don't get the grub menu on boot, just before grub loads, press SHIFT.  Since I had the network boot to start, I had to press CTRL+C to stop network boot and then wait for the routine to exit.  Before the text "grub loading" appears, I was jamming the SHIFT key like crazy.  From there, I edit the first option (ubuntu) and then add nomodeset to the linux/boot entry.

Many, many thanks to this Ubuntu forum thread for the info.  It's nice to see that there's so much self-help information available online to fix these things.

Now it's time to get a real nvidia driver up and running!

Making the Leap

Today has been a long time coming.  I have extended the lifespan of Ubuntu 9.10 well beyond Canonical's support and I feel that with the strides Ubuntu has made, it's worth the leap.  I designed my work desktop computer so that I could easily backup my stuff and upgrade without much woes, but because of laziness on my part, I've been putting off that for a while.  Before I knew it, 9.10 had reached its end in terms of Canonical support.  Just like my old trusty Gutsy 7.10 install on my laptop, I was falling into the same trap of staying on an old system.  This time, hopefully, I stay true to the design goal and keep Ubuntu updated.  With Ubuntu 13 aiming towards gaming (thanks to Valve), it should be an interesting ride for sure.

I had a few external hard disk scares last night as I was backing up my stuff.  I swear Seagate products have gotten lousy through the years.  Thankfully I have more than one drive to back my office stuff up.  Smooth start to the transition, right?  I thought so.

Next up was booting Ubuntu 12.10 and not detecting my network card.  Cool.  Thankfully, I saw a link on Ubuntu's forums about a glitch where you need to set the network boot as the first booting device from the bios.  The tip didn't work in the forum thread, but it sure damn worked for me.

Now, I've clicked install and the disc is taking a while to read.  I hope I manage to get the upgrade or all the work will be for naught.  I'll post again when something significant happens.

Tried some games on Wine

Hitman Sniper Challenge doesn't work on Wine.  Oil Rush on the other hand works splendidly although I initially had trouble getting it to run.  You have to switch it to use opengl instead of DirectX. To do that, go to /path/of/steam/steamapps/common/Oil Rush/data/launcher and edit interface.html.  From there, edit the video_app to opengl instead of auto.

This will also help those who want to use Steam's startup parameters from the property dialog box.  Open Steam Works Link on Oil Rush

Linux as a Gaming Platform?

I'd like to think more and more companies are looking into Linux as a viable platform.  Ubuntu is making a significant push for this and Valve is on their side as of the moment.  If Ubuntu is pushing for a Gaming Platform, I think it makes sense to make an edition that uses a rolling release system.  This ensures that there is only 1 configuration that publishers and developers aim for, and all the rest is just upgrading versions instead of major overhauls that has been happening with every major Linux distro release.  This also makes it easier for maintainers because all of this is just open source software, so they'll figure out just what a game needs to work for their system.  Lastly, this helps gamers who just want to bump up the packages they need to get something to work.  Doing the distribution upgrades takes a lot of time to do and is very risky as well.

If a manufacturer targets a single Linux platform, everyone in the open source community can pick up the slack and figure out how to make it work elsewhere.  This is the open source community at its best and brightest.  Adding a rolling release on top of it, in my opinion, just makes the entire process easier for everyone, gamers and developers alike.

Congrats Reversion on Suzanne Award for Best Designed Short

Congrats to the Reversion blokes for bagging a Suzanne Award.

Watch here!

O'Reilly vs Stewart 2012: Great and Disappointing

There's really not much to say about the debate between Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart but that it was funny, substantive and not surprising for those who have seen the two duke it out.  I had a great time watching this, but had a cruel sinking feeling as the credits began to roll.

After trading jabs, jokes and political points, nothing has changed.  Both sides agree to disagree on a myriad of issues and at the end of the bell head to their respective camps, with neither men convincing the other of anything that they don't already believe.

EXCON Parser in TCL

Had a little programming fun implementing an EXCON parser.  This is implemented using TCL (as always) and basically prints out "Hello World!".  Nothing more than a simple exercise.

Source

428～被封锁的涩谷～

非常感谢把428翻译的人。佩服！真的很佩服你啊！

New Dark Age Chronicle Fan Fiction Entry

I have finished a new one and it's entitled "The Grendal".  The fourth installment in the Dark Age Chronicles Fan Fiction.  Have at it.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106220973/The-Grendal 

Finishing up another story...

Finishing up the latest entry into the Dark Age Chronicles fan fiction.  Then it might take a while before I write.  Hoping this next project will make it out the door.

Firefox and 64-bit Flash

Just a teeny tiny note here.  I realized when I download Firefox from the official website, my 64-bit flash player plugin stop working.  As it turns out, Firefox is giving me 32-bit versions of the browser.

To get the 64-bit versions, check here:

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/linux-x86_64/en-US/

Another note is that Flashplayer 11.2 has a bug where nvidia users get inverted colours.  Seems to be related to the hardware acceleration.  Just decided to downgrade instead.

Bastion Update (minor)

Bastion hasn't worked since day 1.  Let's get that out of the way.  The DllNotFoundException being tossed around seems to be a red herring as well.  I used strace to check what the paths the game is looking at when loading the shared object, and sure enough it finds libfmodex.so just fine.  Maybe it's a 32-bit shared object being used?  The output on file suggests it is a 64-bit library.  

