Mal and Weasel’s Tech Crap

IIIITY bitty living space.

Malachai’s got a new rig.

For those of you that may be interested, I’ve gotten some new gaming muscle. As some may know, I have a habit of playing the newest, most graphically intensive games possible. The old machine (a modest AMD Athlon64 X2 at 2.67GHz. I’ll post the other stats below.) had previously been enough beefcake to handle everything I could throw at it. However, about the time Orange Box came out, it had ceased being beefcake, and had dropped to the category of boca burger. Thus after having beaten Left 4 Dead, which played horribly, as well as the new Wolfenstein, and some other rather graphics-intensive games, I decided to throw together a new one. The new machine, a not-so-modest AMD PhenomII X4 965 Black Edition, raises the bar back to ‘Beefcake Dominator’. (Alright, enough with the burger bun… I mean, puns.)

The Old:

AMD Athlon64 X2, 2.67GHz
Western Digital Caviar 320Gb SATA
2Gb OCZ Fatal1ty PC2-8500 (1066MHz)
Asus M2N-MX SE MicroATX
Apevia XCruiser-Black Midtower
EVGA nVidia GeForce 8600GTX 512Mb
Creative SB5.1d Sound

The New:

AMD PhenomII x4 965 Black, 3.4GHz
Western Digital Caviar Black 1024Gb SATA
Hitachi Deskstar 1024Gb SATA
Western Digital Caviar 320Gb SATA
Hitachi Deskstar 80Gb SATA
MSI NF750-G55 ATX
Ultra M923 ATX Fulltower
EVGA nVidia GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked 768Mb

Thanks to TigerDirect, I was able to put this all together, (plus some) with under $1100 including shipping.

As my good friend Weasel (who’s right next to me right now) says, “It eats green berets for breakfast, and right now, it’s hungry.”

Images

Just recently, (last Friday, if you’re interested…) I picked up three Palm handhelds. Two III series, one ‘x’ and one ‘e’, and a Zire 21. Acting very kid-in-a-candy-store, I got home and started playing with them. I found out rather quickly that the Palm hotsync manager (which has stopped being developed long before the Pre came out.) doesn’t support Vista 64bit or 7 at all. (I use Windows 7 64bit.) So to work around it, I installed Virtualbox on my computer, and a copy of Windows XP Pro atop that. After that, I was finally able to get the Hotsync Manager working, and have been spending my time since getting ebooks, OS hacks, programs, and other related goodness working on two generations of devices.

The programs thus far:

YAHM (Yet Another Hack Manager)
-This program allows me to ‘beam’ OS hacks back and forth between generations of device.

HackMaster
-This is the actual OS Hack manager I use. Works flawlessly, and is fast as hell.

Marbles^2
-The best damn timewaster puzzle game ever.

eReader
-Good ebook reader for palm. Supports the old OS 3.1 that’s on the IIIx, and has full grayscale support for the Zire 21. All-in-all quite good. Also has a DropBook windows client, and supports the PML markup language for creating your own ebooks from html and txt sources.

My poor old HP Pavilion has sure been through a lot lately, having had its OS replaced approximately 8 times, the hard drive formatted for 5 of those. It originally shipped with Windows Millenium Edition (puke), its previous owner mercifully replacing it with Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2. I, however, found performance under Windows XP to be less than optimal, and many of the programs (i.e. games) that I wished to run on it simply wouldn’t agree with XP, or would otherwise choke at the system’s lack of video acceleration and/or DirectX 9.0 support. (Game Maker, I’m looking at you.)

So the first thing I did was stick Windows 2000 Professional on it. Performance was actually somewhat better than before, all my drivers still worked, and, most importantly, Slam Tilt Pinball worked (finally). Though as time went on, I found that Windows 2000 still didn’t suit my needs, and wondered if there was a flavor of Linux that would agree with it. So I ran down the list. Condensed version of my various attempts and findings below.

Xubuntu 8.10
I found that Xubuntu didn’t have enough memory to even install, and upon using the Alternative installer, had several read errors and eventually screwed up my boot sector (see Boot Loaders Suck).

Puppy Linux 4.2.1
Puppy actually ran from its LiveCD surprisingly well. I was highly pleased with it – until I learned that it was next to impossible to install to hard drive. (I realize that Puppy isn’t supposed to be installed to a hard drive, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Damn Small Linux
DSL installed quite comfortably and even ran pretty well, but this was when I first became acquainted with the ridiculous things one needs to do to get a wireless card working in Linux. I hate you, ndiswrapper. Also, the package manager didn’t work for some reason, so I couldn’t get apps that I needed.

