Ryan pulled a late night and did a final sync of data from Frankenputin (old server) to Minimus. I mainly sat back and let Ryan do the heavy lifting, just acting as cheerleader, head scratcher in chief and occasional googler of error messages. There were some struggles with Mysql and the usual Gallery puking, but eventually the beast was wrestled into submission. A few port forwarding changes and now everything is being served up by Minimus. Frankenputin has been powered down, quite possibly for good. My garage no longer sounds like a jet taking off and I kinda miss it.

If you are a silverfir.net user, please poke your head into infrequently visited dark corners and see if you find anything growing there. I plan to consign Frankenputin to its new role as boat anchor and kick Minimus into a closet as soon as it is verified that the new server is stable and no additional settings/data need importing from Frankenputin.

Well, I have virtually run out of Lucasarts Scumm games to play using ScummVM. I came to wondering whether there was any equivalent project for Sierra’s classic adventure games. Unfortunately, unlike Lucasarts, with their unified “Scumm” scripting system, Sierra games were implemented with a large number of tools. The chief systems used in Sierra adventure games were AGI for their earlier works and various versions of SCI for their later adventure games. While there are some interpreters to allow these games to be played on modern platforms, such as NAGI and FreeSCI, neither is nearly as mature and polished as ScummVM. So, what can one do, short of busting a 486 out of the closet? One solution that I have found is DOSBox. DOSBox is an opensource project that implements a large subset of the operating system and hardward environment of an old DOS computer, including all the oddball sound and video cards in use 15-25 years ago (Wow, has it really been that long?). DOSBox in itself is a bit of a pain to use, but couple it with a nice graphical front end like D-Fend and running old Dos games becomes a breeze. One of the nice things about D-Fend is allows one to create environment profiles for each game and create a direct icon to launch each game. So, if a game runs better with a Sound Blaster 16 or a EGA graphics card, then give it a EGA graphics card. So far, I haven’t found an old Dos game which DOSBox will not play. So far I have tested:

-Abuse
-Doom 2
-Gabriel Knight
-Goblins 1 and 2
-Hero’s Quest (later renamed Quest for Glory)
-King’s Quest I, II and III
-Wing Commander: Privateer
-Quest for Glory II
-Quest for Glory I – VGA
-Space Quest I – EGA and VGA
-Space Quest II

At last week’s hacknight, I got to see OSX running on commodity Intel hardware. In particular, it was running on a Dell XPS M170 gaming notebook (one of the new XPS series ones that glow). Unofficial support for non-apple hardware has come along quite a bit, with support for more video cards, non-SSE3 machines (still requires SSE2 minimum), and in the very latest release, support for SATA hard drives. I decided to try it out for myself, so I downloaded an pre-patched image created by someone named Myzar. I ran into one problem after another, trying to install using this iso image in VMware. I managed to resolve one problem after another, but finally bumped into an haulting ACPI error that prevented the system from fully booting after install. I found that Myzar created a new image and had released a PPF differential patch update to patch the previous iso image to OSX version 10.4.6 and also added the option of using a recompiled SSE3 kernel. The default kernel didn’t work, but the recompiled one did the trick. OSX is now running happily in VMware. All the hardware is working (network, sound, usb, etc), except for the video card, which is running with the unaccelerated VGA driver. I ended up having to tweak a lot of VMware settings to get it OSX working properly. Here are some settings I would recommend if you choose to try this at home…

• Added the line paevm=true to the virtual machine’s .vmx config file. By default, VMware disables support for PAE (physical address extension), a technique for accessing ram > 4 GB on 32 bit CPUs. OSX requires support for PAE to run.
• Mount the OSX cd image (iso file) using Daemon Tools, and then tell VMware to use the virtual cd-rom created by Daemon Tools. Many PC optical drives have problems with the OSX cds and VMware’s own .iso image mounting doesn’t work well with the HFS+ format cd.
• Allocate all the hard disk space for your virtual hard disk drive immediately (instead of choosing the option allowing it to grow as space is used).
• Specify the guest OS type as FreeBSD.
• Add a USB controller to the list of virtual hardware, but disable the autoconnect option
• In “host settings” choose the option to fit all guest os memory into reserved memory, rather than allowing for swapping. Produces quite a speedup.

Here are some more pictures of OSX86 running in VMware, as well as some of the error messages I received.

I have been playing around with ScummVM quite a bit this week. I have played 3 Lucasarts games to completion, so far, and have started on my fourth – Full Throttle. I have been scouring eBay and p2p for more games. One of the problems I ran into is that many of the newer Scumm games include full digital soundtracks and voice-overs. Earlier games simply had subtitles for the dialogue and used fm synthesis/midi files or something similar for the sound effects. As a result, some of the earlier games had data files ammounting to only 5-10 MB, while later games like Full Throttle might total a gig. The large size of the datafiles makes playing these larger games on a PDA rather difficult, as these devices tend to use fairly small flash cards for storage. One solution, other than going and plunking down those hard earned $ on a large flash card is to make use of an auxilary project to ScummVM called Scumm Tools. Scumm tools allows one to compress the Scumm audio files using MP3 or Ogg formats. Compressed data files are supported by most newer versions of ScummVM, although you will need to ensure that your platform has enough processing power to decode the audio and do everything else, as well. The tools are a nice start, but many games spread their data across a large number of files, making for a lot of time spent at a command prompt to compress them all. Thankfully, a user on the ScummVM forums created a series of game-specific batch scripts that help automate most of the process. The benefits of compressing are sizeable (haha). Most “talkie” games compressed to about 40% of their previous size, with no perceptible loss of audio quality.