I'm not certain just what it is it is trying to load but poking through Super Giant Games' MonoGame source tree though enlightening wasn't exactly pointing me to the right direction.  My friend told me to just compile this to get Bastion running, but I'm pretty sure Super Giant Games didn't include the cs source code of the actual game.  It's just the engine!

That being said, it looks like the point of failure is somewhere in FMOD, if the exception being shown is accurate at all.  The call right before the FMOD.Factory.System_Create points to the use of some  wrapper library from within FMOD itself failing which may probably force the library to unload and yield the dreaded exception.

Sadly, Super Giant Games' support doesn't seem to operate properly because they haven't actually replied to my email.  Great effort in providing a Linux client and then just leave us to figure out the mess.  Smart move guys.

Bastion on Ubuntu

I'm thinking that maybe my nVIDIA drivers are too old, or my Xorg, or I'm missing this dll... or maybe Bastion just hates me.

Help?

Steam's Hardware Survey detects Wine

This is something I found interesting though it's not really much of a surprise with Valve finally giving Linux some respect.

Backported Winetricks

Just decided to check the Winetricks version after reading RPS's article about Gaming on Linux (Nice to hear good feedback from non-Linux users).  It wasn't complicated to backport the precise PPA package.  Just changed the compat to 5, the control file for debhelper and maintainer stuff, and the changelog file.  Nothing much out of the ordinary.  I thought I may have to do something about the .install file but turns out I didn't.

Diablo III on Wine

So the fruit of all the hard work I've done on backporting Wine 1.5.10 has finally been revealed.  Surprisingly, much of Diablo III's installation is problem free once you get the new builds of Wine.  Here it is in all its glory.

More details after the jump!

Wine 1.5.10 Backporting Notes

As I said earlier, I had some major problems getting it to package, but after two days of mucking around I've finally gotten something working.  All that after the jump.

Well that was wild!

Two days of work and finally have Wine 1.5.10 installed on the box.  It's got a few minor issues, but probably things I'll fix when I rebuild this.  I'll post notes on what I did, but the advantages of using this new build script is that I can slip in patches with ease now without having to figure out how to get it running.  I learned many things including the fact that my dpkg is outdated.

Backporting Wine 1.5

Spent quite a few hours on the backporting biz on wine 1.5.  The structure is totally different so there's a raft of changes to how I managed to backport it.  I'll be posting the changes soon for my own references, but there's definitely quite a few things to do here.

It's building right now, but who knows if it gets to the end?

Got Diablo 3: Starter Edition...

So my friends hooked me up with the Starter Edition keys for Diablo 3.  I'll be rolling up my sleeves to backport Wine and see how far I can play this one.  Not expecting a lot and I didn't like Torchlight.

Aravyan Nocturne

A new story for the Dark Age Chronicles.

Read this.

REVERSION

REVERSION!  Check it out!

Official Site

Dark Age Chronicles Series

This is my collection of the MACE: The Dark Age Fan Fiction.  Have fun with it!

Some random ramblings...

When using mplayer, press 'o'... for the... "Oh sh*t Dis!" haha.

Also watched The Dark Knight Rises.  Wow.  Good movie.  Didn't think Chris would come back for a third one because although I didn't like The Dark Knight as much, I thought the ending was a perfect way to give the series to any director to continue as it establishes Batman's outlaw status.  Kudos to Nolan for coming back and delivering a much better movie.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent - Not a WINE Problem

Took a while, but I've dug up enough evidence to point that this isn't a WINE issue.

Link #1

Also, NVIDIA's 8800 cards were excluded from tests due to rendering errors during gameplay. While the game did run on our 8800, the Sam Fisher model was warped and twisted into a very strange shape making gameplay pretty much impossible, as the image shows below.

Link #2

For what it's worth, if you run into these problems with the game, you can try these fixes to see if they do anything.  They didn't work on my end though.

Run the game with a "-ll" (double 'L's) flag on the game.
"/path/to/splinter/cell/double/agent/SCDALauncher.exe -ll"
or
"/path/to/splinter/cell/double/agent/SCDALauncher.exe -LL"
or
"/path/to/splinter/cell/double/agent/SCDA-Offline/System/SplinterCell4.exe -ll"
or
"/path/to/splinter/cell/double/agent/SCDA-Offline/System/SplinterCell4.exe -LL"

Then try to disable AA and AF.  Not sure what else to try if these don't work.  Driver update?  I don't know.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent on Wine Update

Here's a tiny update.  I managed to muck around and get the auto updater to work for this game.

I installed these packages via winetricks: vcrun2003, vcrun2005, and vcrun2008 to get the dlls that the program needed.

Then you run:
/path/to/splinter/cell/da/support/UpdateLauncher/SC4UpdateLauncher.exe

This will download and install the 1.02a patch.  Did it fix Sam though?  Nope.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent on Wine

I got this game off a free promo and for the most part the game installation was extraordinarily smooth! I tried to launch the game from the desktop icon and didn't get much success.  I ran SCDALauncher.exe from the installed path to launch it.  It looked like it was working well until I got to the actual tutorial.

Poor Sam!  I have no idea why this is happening, but I'll keep trying.  So close yet so far!