Debris 1.0.4
This one looked promising, until I learned that APT was connected to a very old Ubuntu database that no longer existed, and I unfortunately was unable to figure out how to set it to multiverse. Then, well, more ndiswrapper nonsense.

Fluxbuntu 7.10
Not only did APT actually work on this one, the installer acknowledged the existence of, but still didn’t know how to use, my Linksys WPC54G wireless card. More ndiswrapper nonsense later (and with heavy assistance from Malachai), I realized that ndiswrapper wasn’t even treating my wireless card as wlan0 like it was supposed to, but rather eth1, rendering it essentially useless. Default desktop settings were very pretty, though.

Tiring of all this open source stuff, I opted to just nuke the hard drive again and load up Windows 98 SE. This is an OS that I am extremely, intimately familiar with, having learned just about all of its quirks and tricks. Plus, Linksys’ driver CD supports 98, I can get mass storage drivers working very nicely, and basically I wonder why I didn’t just load Win98 on it in the first place. Since, well, that’s essentially what the darned thing came with to start with!

Mal already got down to the nitty gritty of the Dell Mini 12, something of an in-between as far as laptops go: it’s not quite large or powerful enough to be a full-on desktop replacement, but it’s not exactly small enough to be considered a netbook or ultra-mobile PC. The thing is less than half an inch thick, weighs less than a paperback novel, and actually performs better than my current laptop, an HP Pavilion N5170.

The Mini 12 isn’t really considered a gaming machine, yet it holds its own on more than a few applications. This particular Mini came loaded with Ubuntu Linux, evidently quickly replaced with the Windows 7 RC, which as predicted, runs significantly better than my ill-fated and ill-advised attempt at emulating it via Virtual PC (which, admittedly, would probably have gone better if I’d used VirtualBox or VMWare). Malachai mentions to me that the OS will probably also get replaced with Win XP or such. The Mini 12, jack of all OS’es, master of…some? Wonder if you could put Windows 2000, BeOS 5, OS/2 Warp 4, or most of all, Hackintosh the thing and make it run OS X Leopard?

I’m pretty satisfied with this thing and kind of want one of my own. (psst, give me some money, Adecco, so I might buy something!)

On a slightly more tech-ish note than my previous post:

I’ve just purchased a Netbook. I’d sworn to myself a long time ago that I would never purchase an underpowered, tiny-keyboarded little laptop. God was I wrong. The minute I picked this little thing up I was sold. It’s a Dell Mini 12. This thing is so light that I could carry it in a backpack and never even notice it. It weighs less than most of the books on my shelf. (Truthfully, I just weighed it by hand along with my desktop’s keyboard. The keyboard was heavier.) Currently, it’s running an RC version of Windows 7, but I’m not sure how long that will last. Probably only until the person I bought it off of gets me the Windows XP CD that it came with. Win7 is pretty and all, but it just ain’t great enough for me to keep on this underpowered little system. (Also quite truthfully, even with a 1.33GHz processor, and only 1Gb of RAM, this thing seems to scream. It starts in about 30 seconds, and most programs start up in only 3 or 4 seconds.) It has a great little wireless card that gets a better signal than just about anything else in the house, and a little webcam at the top of the screen.

Performance Overall: 8/10
Processor: 5/10
RAM: 6/10
Graphics: 5/10
HDD: 8/10 (For a netbook.)
Screen Size and Realestate: 8/10
Webcam: 8/10
Wireless: 10/10 (Amazing reception.)

Form Overall: 9/10
Size: 8/10
Ease of use/typing: 7/10
Weight: 10/10 (Light as a feather @ roughly 2 pounds.)
Stylings: 8/10 (A nice looking black-silver-white combination.)

Overall Thoughts: 8/10 (Definitely worth a look.)

Microsoft recently stuck an ISO image of the Windows 7 Release Candidate on their website – a 2-and-some gigabyte DVD designed to get consumer feedback. Well, I’m not going to be loading it as a permanent OS (not when it’s supposed to expire at about the time Win 7 is supposed to hit shelves), so instead I’ll be testing it out through Microsoft’s other neat free piece of software: Virtual PC. (Because I’m too lazy to get Sun VirtualBox.)

The installation did take a while longer than expected – probably because it’s emulated and only has 512 MB allocated to it – but seems smooth so far, with no real hiccups and very few points at which the user needs to make decisions. Might be good for unattended installs, but rather troubling for those of us that like options (me, in other words).