VMware recently introduced VMware Player, a free piece of software that allows you to run virtual machines created in any of their commercial products. The software requires you to have administrator rights on any machine you use it on, as it installs several services, but it is still extremely cool to be able to take your virtual machines with you.

Another option for those wishing to take a vm along for the ride is Qemu, which unlike VMware’s software, supports access to network hardware without needing to install any special services. Sticking qemu and a vm on a keychain is a great way to have a secure, network capable computing environment with you should you need to access the internet from a untrusted/public computer.

Still another option, and perhaps your best bet if you don’t have a 1 or 2 GB USB keychain is Portable CE which allows one to run a complete Windows CE environment from a small keychain.

I have been liking Ubuntu enough that I decided to devote some actual hardware to it and not simply run in a virtual machine. Running it in the VM was fine, but I was unable to get VMware tools to install, using the older version of VMware that I own (the new version supports it just fine). Without the VMware tools, the client OS is running without much in the way of graphics acceleration. I saw that VMware was releasing a toolkit, to allow OS makers to build in support for VMware’s “virtual hardware,” so that the tools install becomes unnecessary. in other VMware news, the x86 version of OS X has apparently been hacked to run within VMware. I will definitely have to check this out further. I have been running the PPC version of OS X in PearPC for some time now, but due to all the cross-instruction set translation needed to run PPC code on a x86 machine, running OSX on x86 hardware is currently very slow. Now, with OSX tunning natively on x86, emulation should be much faster. There is some DRM built into the developers release right now that tries to restrict OSX from running on anything but the official developer boxes, so a virtual machine may actually be the ideal environment for those wishing to run OSX on generic, non-apple x86 boxes.

Anyways, back to the original point. I now have a Ubuntu install on a Celeron 500 w 256MB of ram. Despite the relatively modest hardware, Ubuntu runs just great. Certainly much faster than XP on similar hardware. I am a little disappointed by how many things have been left out of the OS for “political” reasons. They can all be added back with a little effort, but it would be nice if they had been included on the install disks by default (even if not installed in the default installation configurations). I have found that I have needed to download far more packages with Ubuntu than with Fedora to get a nicely rounded system.

Azureus, my BitTorrent client of choice finished downloading the DVD .ISO for Ubuntu Linux this evening. Although it was getting rather late, I blasted the image to a dvd-r using my new Plextor 12x SATA burner at full speed. I don’t normally burn at the faster speeds, as I have found that disks burned at slower speeds have better archival life and wear resistance. I attribute this to the burner being able to create more well-defined pits at slower speeds. Anyways, the Plextor handled the high-speed burn like a champ and a few scant minutes later, I had a Ubuntu installation DVD. I set up a VM in VMware with which to play around with it and popped in the disk. Installation went smoothly, although Ubuntu seems to be one of the last major distros still using a ascii text based installation wizard by default. The only hitch in the installation process came when after booting into the Gnome Desktop, I tried to get all available package updates. It popped up a dialogue saying I had to be logged in as root to do the updates. So, I logged out and proceeded to try and log back in as root. I typed in the password I normally use for super user level accounts and was presented with a bad password error message. I was sure I was asked for a password during the install, so I tried a couple minor variations, but to no avail. So, I was left to reinstall the OS from scratch. I did so, only to encounter the same problem. I googled for a solution. It turns out Ubuntu disables the root account by default and gives the user account you create during the install process super user status. It is easy to enable the root account, and I did so promptly. I really dislike having to use the sudo command every time I try and do something of substance. Anyways, outside of this minor issue, so far I really like Ubunto.

In other news, I am trying to get back into some semblance of shape that well…resembles a shape. I have been biking 15+ miles almost every day on my Lifefitness Lifecycle these last few weeks. I recently mounted a compact keyboard and a handheld trackball to the handlebars. This, coupled with my newly improved media center pc (Thanks go out to Colin for the mini-itx case!) makes for a decent web browsing, email and media platform while biking. I composed this entire entry while biking, although I will probably go back and edit in some links afterwards on my main pc. Using a keyboard as a text entry solution is not ideal for biking, as it requires me to take both hands off the handlebars and move into a more upright position. I might invest in an alternative text entry/pointing device like a Twiddler if I persist in exercising while I blog. I would also like to pick one up for eventual incorporation into a wearable computer rig.