Strange Wine Scratchy Audio Issue

I had a game that I run on Wine that kept exhibiting scratchy audio and after a few relaunches, it didn't seem to go away like I hope.  I then shut off pidgin and suddenly the scratchy audio went away.  Not sure what the correlation is with how both apps are using Pulse Audio, but it certainly is worth posting for possible further investigation.

Shadows Behind a Rising Sun

Added a short story to my Scribd account.  It's a fanfiction of Mace: The Dark Age and is the second entry to the ongoing series.  Read it on the link.

Shadows Behind a Rising Sun

Things to remember with git

I hate git with a passion... and regretfully, I have to keep track of things with git that I always forget.  So, here are stuff I need to remind myself when setting up git:

git config --global user.name "My Name"

git config --global user.email "my@email.com"

git clone username@somehost:~whateverthis/is.git

Two Good VNC/RDP Android Apps

I had an earlier post talking about PocketCloud Remote RDP/VNC and how it was much better than androidVNC.  I have come with the realization that the free app version was restricted to only one connection.  That's not really a deal breaker, but I had an early quirk with the right click from the virtual pointer wasn't really working.  What I began to realize was that the connection was set to operate on Mac environment which meant I didn't have right click.  Switching to Windows environment for my connection setting worked wonders.

The next problem I had was that I had to remote to two machines and I needed another remote access configuration, something that the free PocketCloud app didn't allow.  I began to look for another app that could provide decent remote desktop functionality.  I found Jump Desktop Free which provides the keys I needed (tab, directional keys, etc).  The only usability quirk I had to learn was that right click was tap and hold on the virtual pointer.  To do the mouse drag, you double tap and then drag with your finger.

POSIX Thread Memory Leaks.

For years, I've been hunting down some nasty memory leaks in the applications I've been using.  The code for the most part is inherited and I haven't been able to wrap my head around it.  This latest discovery though after reading some documentation and code has given me something to chase.

Tracking down memory leaks from multi-threaded applications is a nightmare, but I'm seeing some rational logic behind it now based on this IBM article on POSIX threads.

And I quote:

If you create a joinable thread but forget to join it, its resources or private memory are always kept in the process space and never reclaimed. Always join the joinable threads; by not joining them, you risk serious memory leaks.

Well, I'll be damned!

Codemasters' F1 Online Beta

It's a decent browser game but they really need to fix a lot of things.

1. I can tell that this game is going to be a buy to win style.
2. The physical collisions,  shunts and dirty driving really detract from the experience.
3. They should give the option for keyboard controls and the chase camera angle because the game doesn't look bad and some guys want a more conventional driving game.  The mouse is serviceable but it can get disorienting.
4. Penalties for hitting the grass is not severe enough.  Several cars are able to cut corners and actually drive faster than those who honestly go around the circuit.
5. Post race penalties.  Dirty driving needs to be punished.  What better way to do it than applying time penalties after the race?
6. Linux port of Unity Webplayer.  Seriously... it's not even funny.

Location for the Applications Menu of Wine apps?

Here's just to keep track of things.  When wine installs applications, the .desktop files on Wine is dumped in /home/dir/.local/share/applications.  I'm pretty sure it's standard for Gnome desktops, but thought I'd forget about this very quickly.

Densha De Go! Final! and Wine

To get the game working, you need to have winetricks d3d9.  Game works out of the box just fine!

Running with Japanese support on Wine

Wine looks into your system's locale settings to display the fonts for your application.  After installing your language packs from the Language Support window, you can do this to run your app with Japanese font support.

$ WINEPREFIX="/where/ever/is/your/wine/prefix" LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 wine /path/to/your/app.exe

Random thoughts...

I had problems getting Skype video to work on my Ubuntu box.  What I eventually did was to lean back on v4l1.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so ./skype

I'm moving to Skype 4.0 and wanted to make sure I tracked this change.

Also blogging about my old Acer Aspire 5920g when trying to get the CrystalEye Webcam to work on my old Gutsy Gibbon.  I had a few scripts written and also installed uvcview (I believe).

To get the camera to record, I used this line:

ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 320x240 -r 24 -i /dev/video0 -f avi filename.avi

Installed luvcview and ran this line to get webcam to capture snapshots.

luvcview -f yuv

You will need libsdl for this to work as well as the uvcvideo drivers.

From lsmod:

uvcvideo, compat_ioctl32, videodev, v4l1_compat, v4l2_common

This blog might help.

$ wget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Investigation/uvc/luvcview-20070512.tar.gz$ tar zxvf luvcview-20070512.tar.gz$ cd luvcview-20070512$ make$ make install







Configuring Remote Access

A reminder when configuring stuff like ports on remote access.  run gconf-editor then browse through desktop > gnome > remote_access

The Fall into Evil

Just finished a fan fiction of Mace: The Dark Age entitled the Fall into Evil.

Check it out here!

Some ramblings...

Just a few things.  The stock gallery in Android really sucks.  When I finally got a microSDHC and moved all my photos and videos, this stupid app kept re-scanning the card and inserting duplicate thumbnail entries for each picture and video there.  Talk about stupid stuff.  I learned a few things on the Acer Tablet Forum.  Putting in the .nomedia file in the folder means that the apps (at least ones I've checked) will ignore this and treat it like there's no media files in there.  Second, from Settings > App > All, I can select Gallery and tap on Disable to turn the damn app off.  Lastly, I installed QuickPic which proved to be so much better.

