My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: December 2013 (Page 2 of 2)

City of Munich completes migration to Linux of 15000 desktops

munich_logoOn 12 december 2013, a full ten years after deciding to move away from the vendor-lock in that is called Microsoft Windows, the german city of Munich has completed the migration to their own Linux distribution called “LiMux“, a brand of Ubuntu with a KDE desktop environment. A full 15,000 computers are running Linux now. What an accomplishment!

The project had its setbacks but I applaud it for its successful ending. I know firsthand how hard it is to migrate institutions (governmental or commercial) to Linux – all my involvements have met with “death from above” meaning higher up in the hierarchy the decision was made to stop the pilots.

It is obvious that the commitment of the city counsil has been the crucial factor here. For the council, cost savings were not the goal, it was the realization that an external entity was able to dictate its terms to the city: to be precise, Microsoft required that all Munich computers would have to be upgraded from Windows NT to a newer version of the OS, and of  its Office Suite. At great cost since it affected 14,000 computers. In order to remove Microsoft from the equation, the “LiMux” project was started. During the ten years this project ran, Steve Ballmer visited the city in order to convince the council that they should reconsider and offered licenses for the Microsoft OS and Office suite at ridiculous discounts. But his words fell on infertile grounds.

Munich has calculated that it saved ten million euros by not upgrading their Windows software and instead going for Linux and Open Source. A number that has been disputed by several parties, including Microsoft. And to be honest, licenses are not the only cost factor in a migration like this, if you take into consideration rewriting/porting of critical software, educating people and running two IT infrastructures in parallel for a decade. A rock-solid conviction that freedom is more important than cost is required to stand fast against the big influencers. But Munich has a socialist majority, which has certainly helped to sustain the project through uncertain times. In this regard, when I look at my own dutch government, mostly my representatives are spineless and talking out of their asses. It’s not possible for me to point at someone who will get my vote and is member of a political party I hold in high esteem.

A shining example of the council’s commitment on the other hand, is the story told at LinuxTag 2013 by Peter Hoffman (LiMux project leader) about the time when Bill Gates himself spoke with the Major. At one point, Gates asked the Major what his reasons were for this Linux migration. The answer ‘We want more freedom” did not satisfy Gates, and he asked “Freedom from what?”. The major replied with “Freedom from you, Mr. Gates!'”

Read more about this epic voyage on the European Union’s JoinUp site, in Linux Magazin (in german) or on Tech Republic,  and of course the web site dedicated to the LiMux project (in german).

SteamOS is out – based on Debian, not Ubuntu

steamos

The release of SteamOS was right on time, as promised by Valve. SteamOS is an Operating System designed to play your (Steam) games on a TV. The accompanying “Steam Box“, which will be running the SteamOS and which is supposed to be a hardware platform as open as the Operating System designed for it, is still in Beta but 300 prototype devices (running the SteamOS) have been sent to eager testers together with a purpose-built Steam Controller.

Apparently the Steam Box will also allow you to play your games on your regular (Windows?) computer and “stream” the game’s display to the TV connected to the Steam Box (or any homebrew computer running SteamOS). I don’t know if that will deliver a perfect gaming experience (PC and TV must be close to each other) but I guess that this is how Windows users can still profit from the Steam Box (since it runs a Linux OS, Windows games are out of the question).

You can already download the slightly less than one gigabyte large archive of the OS. It is still a beta release, so not advised for “inexperienced Linux users”. Well, we Slackers do not fall into that category.

From the SteamOS FAQ:

Q: What is SteamOS?
SteamOS is a fork (derivative) of Debian GNU/Linux. The first version (SteamOS 1.0) is called ‘alchemist’ and it is based on the Debian ‘wheezy’ (stable 7.1) distribution.

