Windows Emulation on Linux

I found [Ubuntu Linux] easy to work with for the past couple months. Shortly after running Linux, it’s common to want to play games and run office on Linux. To run games on Linux there are three options: 1) Wine 2) Cross over games and 3) Cedega. [Wine] is a Windows emulator that is free and game setup is done by manual setup of config files. 2) [Cross over games] is a commercial product built on Wine that facilitates the manual process. [Cedega] is also a commercial product built on Wine; check the [game database] for supported game information. Cross-over initially created a product to emulate Windows so that MS Office could be installed on Linux and it looks like they want a piece of the gaming market as well. So far Cedega appears to work better for games. Cedega also comes bundled with “Spore Creature Creator” so obviously they are the better choice. Cedega doesn’t support MS Office as far as I know. I installed MS Office 2007 with CrossOver Office, but found MS Word 2007 crashes on startup and the product is still working on support for Office 2007 SP1.

Revisiting Shaders

I’ve been out of shader land for more than a year now. And it’s time to jump back into the realm of shaders. Last time I was here, there were two camps: [HLSL] and [Cg] shaders. HLSL are windows specific and Cg are platform independent. The syntax for each is similar. Nvidia provides [FX Composer] that facilitates rapid shader prototyping and does shader profiling. AMD provides [GPU Shader Analyzer] another shader profiling tool. Shader engineers can be found in either the [AMD] or [NVIDIA] or [Mental Mill] or [ShaderFX] developer forums. RenderMonkey can also show [disassembly], but it’s hidden.

Broadcom wireless drivers (Ubuntu 8.10)

I’m running [Ubuntu] 8.10, but my broadcom drivers keep having issues. I followed [this post] and connected to the wireless Internet. But when I rebooted, the drivers were unloaded. Investigating… No luck. There was a kernel update which is probably causing issues. For now, I’ll have to run a wire through the wall…

[This] seems to work off and on.

Using a Mac

Apple Remote Desktop Client:
As a Windows user, I’ve used Remote Desktop to connect to other computers frequently. I’ve recently been learning Mac, and apparently there’s an [Apple Remote Desktop Client] that will connect to a Windows Remote Desktop session. This [kid] can show you how to use it.

I downloaded the [Ubuntu] iso on the Mac because it downloads 10X faster over wireless than my other Vista machines. And then I found [a short list of steps] on how to burn an ISO disk image on a Mac.

Linux Games

After you have Linux up and running the next step is to find games for your system. The Mandriva community has a [wiki entry] with links to each game.

Rank of best looking Linux games so far are:

  • [Secret Maryo Chronicles] – a Super Mario Brothers clone.
  • [Spring Project] – an open source RTS engine for Windows/Linux
  • [CUBE] – a FPS game engine.
  • [Sauerbraten] – an enhancement to the CUBE game engine.
  • [Fungaloids] is a visually fast paced game with lots of visual effects.
  • [ManiaDrive] – is an impossibly fast race car / track completion game. They use punk music and really short track times to catalyze aggravation..

    • Ubuntu Linux Distro

    I thought I’d give the Linux distro [Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition] a try. Mandriva was being a pain about setting up the NVIDIA graphics driver. Time for something new.

    First setup your build environment. Pop in the install CD and run this in a terminal.

    sudo apt-cdrom add
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install build-essential
gcc -v

    The following put me back on the network.

    You are using the b43 driver from linux-2.6.24

    If you are using the b43 driver from linux-2.6.24, follow these instructions.

    Use version 011 of b43-fwcutter.
    Download, extract the b43-fwcutter tarball and build it:

    wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
    tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
    cd b43-fwcutter-011
    make
    cd ..

    Use version 4.80.53.0 of Broadcom’s proprietary driver.
    Download and extract the firmware from this driver tarball:

    export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR=”/lib/firmware”
    wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
    tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
    cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
    sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta.o

    Download and check for all the updates.

    Ubtuntu’s hardware wizard was able to automatically download and install the NVIDIA display drivers. Do not try to manually install the NVIDIA display drivers or else the hardware wizard won’t work. For some graphics cards [setup] is required, but it was all automatic for me.

    Ubtuntu has a ton of [visual effects] that you can enable.

    I have to concede that Ubuntu is a better distribution than Mandriva. Ubuntu has better built-in hardware support and was easier to install.

    Amazon Kindle

    I just got my [Amazon] [Kindle] after 3 weeks of waiting and checking the shipping information every hour. Now I just need to figure out #1 how to hack it #2 how to install software updates #3 [how to transfer pdfs]. #4 how to get the kindle on my home network

    #1) Looking at the boot logs, some [hackers] have already found the Kindle software is written in Java.

    #2) My kindle has software Version: Kindle 1.0.8 (164820023) out of the box, so it’s already up to date.

    #3) I was able to use the free [MobiPocket Creator (publish edition)]. And it’s pretty easy to use the wizard to import the pdf and build the prc file. And then I transfer the prc to the Kindle with the USB cable for free.

    Mandriva 2009

    I had a chance to play around with the 4G [Mandriva 2009 DVD] on my old [IBUYPOWER] laptop. Initially X wouldn’t initialize, so I hit CONTROL-ALT-BACKSPACE a couple times and that did the trick. Unfortunately my wireless network card is not being detected. So I’m going to try [NdisWrapper] or [OpenWRT] or [X-WRT] the graphical front-end. The LAN is a [Realtek 8110 SB(L)]. My wireless network driver can be found on [LinuxWireless]. I was able to get my wireless network working with the following script:

    You are using the b43 driver from linux-2.6.25 or newer

    Follow these instructions if you are using the b43 driver from linux-2.6.25 and newer or compat-wireless-2.6, or from any current GIT tree.

    Use version 011 of b43-fwcutter.
    Download, extract the b43-fwcutter tarball and build it:

    wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
    tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
    cd b43-fwcutter-011
    make
    cd ..

    Use version 4.150.10.5 of Broadcom’s proprietary driver.
    Download and extract the firmware from this driver tarball:

    export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR=”/lib/firmware”
    wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
    tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
    cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver
    sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta_mimo.o

    Visit the [Mandriva Wiki] for tips on configuring the display. “init 3” exits the X session and “init 5” starts the X session. “uname -a” tells you your Linux kernel version so you can install the source and headers “[Linux 2.6.27-desktop-0.rc8.2mnb #1 SMP] Thu Oct 2 05:49:37 EDT 2008 x86_64 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz GNU/Linux”.