On Sims FreePlay, if you need your Sim to go to work with low hygiene for that 1 LP reward, just send the sim to kick his own trash can and clean up that mess repeatedly.  Kicking a friend's trash can means hurting the relationship.

Mass Effect Infiltrator should not have had any walking parts in the actual combat.

Linux and Core dumps

I thought I'd just drop a little snippet on this.  Read a bit about trying to get my Linux to dump cores and saw two tips on it that I thought I'd easily forget.

First is to define the core pattern at /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern.  This defines how the core_pattern is being generated and what the core file will look like.  By default it dumps it on the current working directory of the application but the core_pattern should allow you to play around with that.

Second is to change ulimit.  ulimit -a will show you what the settings are for core file size.  Change it to impose a maximum file size by invoking ulimit -c .  You can also invoke ulimit -c unlimited.

Damn! A proper VNC viewer on Android!

For a long time, I've endured androidVNC as my primary remote desktop viewer on my Acer tablet.  It's rudimentary but works and is free which was what I was looking for when I got my tablet.  There are a couple of things that really bothered me with this software though.  First was the propensity to crashes when doing multi-touch accidentally.  Second was the cumbersome keyboard support and the fact that half the time, I can't see what I'm actually typing.  Third was the lack of support for the very well developed Hacker's Keyboard.  While using it a few hours ago, I really started to think that there had to be a much better option that didn't cost a dime.  Google took me to another VNC that works so much better.  That's the PocketCloud Remote RDP/VNC.  Love how everything looks professional and the mouse circular menu really makes using the desktop much, much better.  Can't look back at my old VNC viewer after this one.

仮面ライダーBLACK Hyper Detail Molding

My brother managed to find these two bad boys in the shop.  Black (HDM Secret Release) and Shadow Moon!

Witcher 2 thoughts...

Yes... apparently, the Lady of the Lake bestows crap swords.  Better to wield a cutlass!

Finally beat the Kayran after setting the resolution to 320x175!  Woohoo!

Android ICS Irritation: Application Not Responding

I started getting some slow downs with my last few days of Honeycomb.  Launching apps had gotten generally slower.  The stock browser paused damn too much.  Everything was becoming a painful experience for me.  With that, I looked up Elixir 2 and Lookup Ad Detection to figure out just what was happening.  No matter how much I inspected the 'top' command output, I couldn't see anything that was really causing a bottleneck.  I then looked up the ad network apps that were in my system.  It was there I realized that there's a chock full of these that come with your freebie games.  Without hesitation, I proceeded to zap away the multitude of freebie apps that were hooked up in these ads.  Truth be told, I don't know which one did it, to be honest, but I could definitely sense a good change in speed.  It wasn't enough though.

EA at Ubuntu Developer Summit!

"We are a platform agnostic company." - Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Ha!

Acer A500 and Ice Cream Sandwich

Ever since the word got out that Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich or simply ICS) started going out, the wait for the update has been infuriating.  Every time I check my device for updates, it has always insisted it didn't have any.  I knew it was already out there though and its inability to find it was aggravating.  People had mentioned that the Iconia Tab Updater needed to be updated but as far as Google was concerned, it was which only made matters more irritating.

Finally I decided to go to Acer's local support website and looked for this apk and bit the bullet.  As soon as the app replaced the one installed by Google, it picked up 4.0.3 right away.  I knew ICS had problems but I was willing to bite the bullet.  After the update went through without a hitch, I've decided to write down my thoughts on this.

Thoughts on Witcher 2

I don't know what to think of when it comes to Witcher 2.  Sometimes, it shines as  such a great game and sometimes I just want to bash my head into a wall.  My experience has been a combination of many things that I really take away from the experience, the first major factor being Wine's own glitches.

Some random stuff...

First off, git sucks again.  For some reason it keeps deleting this file while I'm pulling to update my branch.  Why anyone uses this stupid software I will never know.

Second, one guy in the Witcher forums had been helpful in providing tips to run the game on.  I am advised to try Aspect Ratio scaling to see how that works.

NVIDIA X Server Settings
GPU 0 > DFP-1 > GPU Scaling Method > Aspect Ratio Scaled

Will see how that pans out.

Witcher 2 on Wine Update

Well, the game finally worked!  I installed it and then installed vcrun2010 and d3dx9 after (actually I forgot to do it before install!).  The game wouldn't work so I decided to use the hot fix installer here.  Frame rate was all over the place and starting a new game would just make it load forever.  According to the Witcher forums, it's because the graphics card cannot hack the game, so I was forced to lower the resolution to 800x600.  I'll work my way up from there because it's tiny.  1024x768 also doesn't work.

On a side note, the GOG release includes the Polish voice overs already!

Additional user.reg stuff:
HKCU\\Software\\Wine\\Direct3D
UseGLSL=disabled

Also, mouse warping is an issue.  I remember now that the mouse wouldn't warp back so I had problems navigating and clicking on stuff.  The pains I go through to play Witcher 2...

Mouse warping seems to work??

