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  • 1 min read

Seagate FreeAgent

On the way home tonight, I stopped off at Best Buy and picked up the Seagate FreeAgent 250GB external hard drive that’s on sale this week. Now that I have an office, I wanted to take my music with me to work so I could listen during the day. (Yay for having an office!)

It comes formatted as NTFS, which annoys me to no end. It lists on the box it’s NTFS, and works with XP / Vista, and MacOS, both PowerPC and Intel. At least I knew what I was buying.

But NTFS is notoriously difficult to work with on Linux, though the NTFS 3G driver has made a lot of progress. And of course my system doesn’t have the NTFS 3G driver installed.

Whatever happened to good old FAT32?

How annoying. Luckily, I have a Mac Mini and one Windows box left. I was feeling lazy.

Quake Wars on Foresight Linux

The Enemy Territory:Quake Wars Linux client was released Friday by id. The 17mb client and installer is using Icculus‘ Mojo Setup for installation. This is a welcome change from the Doom3 and Quake IV installers which required you to manually copy the .pak files from the CD or DVDs over to your hard drive. With Mojo Setup, you just run the executable file you download from id, pop the DVD in and it installs the client, Punkbuster and copies the necessary files over from the DVD.

With both the demo and the client, I was running in to keyboard lockups when playing. It didn’t matter if I was playing in full screen or windowed, the game would continue, but my keyboard was totally non-responsive. I tested Compiz enabled and disabled, windowed and non-windowed, and dual monitor and single monitor. It turns out that Pidgin, X-Chat and Mugshot would cause it to lock up. Basically, if anything appeared in the notification section Quake Wars would free the keyboard. Alt-tabbing to different applications and coming back to Quake Wars didn’t help. Disabling those applications before running Quake Wars has stopped the keyboard lockups.

Playing in full screen mode is definitely more immersive, and Quake Wars supports a native 1920×1200 resolution. Playing windowed in dual monitors I was playing in 1680×1250. It’s a pain though to switch xorg.conf and restart GNOME just to play a game, so I haven’t made up my mind.

The Quake Wars FAQ recommends a low latency kernel configured with CONFIG_HZ_1000=y. Foresight’s kernel does not include that setting, and using the Nvidia drivers currently in the repo, 100.14.03, performance has been smooth as silk. I’m running a Core 2 Duo E6300, 2 gigs of RAM and a Nvidia (BFG) 7950GT.

I’m enjoying the full game much more than the early beta client I played in Windows. While the game is definitely faster than Battelfield 2, it’s not as fast as I first thought. I still have a ton to learn (like joining a squad or learning to fly the air vehicles), but it’s fun. 2 out of 3 maps played this afternoon, and I was top Soldier, top kills, and close in top EXP. The promotions and unlocks by campaign is better than I expected, as I wasn’t sure how tempoary unlocks would be, but they work well. I thought I had played on a ranked server today, but searching for my stats, I can’t find them. Guess I need to play some more!

Kudos again to id for releasing a Linux client. It’s nice to have a state of the art game to play on Linux. The next month or two should be great for the state of gaming on Linux, with the rumored Gears of War release, and the definite release of Unreal Tournament 3.

A month with Quod Libet

For the last month I’ve been runnign Quod Libet instead of Banshee. I had run in to two critical problems with Banshee about a month ago:

  • Banshee was taking 80 minutes to start. (Since fixed, I think it was something with Foresight, as Banshee hasn’t had a release in a while).
  • Banshee’s Last.fm reporting plugin hasn’t reported songs correctly to Last.fm for a long time. This is a known bug in the plugin, without a known fix that I’m aware of.

Banshee’s Last.Fm integration may sound like something trivial, but I really enjoy browsing my profile to see what I’ve listened to. Unfortunately, my profile isn’t close to accurate as all the music I listen to at night via Banshee isn’t being reported. Between that, the old data that is still in my Last.fm profile from my wife listening to music via the Xbox (yes, the James Taylor in my profile isn’t from me listening to it), and the Last.fm radio streams, it’s not really an accurate reflection of my music tastes.

Quod Libet is a GTK+ music player, that also includes Ex Falso, a tag editor. Quod Libet is a favorite of a couple of Foresight users, so I thought I’d give that a try. A simple:

<br /> sudo conary update quodlibet

And it’s installed in Foresight!

My first impressions of Quod Libet, is that it comes across with a basic view, but once you start digging, it’s quite the powerful player. The default view includes a search box, People (artist) Album, and then the song list. Search is fast, feels a touch faster than Banshee.

Other views you can choose from include Playlists, Search, File System, Album, Internet Radio and Media Devices.

I tend to listen to full albums at a time, and not create playlists or listen to random songs, so Quod Libet has worked well for me. I’ve been impressed with it’s simplicity, and as I’ve dug deeper, even more impressed with the number of features and advanced funtionality it has. While it doesn’t have the visual appeal of Banshee, it just works, and that’s all I’ve asked it to do.