The major changes made in SteamOS are:

  • Backported eglibc 2.17 from Debian testing
  • Added various third-party drivers and updated graphics stack (Intel and AMD graphics support still being worked on)
  • Updated kernel tracking the 3.10 longterm branch (currently 3.10.11)
  • Custom graphics compositor designed to provide a seamless transition between Steam, its games and the SteamOS system overlay
  • Configured to auto-update from the Valve SteamOS repositories

I think it is a positive message to all Open Source fans that Debian has been chosen as the base for SteamOS and not Ubuntu, which was the initial target for the Linux Steam Client. I have been watching the threads discussing issues with Steam on Ubuntu and was always glad that running Steam on Slackware was so much easier 🙂

I downloaded the OS image and despite online warnings that the download server was overloaded, it arrived at  6.5 MB/sec which is the maximum bandwith of my own Internet link. I have not yet tried it, but somewhere this week I will certainly dress up a Virtual Machine to see what it looks like. I wonder what will happen, as SteamOS expects Nvidia graphics hardware to be present, although the FAQ mentions “(AMD and Intel graphics support coming soon)“.

Exciting times for Linux gamers.  Ever since Gabe Newell’s public statement at LinuxCon 2013 that the future of gaming was on Linux, not on Windows, his company has been porting Steam games to Linux at a frantic pace, with other Open Source software profiting from their efforts (LLVM, X.Org drivers are examples). A year before that speech, Gabe Newell already called Windows 8 “a catastrophe” at a videogame conference in Seattle. Valve, a big thumbs up!

Eric

Memories of Doom

doom_boxcoverYesterday was the 20th birthday of DOOM, the computer game which meant a paradigm shift to me way back when I got my hands on it.

It was 1993 and I worked at a CAD/CAM company with a Novell network (IPX protocolled, this was before the time of TCP/IP even). A collegue of mine had downloaded the shareware version of DOOM from a bulletin board and found out that it had multiplayer capabilities and could be played on an IPX network – like our company network. One-on-one play was also possible using direct modem connection (yes, this was before the advent of the public Internet) but IPX network setup meant 4-player deatchmatch. Nobody had ever played a 3D game on a network (Multi User Dungeons and the like are quite different) so this was exciting stuff.

I was the local sysadmin, and so they asked me if they could put up a copy of the game on the server so that people could install it and have a go at network play. Sure thing! I wanted to try this out myself of course. Early version of a BOFH 🙂

I wish I had gone ehard doing that… even though playing deathmatch was an ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC experience. What happened? The first version of shareware DOOM had a serious flaw in the IPX network play, it used broadcast packets to communicate among the players of the game. Once we got a couple of foursomes playing the game, the network came to a complete standstill because of all the broadcast traffic.

Luckily the fix came fast, and the next update to the shareware version used unicast packets. That settled things 🙂

But by then I was hooked. I had never played a (semi-) 3D graphical game before at that time, the best I had done was Leisure Suit Larry and that was a different league altogether. I liked the Colossal Cave Adventure a lot better actually. You know that you can type “adventure” on your Slackware command prompt? You’ll probably not experience what I felt in 1983 when I first started it on the University’s mainframe computer… the first ever computer game I played. IT was right after we switched from teletypes and punch cards to VT100 terminals…

DOOM was so much different, it caused an adrenaline rush and we all got hooked at work. We had to declare our lunch breaks as exclusive frag time so that we could still get some work done in the remaining hours. DOOM’s IPX based network play was limited to isolated LANs because John Carmack was new to IPX, but we actually managed to battle our collegues in another office 100 kilometers away after I learnt enough of the IPX protocol to modify the ipxsetup source code and add routing capabilities (even then, idsoftware was ahead of everyone else in the field, not just by being the first company to give away parts of their game for free as “shareware” but also by making the source code of their network setup program available). Yes, those are some of my first USENET posts way back in 1995 and 1996 when we had finally had our own Internet subscription at work (connecting through a 1200 baud Hayes Smartmodem).