I ran a test using Tomb Raider Underworld to see if the mouse warping code was working out of the box.  Much to my surprise... it seems to be!  I wonder if it's just because I used 1920x1080 resolution and force mouse overrides.

Cross fingers and hope the findings is true.

Update: Mouse Warp Patch Problem

I was hoping to slip in my ported mouse patch but it looks like 1.4 source has changed quite a few things in the mouse implementation.  I got this error while compiling.


mouse.c: In function ‘dinput_mouse_hook’:
mouse.c:359: error: ‘SysMouseImpl’ has no member named ‘mapped_center’
mouse.c:359: error: ‘SysMouseImpl’ has no member named ‘mapped_center’

Looks like I will need to read the code to reintroduce the hack.

Wine 1.4 Backport notes

Have a new spanking build of Wine on Karmic using 1.4 from the Launchpad PPA.  Here's a few notes on what I noticed here.

• I had to repackage wine1.3_1.4.orig.tar.gz to rename the folder to wine1.3-1.4
• ttf-symbol-replacement-wine1.3 is back in this build.
• changed the dependency debhelper >=5
• removed gcc-4.4-multilib
• removed oss4-dev
• remove in /debian/rules CC="gcc-4.4" line 51

Rebuilt it and there were no build problems.  I installed it and it looked like it didn't find anything wrong.  winecfg and wineboot works fine.

Winetricks was backported from precise pangolin.  Very easy to update for Karmic.  Just update the debhelper >= 5 and change the compat file to 5.

A few Linux stuff...

While doing some debugging on some production server, I had a bad bout with daemontools where my script was just failing without errors output.  I spent quite some time reading about this figuring out what went wrong and it just wasn't working out.  I could execute the service run manually but I couldn't via svc -u.  At the end of it, I decided to kill svscanboot and the svscan processes to re-execute the daemontools startup script.  My services ran just fine after.  Phew!  I think what caused it was the killing of readproctitle which is used by daemontools to tell us what happened (by using ps).

As an additional point, I managed to get multilog working by creating this /service/runme/log/run script.  The script basically executes: exec setuidgid user multilog t /location/to/the/log/

Next is fiddling with fonts.  To install fonts, create the .fonts folder and run sudo fc-cache -f (or sudo fc-cache -fv for verbose flag).

Lastly, it seems that I may have to backport wine-1.4.  wine-1.3.33 has served me well, but it is also now pretty old.  Also with this is the latest winetricks backport.

Yes!!! Witcher 2 Keys!

After staring through days of the download of Witcher 2 Steam, hoping to fire it up and get a CD key, I was getting desperate that I wouldn't be able to avail of the GOG.com Witcher 2 backup promo.  After going through CD Projekt RED's website for a replacement key, I was told to wait for 72 hours.

I'm always skeptical about these things, but apparently after just 48 hours, they've responded with my new key.  Thank you very much CD Projekt RED and thank you GOG.com! You guys rock!

MMA Journalism Thoughts

Yesterday, I listened to Ariel's MMA debate with Pat Miletich and they seemed to be locked into this talk on Chael Sonnen's latest samples of crazy talk.  I don't think Pat Miletich made a compelling case against Ariel who really seemed flustered by the entire thing.  It did made me dig up Mauro Ranallo's interview with Kenny Rice back on April 4. 

I really have to say that I agree with Kenny here.  Journalists ought to be trying to get the truth out there and you can't just let crazy stuff fly out like that unchallenged.  Ariel Helwani is a great journalist and interviewer.  You just have to see the way he cracked Nick Diaz's barriers to really appreciate what the guy can do.  Getting anything out of Nick Diaz that feels genuine, raw and special is always interesting.  Sad to say, I get the total 180 impression when he does interviews with the likes of Chael.

Chael Sonnen talks crazy stuff.  He does it all the time, and I think people know it.  His style attracts in the same way media punditry does in the world of cable news.  It is sad that someone of Ariel's expertise would stoop so low as to give Chael a forum to spew nonsense and never really choose to hold that guy accountable for what he says.  It really looks like he's out to get more page hits on his site because everyone knows sound bites sell.  Everyone knows that conflict sells.  It's why CNN and other cable news spend a lot of money on graphics and showmanship.  

To me, it's not news.  It's BS.  If Ariel wants this kind of interview with Chael, he should put up a late night talk show where Chael can do whatever he wants and Ariel can laugh while the money rolls in.

Patching Steam's Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection

I managed to get the game patched before but that was after numerous tries to get the auto-updater to work.  I'm posting this as an archive so I don't lose this information.  

64-bit

"C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\XLive\Updates\57520fa2\Content\setup.exe" /f "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\mortal kombat arcade kollection"

32-bit

"C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft \XLive\Updates\57520fa2\Content\setup.exe" /f "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\mortal kombat arcade kollection"

This is a very helpful thread on that.

Witcher and Wine Update

Playing a lot of Witcher lately but I've run into some interesting findings.  One is that on a fresh boot, I have to run Witcher twice to fix the graphics problem (puppeteer bug), so this has very little to do with the Launcher.exe.  Having it run directly from desktop menu is also added convenience and less clicks to do.

At least one time, I had an error dialog box telling me that Witcher crashed.  Once I clicked OK, the game launched anyway, but there was no sound at all.  This has been consistent in that everytime the dialog box shows up before launch, the game loses sound.  I don't know what causes that but after a reboot, it fixes by itself.  The sound is also automatically disabled by the game so you have to go the option and re-enable it.

