Jun 21
Hi!
Long time no updates here. I was pretty busy lately (planning trips, exams in university, building a bike, etc etc), but today I found a neat little game, and I'd like to spread the word. It is called
Rezerwar, I found it when I was checking latest package updates from
SlackBuilds. The package had a pretty cool description there:
Rezerwar is a puzzle game that could be quickly described as the illegitimate child of a known tetromino game and a pipe game. I adopted this bastard child and tried to give it some life. The goal of this game is to basically create networks of water and make them disappear, a couple tricks and techniques will help you achieve this goal faster.
Good parts
- Great gameplay. I am fan of fast playable games, that have simple mechanics & addictive gameplay. This is one of them :)
- Cool idea!
Bad parts
- You have to get used to game controls. For first games I tried to rotate the block with up button, which drops the block immediately.
- I am a big fan of chiptunes / oldschool video game music, but the only in-game song may get on your nerves after some time playing. If you know how to make MIDI tracks, maybe you could help the developer by making some more.
I tested the game on 3 distros (Slackware, Fedora & Arch). Here are some install notes:
- Arch Linux: Grab your copy from AUR (link), just simple as that :)
- Fedora: There is no Fedora package yet, I will try to make one myself!
- Slackware: I installed it from *surprise* a SlackBuild. I dont have sound configured for my Slack machine, but after your tipical SlackBuild install game itself works great.
Cheers to Bertrand (aka Tamentis) for the great game!
Now go & play some Rezerwar :p
Apr 21
I found a useful post on making a ssh Login Banner by Review Ninja. I decided to make things more fun by adding some ASCII art (created with Figlet) to it. My Slackware and Arch Linux boxes now have neat login messages. Here is how:
-
For Slackware: Download figlet from here and install with installpkg.
-
For Archlinux: Install figlet with pacman -S figlet.
- To see what fonts are installed by default run ls /usr/share/figlet/*flf for Slackware and ls /usr/share/figlet/font*flf for Arch.
- Create a custom welcome message. (Figlet has tons of options available). Check the manpage for syntax reference.
- Do something like figlet -f mini Hello! > ~/.ssh/ssh-welcome
- Enable the Login Banner (check the link in the beginning of this article)
- Restart ssh. For Archlinux: /etc/rc.d/sshd restart For Slackware: /etc/rc.d/rc.sshd restart
Enjoy! :)
Apr 6
I got really bored today in a lecture about context-free grammar. I started tinkering with Processing and made the basic "engine" of my project - an 8-bit synthesizer. This is the first project in which I used sound (minim libs). I couldn't find some cool samples on freesound, so I made them myself. (if you want, you can mash it with your samples :)
It is a "true 8-bit" synth, because samples are made with Nintendo Gameboy, yeah ;)
This is just a quick project (so I don't forget the idea), but I hope to
improve it someday, to get rid of the "switch / case" part, which I really dislike. Enjoy & make some noise!
Mar 28
I updated my favourite Twitter client Pino (I reviewed it 2 weeks ago) for Arch Linux netbook and my Fedora desktop today. Some nasty bugs have been fixed (now the cursor is visible) and now it has spell checker.
Pino 0.2.4 for Fedora 12I used
Paweł's RPM package for Fedora. Download it from
here. It has tons of new features compared to version 0.1.4 in yum official repos (0.1.4 only supports twitter and doesn't have a pine icon :D )
Pino 0.2.4 for Arch LinuxThere is no Pino package for Arch Linux in official repos and
version in AUR is a bit old. But, you can download the tarball from AUR and replace PKBUILD script with my modified one, which was working OK. Check the comments on AUR page, if you encounter some problems, see my PKBUILD
here.
I don't do microblogging on other distros so I don't know how to run Pino there, but I recommend chekcing out the best twitter/
identi.ca client around! ;)
Mar 26
After my epic failures (read previous posts) with KMS crashing the whole system and building kernel just for fun, I decided that it would be much easier to reinstall whole PC than to try to fix problems. I wanted to change things a bit, so now my home desktop PC is running Fedora12. Looks nice & works fast, even with gnome. And OpenGL runs out of the box (even with my old chipset and integrated intel video card, yay). Most of my machines still run arch & stays my favourite Linux distro.
Oh, the only time I said
goddamit with Fedora was, when I couldn''t find vim in default install, hehe.
Mar 25
I had some serious troubles after full system upgrade (which upgraded kernel too) recently. I could not boot my Arch Desktop PC. (Here is my forum post about it). I thought that new kernel doesn't want to work with my PATA disks, so I decided to rollback kernel (hoping that I could do that with Arch Live CD).