The only minor complaint I had, was that due to a DDOS attach, the Quod Libet team lost some it’s website, and the documentation on plugins is non-existent. While there is a nice list of plugins available, I had to get some help to figure out how to setup the sub-directories on where to put the plugins, and only one or two have worked out of the five or six I’ve attempted to install. Granted I haven’t spent that much time trying to configure the plugins, but it was just a small disappointment.

If you’re looking for an alternative to Rhythmbox or Banshee on a GNOME desktop, give Quod Libet a chance, the best thing I can say about it is that it “just works”. And works well.

A bug-hunting we will go

We had a really good Foresight developer meeting a few weeks ago, and one of the outcomes is to start scheduling week long sprints to accomplish some tasks.

First up, is Bug Hunting Week.

Foresight Bug Hunting Week

With 2.0 on the horizon, it’s time to get JIRA, our issue tracker, cleaned up, and tackle all the outstanding issues in 1.4 (and older) and make sure that if the issue hasn’t been resolved, it’s at least assigned to a developer.

Want to help? Join us in #foresight-qa on Freenode or visit the wiki pages to learn more.

More on the waiting game aka Quake Wars

I, like Phoronix, thought the Linux client was days away, but it’s weeks according to a post I saw on Linux-Gaming.net this morning:

I’ve also been making steady progress with the Linux Client, and it’s coming along really well. We’ve been running a closed-beta test for ‘friends and family’ for a little while, and for the past couple of weeks have had a fully functional version of the demo running. The closed-beta testers are now able to play alongside Windows players on the same version, with full Punkbuster support. The major systems including the renderer and audio are working great, and performance has been good on both the NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards.

Alongside my other responsibilities at id, my focus now is on optimization for the Linux Client. If everything goes to plan, we should have the Linux Client ready for release in just a few weeks.

Read TTimo’s full post here.

Darn. Well, I have tons of stuff to do with Foresight right now anyway, but it would have been fun to have some time to play before my new job starts in a couple weeks!

Foresight Wiki

The Foresight wiki is unavailable for adding content for a few days. All wiki content is still viewable, but you can’t edit or add content until after we perform an upgrade, which will hopefully be completed by the end of the weekend.

Our apologies!

Waiting Game: Quake Wars

I picked up a copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Now I’m just playing the waiting game for the Linux binary so I can play it.

I think the actual game is more fun.

But I wanted to make a statement by picking up the game during release week – it’s important to me to support commercial game companies who make Linux compatible games.

Rolling releases

Over the next month or two, you may hear a lot of news about upcoming releases of various Linux distributions.

But what if you could do things differently? What if you could have a Linux distribution that wasn’t tied to a specific date twice a year to update your packages and your distribution? What if you wanted access to the latest Banshee for example that will be out later this year and not wait until next spring? Why mess around with backports or unstable respositories just to gain access to the latest release of a package that features a bug fix you need?

Try a Linux distribution that features a rolling release. Try Foresight Linux. Yes, we have a “formal” release when GNOME releases every 6 months, but when a package has an update, it’s probably updated before you even notice, and just one conary updateall away from being included in your desktop. The latest packages will give you access to the latest features, and better yet, the latest bug fixes of any given package. With Foresight Linux 2.0 on the horizon, we will be adding a more formal QA process, so don’t let the “but we need months of testing” stop you from updating. Point releases come out every couple months, but mostly to update the downloadable media including install CDs / DVD and live media such as Live CDs or VMWare images. The magic of conary will keep all of your installed packages up to date.

Additionally, if something doesn’t work, Conary is an innovative package manager that features a rollback feature – from the command line type sudo conary rollback 1 and you’ll be right back to where you were before you installed that last package.

There can be better ways of doing things. And a rolling release is a better way.

GNOME 2.20 and Foresight 1.4 Released

GNOME 2.20 is out and that means a formal release of Foresight Linux, 1.4, is out to go with it!

Why do I say “formal release of Foresight Linux”? Because of Conary, Foresight does rolling releases – whenever a package has a major update, you’ll get it right away, so you always have the latest bug fixes of your favorite software.

Here are the GNOME 2.20 Release Notes, Foresight 1.4 release announcement and release notes, and because it is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, the release notes done by our resident pirates.

And of course, the best place to get the latest GNOME is Foresight Linux – download today.

Congrats to the team for another great release, and here’s to 2.0 in the near future!

PackageKit

As a Foresight user, I’m very excited about the future of PackageKit, which was highlighted in the August Foresight newsletter.

PackageKit will be a graphical front end for helping manage software packages on your computer, including installation, removal and updates.

Ken VanDine and Elliott Peele among others are hard at work getting Conary to work with PackageKit.

The new PackageKit website / wiki is up, and I just finished porting Richard’s Docbook documentation (that he blogged about this morning) for PackageKit to the wiki, available here. The basics are there, and I’ve got the ToC and most formatting done, but it could use some help with proofreading and getting the tables set up.