Witcher and Wine Update

So, in my session yesterday I found more interesting clues.  After work, I fired up Witcher straight away and predictably Geralt was invisible and this warranted a hard reboot to fix.  Something about Ubuntu is doing this I am sure as my playtime in older Ubuntu systems wasn't like this.  You can tell if Witcher is going to have graphical glitches if you're not seeing the flying crows in the background of the main menu (lower left hand corner of the screen).

Next thing I did after a reboot was run the desktop icon which runs the Launcher.  The game didn't have the crows in the menu but it turns out it wasn't Geralt being invisible.  It was the puppeteer bug.  So what I did was run the witcher.exe directly (something I always did on my first playthrough).  This fixed everything and Witcher ran well after that.  I updated the desktop icon to run the executable file so I expect this to be fixed for good.

Witcher and Wine

Long ago, I started playing Witcher.  I haven't finished it yet because it's a darn long game.  When I played with it, I was running the Cross Over Lame Duck edition but I had to use version 7.2.2 because version 8 would just silently crash.  Running that had a few graphical glitches like the trees and the vitality and endurance bar, but other than that, perfect.

I just reinstalled the game and it's running on Wine 1.3.33, but I noticed a few peculiarities in addition to the graphical glitches. 

The first was that Geralt would only walk for a few steps.  Then he would start to glide on the floor.  I believe this has something to do with the keyboard input that is bugged in Ubuntu 9.10.  If you pull out the sword, you will notice Geralt walking a few steps and then perform a roll on the floor, indicating that the game was reading double-tap direction input.

Second was this occasional problem of Geralt not being rendered.  I toggled UseGLSL to disable which seems to help although it does still happen.  Restarting the computer seems to fix things, so I'm not sure what it is.

Third was an issue with the so-called puppeteer lines that are rendered on Geralt.  I noticed this when I ran the game from the launcher but when I ran the game from Witcher.exe it didn't have this problem.  I deduced that this has something to do with the fact that my AppDefaults on Witcher.exe weren't getting picked up when I run Launcher.exe.  Since I have separate Wine bottles for each game I have installed, I decided to push the AppDefaults into the actual Direct3D settings.

Lastly was a lack of sound.  My experience with Wine apps and sound (and PulseAudio) is that the longer my computer runs, the more Wine performance seems to suffer.  My suspicions are that PulseAudio is still not in a good implemented state.  After copying my audio settings from Tomb Raider Underworld, I rebooted the machine and ran the game.  The game gave me a good scare when it still didn't have audio but after checking the game's options, I realized there was a toggle to disable sound.  Bah!

I hope to finish Witcher this time around.  The game is really huge and I really want this to be over in preparation for Witcher 2.

A few thoughts...

I'll keep this short.  Figured out that deleting Sims on Sims FreePlay is a matter of customizing the Sim for their clothes and hairdo.  There's a red icon on the upper left corner.

Been getting some sweet stuff out of GOG lately.  I'm plan to play Fallout and (finally finish) Witcher Enhanced Edition.

Sims FreePlay: Relocating Pets

Every once in a while, this menu pops up with the 'Relocate' button and I'm befuddled as how I got that.  I've tried searching EA's FAQs for an answer to a different way of relocating Sims.  Apparently, the menu that I got was on relocating pets.  Double tap the dog you own and you'll be able to select which household the dog goes, or you can put it up for adoption.  Sometimes, I wish I got the memo!

Reversion Movie Trailer

Check it out!  More info on the The Reversion Movie Official Blog.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Thoughts

HOLY F*CKING BOSS BATTLES, BATMAN!

The Adventures of Tintin Wii Edition

Let's get this out of the way.  I didn't enjoy the movie as much as I would have wanted to.  It was just a kiddie fun fluff movie with way too much action shoehorned into the story.  I didn't care for the much touted CG art either.  In one word: 'meh'.

In picking up the Wii game, I wasn't expecting much out of it.  After all, it was based on a pretty lame movie.  What piqued my interest however was how quickly the game's narrative was deviating from the film.  The main plot is intact, but much of the details have been altered making it Ubisoft's own version of Tintin's search for the Secret of the Unicorn.

Issue with Real Video

I bumped into an issue with real video and it was something like Could not open required DirectShow codec drvc.so, or something to that effect.  I didn't read all of it and went immediately to search online for the answer.  The solution to my problem was actually just chmodding it.  I should have paid more attention to the error output.

sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/win32/*

sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/codecs/*

Ha!

Tomb Raider: Underworld Wii vs PC

I managed to finish the Tomb Raider: Underworld PC demo and it made for an interesting experience for someone who has played the Wii version.  Obviously the graphics on the PC version are way better.  The Lara model always looked cheap to me on the Wii version and the face in particular seems to have been altered quite a bit from the HD editions.  A few minor details were strangely omitted in the Wii edition like the Video Cam Overlay during the opening cutscene of the Thailand level.  