So, I tuned in some old school beats from
Run DMC and started my great experiment - Reinstalling kernel (and kernel firmware) from Arch LiveCD. Here is my PC rescue mission step-by-step:
- Boot up the Arch liveCD (well, you guessed it would be necessary, right?)
- Login as root & add some root password (will be useful later) with passwd root
- Mount the root partition of Desktop PC (for me: /dev/sda3) to /mnt
- Edit /etc/hosts.allow to allow ssh connections
- Start dhcp, restart network daemon, & start ssh daemon
- Connect to Desktop PC from AspireOne (with Midnight Commander)
- Copy kernel26 & kernel26 firmware from AspireOne pacman cache to Desktop PC's /mnt/tmp
- chroot to /mnt
- Install packages from /tmp with pacman -U
- (fingers crossed)
- (grab a tea while it's building)
- Reboot (fingers crossed)
...and it still didn't work. But now error messages were a bit different. It seems that KMS doesn't play nice with my intel 865G chipset. Oh well, it is late and I wont try to remove it. But today I learned the power of Arch LiveCD, hehe
But hey, if you have 865G chipset and you've tried to install KMS, post your /etc/mkinitcpio.conf MODULES section please. I don't remember what values it had by default.. :/
Mar 22
OpenBSD 4.7 will be out on May 19th (you can pre-order it here), but the traditional OpenBSD "theme song" for release 4.7 was released recently. The song is titled "I'm still here". Read the full lyrics here and enjoy the song :)
P.S. This was my first attempt to upload a song here. Posterous accepts songs & plays them, horray!
Mar 22
When I installed Arch Linux for the first time, I was doing it step-by step, following the Arch install guide. With Slack I was reading the Slackbook. IMHO, it is the must-read resource for anyone who wants to dive into this distribution.
Here are some quick notes from the install process (a live-blogging entry, hehe).
PartitioningArch provides a nice & quick disk partitioning menu in it's install process. I can configure all the bits myself, but default options next-next-finish are available too. But with Slack I had to use standard CLI tool fdisk to partition drives. The old saying
When you learn Ubuntu, you learn Ubuntu, but when you learn Slackware, you learn Linux is really true here :)
Don't fail like I did: check if your root (or boot) partition is bootable before exiting fdisk :)
SetupThe setup tool looks similar to other distributions without a graphical installer. If you have installed Arch, you won't have any problems here. The option of installing GNU Emacs, X and even TeX is provided here. I unchecked most of the package groups (less is more) and installed "full package list". It took quite a time to install. Next time (if there will be one) I will be manually checking packages which I need & which I dont. Because now I have all xf86 video codecs, scanner software and bulk of other stuff I won't need. Configuring the basic system was easy & straightforward.
First runLILO bootloeader waits for 2 minutes to proceed, will have to edit this time. This was also the first time I saw Tuz, the
tasmanian devil, when the system was loading. Now it's time to customize my Fluxbox setup & install some packages Slack style :)
Mar 19
After many, many episodes of Linux Outlaws, the name Slackware has become a synonym for pain. But guess what, I will try it out now. I haven't really tested distros from this big branch of Linux family tree (except for Slax on my USB flash & 2 days with Zenwalk). My good old distrohopping pal - Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook laptop will be the test subject.
It's a shame, that
latvian FTP mirror only has versions 10.2 - 12.2, so I am downloading the .ISO via bittorent now.
Mar 15
I use Dokuwiki a lot. It is main documentation/notes tool for my projects. Sometimes I need to access my notes from different computers. So I came up with a cool idea how to do this. Copy Dokuwiki in the Dropbox directory and make a symbolic link to it in Apache document root directory. Doing it this way, I can get the same DokuWiki on all machines with Dropbox & Apache (all my machines have that). And my notes stay private too!
Setting up Dropbox
If you don't have a Dropbox installed, then I recommend this tutorial by the fine CrunchBang folks. It shows how to install & run Dropbox. Arch Linux wiki also has an entry on Dropbox installation, but CrunchBang tutorial is much easier and it works on Arch too. Setting up DokuWikiDownload DokuWiki from here and extract it to Dropbox folder. Make a symlink ln -s /path/to/dropbox /srv/http/dokuwiki (/srv/http is the default dir in Arch linux. It may be different on your distro). Thanks to zimnyx fro #bash in freenode, who answered my trivial symlink question. Then run localhost/dokuwiki in your browser and go trough the simple install process. DokuWiki is ready :) Now you can make similar symlinks on other machines and have your DW with you all the time, without making it visible to public. Dropbox allows also sharing of folders, this could be a good way for a "private" collaboration tool. If you have done this, let me know if it works! :)