Not just the concept of network play, 3D gaming and freely sharing game data and source code was an eye opener to me, but also the concept of multimedia in computing. At the time, I did not even have a “real” DOS computer. I owned an Atari TT  which I bought because Atari had promised to release a real UNIX OS for that machine. Unlike the Arari ST which was primarily meant for playing games, I was interested in programming, furthermore I had been a UNIX support person before I switched to Novell networks. It took Atari so long to deliver that I never actually got to install their brand of UNIX but got hooked on their TOS/GEM operating system instead, and actually wrote a couple of games (game clones to be precise) and utilities for the TT-GEM platform. But then DOOM came, and my girlfriend (now wife) had bought a computer to write her thesis. Of course I installed DOOM on it (my own Atari was useless) and she got hooked to the game  as well  🙂

But, we kept getting stuck at a particular spot in the game and we did not know how to advance. There was no Internet remember… no Google to search for walkthroughs. So I decided to upgrade the computer with extra RAM and a soud card.

Man…

The first time I started DOOM after the sound card was installed, somewhere late at night in a darkened room, and some IMPs raised their gruesome voices, the hair on my head stood on end and I had goosebumps all over. This was scary stuff, o wow! It was my first truely immersive experience in computer gaming – 3D and sound. It defined my taste for computer games, and I still care for “idgames” style of shooters more than anything else.

And having the sounds meant we finally could progress in the game, because we heard a distant door open and close again, and we knew than that we had to run for that door. Something which we would not have discovered without a sound card.

At that time, I knew the computer industry was going to change. It was a game which made me decide to buy new hardware… that was a first for me. At work where I was the sysadmin I upgraded or replaced computers because the programmers would buy a new compiler or wrote more complex code. Games were not considered as relevant to computing. Hah!

A nice read, also called “Memories of Doom” (why did they nick my title!) is up on Kotaku where John Carmack and John Romero (former friends, now bitter rivals) reminisce about their creation. Oh, the good times.

Am I an old guy? Yes, that should be obvious by now. But I still play games. On Slackware Linux.

VLC 2.1.2 has been released

largeVLCThe VideoLAN team released version 2.1.2 of their VLC player today.

This is a maintenance release, “fixing a numerous number of bugs and regressions introduced in 2.1.0, notably on audio device management and SPDIF/HDMI pass-thru“. The 2.1.2 release also “allows experimental decoding of HEVC and Webm/VP9” video, according to the release notes.

In my vlc.SlackBuild I have not only upgraded the VLC source, but additionally updated the internal libraries for bluray, dvdnav, dvdread, ffmpeg, fribidi, live555, opus, speex and x264. I also enabled the 10-bit decoder for H.264 video (also known as High 10 Profile or Hi10P) which should please the Anime fans out there. I really thought I had done this way back already, but apparently not so for VLC 2.1.x.

My next mission is to find out what’s wrong with hardware decoding of the video. Either I get a complete crash of the application (mp4 files) or the picture is all jerky and blocky (mkv files). With the parameter  “-avcodec-hw no” added to the vlc commandline I can watch any video without issues (Nvidia binary driver on multilib slackware64-current with libva-0.32.0 installed… perhaps I should use the same version of libva as I use internally in VLC, which is libva-1.2.1).

Where to find my new VLC packages:

Rsync acccess is offered by the mirror server: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode mp3 and aac audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

KDE 4.11.4 for Slackware 14.1

Even though the KDE community has already made available a Release Candidate for the upcoming KDE 4.12, they also continue with the bugfix releases for the 4.11 series. Yesterday saw the source code release of KDE Software Compilation 4.11.4, as announced on kde.org. This is again a maintenance release, containing updates for Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. Note that the KDE 4.11 Workspaces will continue to receive updates for the next two years – from what I understood, its version will remain 4.11 while KDE SC moves on to 4.12 and onwards.

Since the release of KDE 4.11.3 last month, we were also treated to Slackware 14.1 so it made sense to build the new Slackware packages on Slackware 14.1. They will of course work just as well on slackware-current since that has not diverged all that much from the stable release.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.11.4 ?

Note: you have to be running Slackware 14.1 (or current)! These packages are not suited for Slackware 14.0.

You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

Note that you can also use slackpkg+ (the 3rd-party repository extension to slackpkg) for these upgrades if you want, it makes the process a bit easier for the less seasoned Slacker.

Where to find packages for KDE 4.11.4 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.11.4/ and packages in /14.1/4.11.4/ subdirectories). Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric

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