There's way more enemies in the HD version (Sharks!  haha) while the Wii version has almost none.  I always preferred Tomb Raider with less enemies as I enjoy the climbing and leaping more than the shooting.  The levels are actually comparable.  Similar, but not exactly the same.  I'm honestly more surprised at how close the Wii levels resemble the PC ones.  The Wii edition seems to have regenerating health which points to a game that is much, much more forgiving.  Lara also seems to have more moves and acrobatics than on the Wii version.  Interesting, but at the same time, largely useless when you have pistols.

Different games, yet very similar.  That's interesting.

Tomb Raider: Underworld and Wine: Update

Well, I've been fiddling with this for some time and have seemingly fixed some of the audio issues I have.  Nope, not by using pasuspender which did absolutely nothing for me.  I started trying to use padsp but strange enough the padsp/oss combination doesn't work.

First thing I did was remove audio from the equation to see how the game genuinely worked in my system.  The game stuttered quite a bit so I had to bring down the effects.  I think most of the slowdowns had to do with shadows but for documentation sake, I ran with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 with "Enable Fullscreen Effects" and "Enable Water Effects".  My texture detail was high and texture filtering was trilinear.

When I got the game reasonably running well (or tolerable), I began to fiddle once again with my user.reg.  Here is what I came up with.

[Software\\Wine\\DirectSound]

"DefaultBitsPerSample"="16"

"DefaultSampleRate"="44100"

"EmulDriver"="N"

"HardwareAcceleration"="Full"

[Software\\Wine\\Drivers]

"Audio"="alsa"

[Software\\Wine\\Drivers\\winealsa.drv]

"DefaultOutput"="{0.0.0.00000000}.{B55AC68F-A179-4DC1-BD39-199D8419B343}"

"DefaultVoiceOutput"="{0.0.0.00000000}.{B55AC68F-A179-4DC1-BD39-199D8419B343}"

The winealsa.drv registry settings points to my digital out from HDMI.  I suppose that makes some sense.

I then ran the game: WINEPREFIX="/homedir/.local/share/wineprefixes/tru" wine path\\to\\tru.exe

Truth be told, I don't know why padsp is needed here (or if it is really needed at all!).  I will likely try it without the padsp wrapper to see if setting the winealsa.drv devices is enough.

I played the game for a full hour and it seems to work fine.  I'll be sure to post back when I find out what caused the buffer underrun issues.

UPDATE:
As suspected, padsp is not needed.  I will amend the entry now.

Sims FreePlay

I've been playing Sims FreePlay for a while now on my Acer IconiaTab A500.  It's a nice decent game that isn't quite Sims-ish if such a word exists.  I think a lot of people are at arms with how it's real time and you have to literally wait 6 to 7 hours for your Sims to wake up from slumber.  Me?  I'm not that peeved, to be honest.  It seems that what I've done pretty much in the game is to give them really long tasks, sometimes tasks that take a day to complete.  Doing this seems to have several advantages.

First off, the game gives plenty of XP and money (provided that the task does let you earn) returns for completing tasks.  Second, while your sim is locked in his or her task, your Sims's needs do not go down. If you give him or her a 7 hour task and come back later, the needs (hunger, cleanliness, etc.) should still be relatively intact, which makes looking after them quite a breeze.  Just be the task master!

Another oddity I noticed is that to maintain your Sims's needs, you really should look into the following to bring it back up quickly.  For hunger, you need a refrigerator.  Using only a couple of seconds, you can satiate your Sims's hunger rather quickly.  For cleanliness, you should just use the sink which I find is the quickest way of bringing that statistic back up.  A shower is fine if it's really low though.  For sleep, use the couch for daydreaming.  A minute is all you need to satisfy that need.  For the social need, you can either interact with another Sim or use the phone.  For entertainment needs, just about anything your Sim interacts with should be fine.  I usually go with baking or gardening since that gives money.  Lastly, we all know what the toilet bowl is there for.

If you're the kind not to care about the goals, you'll be fine with the game and the daily grind you put your Sims into.  It's when you start wanting to 'advance' so-to-speak where the freemium aspects of the game can get grating as you feel the need to spend real money on Lifetime Points.  Me?  I'm not one to care.

Oh, and invest in a dog.  Really.

Wine and pasuspender?

I am about fed up with PulseAudio in Ubuntu.  Since day 1, my problems with it just won't end and this is the closest I've gotten to embarking into ripping it out and going back to plain old Alsa.  This has been a real utter pain in the neck so far but I've been reading on pasuspender as some means to get audio working.

How To Temporarily Disable PulseAudio

I hate PulseAudio.  I hate it with a passion.  Unfortunately, I picked Ubuntu when I should have gone Xubuntu.  Now, I hope this can solve some of the woes I'm having with wine and Tomb Raider (as well as other Wine related software).

Tomb Raider Underworld and Wine

Well, I gave the demo for a spin because I did enjoy the game series on the Wii. It does look like Wine can handle the game properly, but the sound is incredibly choppy and it bogs everything down. I suspect this has something to do with the blast pulseaudio that is really giving me quite a headache. Maybe it is time to rip it out and install alsa!

Hmmm... definitely food for thought.

The Reversion Movie: "The End is only The Beginning..."

The Reversion Movie: "The End is only The Beginning...": Welcome to the official blog page for our animated short film, REVERSION. REVERSION is the first 11-minute animated film for hobbyi...

So the key repeat workaround didn't actually work...