After a conversation with Matt Westervelt yesterday at hacknight, I have decided to try out Ubuntu Linux. I have been playing around with Fedora for a while now in VMware, and have been running OS X Tiger pretty regularly in PearPC. This is all part of an effort to become more proficient in non-microsoft OSes in anticipation of an eventual switch.

Despite being a long time advocate of Microsoft based solutions (and having worked there for 3 years), I have become more and more displeased of late with Microsoft’s heavy handedness towards consumers. In particular, I greatly dislike Windows Genuine Advantage, Paladium related initiatives and a general trend I see within Microsoft of not looking at what individuals actually want, but instead treating consumers as “The Product.” This is much in the same vein as media companies, where individuals are seen as “The Product” to be sold to advertisers, and not the reverse. A number of previously *Rock of Gibraltar* stable XP machines (and yes, they are legal licensed copies) have started bluescreening and displaying other distressing behaviour since the forcible installation of Windows Genuine Advantage a few weeks back. To prove that WGA was indeed the cause of these problems, I restored several of these boxes to disk images (I image the OS partitions of my most crucial machines regularly) taken prior to WGA and immediately turned off windows update, even going so far as to disable the service entirely. Unsurprisingly, these boxes returned to their previous high level of stability. I have just about had it with XP. Microsoft’s increasing attempts to exert control over users (DRM, Paladium, Windows Genuine Advantage, etc.) and post-sale crippling of features (like raw sockets support in SP2) has lost them my support as a user and more importantly, as an advocate. I am in the process of migrating several boxes back to W2K Server in the interim, but my longterm plan is for a much less Microsoft-centric infrastructure.

Microsoft still has time to regain my trust, but as it stands, I will not be purchasing Longhorn (recently rechristened Windows Vista) or any other Microsoft products that dares to disrespect the customer. This will be a difficult transition for me. One can tolerate a little malfeasance, but when push comes to shove, I vote with my wallet and am vocal about it. If a business does something you dislike, call them on it. Make sure the decision makers know the reason for you ire. Equally, make sure to let them know what you value about their business/product/service. All institutional power ultimately stems from the consent/acquiescence of individuals. It is often easier to let things slide and let some small portion of your life be governed/controlled by others, but at some point you have to fight for what you believe. To not do so is inhuman.

The updating of all packages went relatively smoothly, and Fedora is now running off a 2.6.12 series kernel. It had no trouble figuring out which packages needed updating and downloading them all, but timed out when trying to figure out package dependencies with such a large ammount of packages selected. All I needed to do to work around the problem was to select a smaller number of packages to install at a time. Thankfully, the update program (up2date) cached all the RPM install files, so I didn’t have to re-download them. This would have been annoying not just because of the size of the updates, but also because the update program warns about the updates not being GPG signed and requires you to click an “install anyways y/n” box after downloading each update before proceeding to download the next one.

I took some time and installed some packages from the Fedora Extras project via YUM, the new package management tool that is very remniscent of APT on Debian based systems. There are some noteable applications that seem to be missing from both the “Fedora Core” and “Fedora Extras” set of applications, most likely due to licensing issues, so I will have to figure out where I can get packages for those. I would prefer to use prebuilt binaries rather than compile from scratch, at least until I get a little more used to the file system structure.

Fedora is working fine in VMware as is, but the automated install of the VMware tools (which provide graphics accelerating, better cursor handling, etc.) into Fedora does’t seem to be working. I am using an older version of VMware, so an update to 5.0 might be in order. VMware Workstation 5 supports some very cool features, such as multiple point in time snapshots per VM, ability to “team” VMs together – specifying a group of vms to start up together in a certain order – allowing you to create whole network infrastructures, broader OS support for both host and client oses, and the list just goes on and on. I just wish it wasn’t soo expensive. I’ll have to look into upgrade pricing.

I spent this evening playing around with Fedora in a VM. Fedora is a distribution that is closely related to Red Hat Linux, one of the most successful Linux distributions. Red Hat decided to concentrate their development and support efforts towards enterprise users and created Red Hat Enterprise Linux towards that end. Red Hat (the company) will only support RHEL. Fedora was originally spawned off Red Hat and most of the active development seems to go on in Fedora, with new releases every 6 months or so. A lot of these changes get rolled into RHEL eventually, but RHEL is designed to have a longer time between release (as Red Hat is now primarily a support company and needs time to create documentation, certification programs, etc.). Anyways, Fedora is the first Red Hat distribution that I have played with in many years. I think the last version of Red Hat that I seriously used was 5.2, so I am eager to see how Red Hat has changed in all these years.

If nothing else, it was a great deal easier to install, with all (virtual hardware) being properly detected during the install process. The last time I touched Red Hat, it took me the greater part of a week to enable proper suppport for my video and sound cards (X has always been a biotch). After about two hours of install process and almost no fuss, I am happily typing this from within Firefox, running on Fedora. I am going to play around with the update system (which still uses RPMs) and see how it handles an update of every installed package (including kernel). If something goes awry, since I am running it in a VM, I can just revert back to the last point in time snapshot , so I am feeling daring :)