Dark Age Chronicles: The Wolf of the North

It took a while, but I finally finished another installment in this series.  It's called The Wolf of the North and is hosted on scribd.  Hope you enjoy it.

Here's a link to the rest of the collection.

ORA-29861: domain index is marked LOADING/FAILED/UNUSABLE

I ran into this issue today and thought it was worth blogging about to keep track of things.  Basically, this just means that the Oracle index is unusable, broken, loading, whatever.  To resolve this, you might need to rebuild the index or drop the index and create a new one.

Some useful SQL:

select owner, index_name 

  from all_indexes 

where domidx_status != 'VALID' or domidx_opstatus !='VALID';

This will list down the bad Oracle indices for you to fix.

drop index [index_name];

alter index [index_name] rebuild;

create index [index_name] on [expression];

I think these are self-explanatory.

EA Origin Store Client on Wine

I have had some issues with Origin beginning last year where the client would just crash and crash.  No matter what version of Wine I used, it wouldn't run at all.  I moved through different Ubuntu distro versions and still no luck.  The crash point is C:\Program Files\Origin\Origin.exe: double free or corruption (!prev) and it seems to happen sporadically. After poking through the wine bug entries here and here, I figured out how to get the client to run reliably.

Since I installed my Origin client on a 32-bit Wine prefix, the commandline you'll see here is specifically for that.

WINEPREFIX="/path/to/wineprefix/of/origin" WINEARCH=win32 taskset -c 0 Origin.exe

Try it and see if it works!

FGLRX Post install do's...

This is a good precaution to do because updating your packages can inadvertently cause you to download bad versions of the fglrx drivers.

$ sudo apt-mark hold fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-dev

AMD FGLRX 13.8 BETA Driver

So, I updated my drivers to 13.8 Beta today using this guide.  The install is no different from Quantal but it's just to make sure I don't make any foolish errors.  I also took the liberty to remove the xserver-xorg-video-intel package that was used by a hack.  As it turns out, there is progress.  Now fglrx will load up without having to use bogus outdated intel video drivers.  The bad news?  Using an external monitor still does not work.  It is clearly a regression with fglrx drivers with 13.04.  That's just how it is with AMD, I suppose.

Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition and Wine

I'll keep this brief.  This was a fairly helpful thread on that front.  Tricky getting the options.ini stuff going which seems to cause crashing.

Progress on the fglrx dual monitor issue

Here's a nice little progress.  I think the root cause of my dual screen woes is the solution to get fglrx working in the first place!!!  This is some spectacular failure on AMD's part, but what else is new with AMD with Linux?

AMD did put out 13.8 beta drivers.  Hopefully, I can ditch the stupid solution and get my 2 screens back!

Worth looking into is the seemingly "Official" bug on launchpad.  Someone posted a possible workaround by disabling SNA acceleration.  Certainly worth a try.  I hate apt-marking outdated packages.

Section "Device"
      Identifier "intel"
      Driver "intel"
      Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
EndSection