After testing out Colin McRae 2005 with the key repeat turned off, I realized it doesn't actually stop the issue from happening. The good news here is that apparently, I can just slap on my USB gamepad and the game picked it up just fine. Wine has come a long way now. Good stuff!

Ubuntu and keyboard key repeat issue

For a while now, I've tolerated the issue of playing Wine games and having problems with the keyboard key repeats. This involved getting killed in Mass Effect and crashing cars in Colin McRae 2005. So, I thought I should dig up on this issue and see just what the hell is happening.

As it turns out, this is caused by a known Xorg bug in Ubuntu 9.04 (lucky me). This discussion thread provides all the details that you need to know on the issue. What I did to alleviate the issues on my end is:

System > preferences > keyboard > key repeat

Mass Effect 3 Demo and Wine - Does not work

I did a few tricks with Origin and played around with the install. Wine can run Mass Effect 3, but unfortunately, Mass Effect 3 requires Origin to play and will always say Origin is not running and thus forcing Mass Effect 3 to close. You can get all the way to the EA logo video and to the main menu. The game also tries to download an update but it does not seem to work. Oh well.

Mass Effect 3 Demo and Wine

I did try it via Origin on Wine and the install doesn't work. As far as I can tell, the installer fails when it's trying to install nVIDIA Physx redistributable package even though I already have Physx installed. I'm not sure if installing games works on Origin via Wine since I copied my Sims 3 Teaser install from an XP box. I think that's going to be how I will try to get Mass Effect 3 working.

UFC 143: Nick Diaz vs Carlos Condit

I'll keep this brief. Carlos won. Get over it.

Simple TCL script for renaming files

So, I got this bundle of files from work and the file name formatting weren't to my liking. Capitalizations and spaces are things I tend to avoid in Linux when possible as you need to use the backslash escape to get the filenames interpreted properly. Tab auto-complete would allow me to use them, but I just didn't like to see my filenames with all the backslash stuff on. So, I decided to whip out a TCL script to do the work for me. It's largely based off the first simple script I did and only took a few minutes to do.

To use it, you just supply the filepath with all the files you want to be renamed and it'll go through each one for you. The script isn't properly tested, so keep that in mind when using this. Its clean up is basically to change the capitalizations to lower case characters and replace all spaces with dashes.

TCL Script

Another Update (and mini-review): Sniper - Ghost Warrior

I've played Sniper - Ghost Warrior on Windows just to see if it's worth anymore headaches and while I see some merits on the game, there's one very serious problem with it. First, we should cover the good stuff.

The game looks great and it gets the basics of shooting targets down, which is nice. Audio department is well done though not entirely unique. Using the same engine as Call of Juarez ticks all of those boxes very easily.

There are merits to the game but there are also serious issues with the AI and stealth mechanics. The game has a bar at the bottom which tells you if you get spotted by enemies. On paper, it should help with the stealth elements of the game, but in practice, it's severely broken. Sometimes, enemies will be able to find you for inexplicable reasons despite the fact you are well hidden in the foliage. There are moments that when you pop out, the meter serves something of a countdown timer for enemies to spot you. And sometimes they can find you even if they are no larger than an ant, just because your head pops out. The AI is aggravating, but rectifiable with the age old save/load. This however turns the game into a case of trial and error. This crazy problem easily takes down the game several notches, which is a shame for a game with high presentation merits.

I'm disappointed in that the game fails to live up to its potential, but it's not beyond playing. That being said, I will no longer work on getting this running on WINE. It just ain't worth that kind of effort.

Update on Wine and Sniper - Ghost Warrior

Having read through a bit more debugging channels with dsound and alsa, I've figured that the game is using mmdevapi to scan through the different possible devices in /dev/snd/ to see which one to use. This bit is very interesting as it seems that after scanning each of the hardware and opening plughw:0,1 device correctly, it attempts to reopen it to play the sound and that is when it gets the device or resoure busy error. I wonder if Wine currently honors the Alsa Driver registry settings enumerated in a forum post I found on archlinux.

[Software\\Wine\\Alsa Driver] #disable auto scan sound card "AutoScanCards"="N"  #specify number of output device "DeviceCount"="1" #point it to your hw number "DeviceCTLn"="hw:1" #same as above "DevicePCMn"="hw:1" #optional: direct hardware interface "UseDirectHW"="Y"

I'm pretty sure at some point this was still honored but I didn't see whether or not Wine still looks for this (a simple grep should suffice, I suppose).

Sniper - Ghost Warrior with Wine

This is just a minor update of my battles with Sniper - Ghost Warrior and sound. Wine says the game should be running without problems, but I'm getting no sound. After doing a bit of tracing, I found this and I'm not sure why the audio device would lock up like that.

trace:alsa:AUDDRV_GetAudioEndpoint "plughw:0,1" 0x86e8b40 0 0x86e94f4

warn:alsa:AUDDRV_GetAudioEndpoint Unable to open PCM "plughw:0,1": -16 (Device or resource busy)

This is the only game to do this. I checked with Dragon Age 2 demo (nice game, by the way...) and I didn't get that problem.

I ran lsof /dev/snd/pcmC0D1p and it looks like pulseaudio is using the device, which is nothing out of the ordinary when I'm playing Dragon Age 2. More debugging needed.