Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 17 of 27)

Half-Life Dedicated Server

March 9, 2013 / / 14 Comments

half-life-logo I have written down how I configured my Half-Life Dedicated Server (HLDS) in a new Slackware Documentation article. You can find the article here: http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:software:halflife_dedicated_server

The reason why I felt compelled to write this, was that the information you can find using Google, and the information on Valve’s own developer Wiki, is not 100% accurate or even outdated.

Writing an article also allowed me to add some tips, like starting the game server in “screen”, and explaining how you can auto-start the game server when your Slackware server boots, and keep the game files updated using a daily cron job.

I hope that the new SlackDocs article will trigger fellow Slackers to create their own HLDS server, and invite each other for some fragging. Hint: you can use the Slackware SteamCommunity group to schedule events like these.

Next on the TODO list is documenting how I created the “minimal Slackware” 32-bits virtual machine (less than 500 MB of Slackware installation footprint) which I use to run my own HLDS at home.

And after that, I still have to document how I setup a TeamSpeak server on the same virtual machine, which can be used for quality in-game voice chat. Lots left to do when I get bored again…

Cheers, Eric

Best wishes for a healthy and safe 2013

December 31, 2012 / / 17 Comments

Hi folks

This is the last day of 2012 and I want to take the opportunity to thank you all for reading my blog posts and your support in whatever way. Some good people sent me donation money through PayPal for which I am extremely glad since these times are not at all good, financially speaking. I was about to give up this summer, but your support allowed me to keep paying the bills for the build box and compensate to my family for all the hours I was not available for them. Thanks also to the generous person who keeps hosting my taper mirror for free – which is also the home of the Slackware Documentation Project coincidentally.

The birth of the Slackware Documentation Project was the highlight of 2012 for me, it gave me a lot of fresh energy to see so many of you reach out and bring together precious documentation for new and experienced Slackers alike.

I hope to see you all back in good health in the New Year!

The year has had its ups and downs for Slackware, one of the least enjoyable moments was when the Slackware.com webserver died and we were without an “internet sign post” for a while. That caused a stir for sure 🙂 I was glad to see the response from Slackers around the world and the expression of faith in the future of our favorite distro.

As the year ends, we are going strong as ever again, with Slackware 14 running on a lot of computers. Let’s see what 2013 brings. At least KDE 4.9.5 packages are waiting on my server for the public release on the 2nd of January 2013. They will not show up in Slackware-current (probably) but you will find them in my ktown repository. I will post here once they are available..

Remember, Slackware will always be free, but please consider a small donation or buy a copy of the Slackware installation media in order to support Pat Volkerding financially.

Finally, I want you to watch a bit of video before you head out into the night and light the fireworks. Be careful, especially you young people!

Cheers, Eric

mirror & wiki server temporarily down

November 23, 2012 / / 6 Comments

The host machine which is running the virtual machine “taper.alienbase.nl” and “docs.slackware.com” has malfunctioned.

According to the story told by that server’s owner, the power cord got loose during the re-build of the RAID array after the guy replaced a failing hard drive.

After a power-on the RAID volume refused to mount…

It looks like the host server may be up and running at the end of the day, if the owner manages to recover from the partition corruption. In that case, my mirror server taper.alienbase.nl and the Slackware Documentatoin Project’s Wiki docs.slackware.com may be online a little later, provided that I can access the server and start the Virtual Machine.

In the worst case, the server will not be able to recover and I have to find a location where I can restore my daily backup of the Wiki content. It’s just bad co-incidence that I will travel to India tomorrow early morning. I have no idea how fast I would be able to arrange for a new host, fix the DNS entries, setup apache and start the Wiki… for the docs.slackware.com hostname I need to involve Pat.

More news later.

Eric

Update Fri Nov 23 18:55:29 UTC 2012 –

The server is back up! The server admin fixed it, no data was lost.

Busy days

November 17, 2012 / / 10 Comments

The KDE team has just made the sources available for the first beta of KDE 4.10. It will take until next week to release that beta1 to the public but I had already decided to skip the Betas for the KDE releases and wait until a Release Candidate. I am afraid that I have very little time for absorbing any more time-consuming projects… like getting a KDE Beta built and tested for Slackware.

In exactly one week I will be traveling to India. Not a holiday, but a business trip to spend a week with my helpdesk team. I will give some training there and talk about “our” side of the work in the Netherlands where I work for the IT department on the ASML campus. My visit should be beneficial to our helpdesk team members who have never actually seen anything of the customer they are working so hard for. There will be plenty of room for socializing as well, and I hope to see something of Hyderabad and its suurroundings at least. I will try and order a meal of the original Hyderabadi Biryani, of which I have a recipe in my own blog as well. And pictures of course… I want to make a lot of photos while I am there.

But, preparation time for that trip is very short, because my employer gave an approval only this week, and that leaves less time for Slackware related stuff. As I said, no new KDE 4.10 beta packages. I have no idea if I will be on time with the KDE 4.9.4 packages which are due early December.

What I did manage, was to update my multilib repository for Slackware 14.0 (something I had forgotten when I updated the -current packages) so that you can try out the new Skype for Linux on a multilib Slackware 14.0. I will try using Skype while visiting India. And I will package a new version of Sigil, the EPUB book editor. For those who regularly update to my newer Calibre e-book management packages – there was no new release this friday because the developer Kovid Goyal took a week off (he lives in Mumbai, India and they had Diwali Festival over there).

I can’t leave you without at least informing you about a new and promising fork of UDEV software. Initiated by Gentoo developers, they are calling this “udev-ng“. You may have noticed in the past that I do not speak favourably about the band of Redhat developers who are trying to destroy anything that is not Redhat by forcing SystemD on everyone – alienating everyone they should be co-operating with and killing software which other distros depend on. With the prospect of an independent fork of UDEV (which Lennart Poettering and friends have merged into systemd with the intent of dropping support for it later) we in Slackware land stand a better chance of keeping systemd out of our distro. In fact this is the second fork of UDEV, I hope the teams will be working together.

Cheers, Eric

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