One thing that did rather trouble me about the installer: it’s almost ridiculously vague at telling you when things are happening. The install process is separated into these five steps:

Copying Windows files
Expanding Windows files (The only portion of the installer to have a percentage)
Installing features
Installing updates
Completing installation

About the most you’ll get to tell how long the install will take is the bar graph along the bottom of the screen, which only seems to move when a step is completed.

After about ten minutes’ worth of installing and restarts, the system begins to boot with “Setup is preparing your computer for first use”, which is always a good sign, especially when it comes with a neat little animated throbber. Once that’s finished – it’s off to set up my user account and settings. I spend a few minutes digging out the product key Microsoft gave me on the website. It rather troubles me that the keyboard input is a little laggy – I assume at this point that it’s just because there are no video card drivers installed. (What video card does Virtual PC emulate?)

Another hiccup occurs in setting up the network. I specify that this is a computer on a home network, and it spends a few minutes attempting to make a connection. Seems a little longer than most other Windows – but again, it might just be the emulator. Then we get to watch Windows “finalize” its settings. Nope, sorry Windows, your settings will not be final until I’m through picking at them. =P

(I notice at this point that the RC is in fact for Windows 7 Ultimate – which might account for the performance issues. Maybe I can turn all that extra crap off as soon as it finishes rebooting.)The system spends a nigh absurd amount of time setting up personalized settings for themes, Windows itself, and Windows Media Player (which I would have liked to ask that the installer not load on my system by default – good ol’ MS up to their same old tricks). The window that claims it’s setting up my “personalized” settings disappears – a sign of life, perhaps? Yep, I called it – the taskbar appears, with the Recycle Bin on the desktop and everything that goes with it.

Naturally, the first thing I do with a Windows install is tweak the hell out of it, so I hop into the Control Panel, namely the Display Properties so I can turn off all the extra Aero stuff and make this thing actually run decently. So far, MS’s claims of Windows 7 being faster than Vista are a little doubtful.

The Display Properties seems to take MS’s usual stance of “accessibility over proper terminology” – the Adjust Resolution tab is simply a series of radio buttons that adjusts font and icon sizes. The “Change Appearance” tab is where you can actually change your screen resolution and video settings, evidently forcing a minimum of 32-bit color.

Not finding the special effect switches I’m looking for, I jump to the Performance control panel. This lets me detect my system’s “Windows Experience” rating. If my time testing the Vista RC is any indication, it will likely get 1.0 on everything. Surprisingly, the performance analyzer detects right away that I am running inside a virtual machine and outright refuses to give me any performance rating whatsoever. So I just jump to the “Visual Effects” options and tell it to adjust for Best Performance. Ah, much better.

The new appearance of Windows 7’s taskbar is at first frightening, displaying icons twice as large and not differentiating between Quick Launch buttons and taskbar buttons. Opening the Taskbar properties and telling it to use small icons resets the taskbar behavior to its Windows 98+ behavior, of taskbar buttons with text labels and quick launch buttons being considered separately. However, I can’t seem to figure out how to disable the Quick Launch toolbar itself (a source of frustration for me, because I tend to accidentally click on the Quick Launch buttons).

Interestingly, the default Quick Launch buttons – Internet Explorer (puke), Windows Explorer (ehh…), and Windows Media Player (ugh) – all expand into their own taskbar buttons when their respective programs are running. Strange. What if the user wants to open more than one Explorer window?

Changing one of these settings causes the User Account Control to pop up. I can see that becoming a severe annoyance, so I turn that off at earliest convenience.

Upon actually starting to use Windows 7 for real programs – like Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Internet Explorer (though the latter’s status as a “real” program is debatable) – I find that Solitaire suffers from severe performance issues, as does Minesweeper, and Internet Explorer fails to load a page stored on the hard drive without Windows considering it an unresponsive program and attempting to close it.

In honest conclusion, I believe that while Windows 7 might supposedly run smoother than Vista, it certainly remains unusably slow and unstable while running in a virtualized system. Not that this really proves anything, but I’m rather hesitant to load this up natively!

This pearl of wisdom was once said to me: if you really want to learn how to do something in Linux, all you have to do is go into a Linux-centric IRC channel and shout, “Linux sucks because [insert issue here] and it works fine in Windows!” They might have been right. I just don’t have the balls to do it.

The issue in question is voice chat. I need to use Ventrilo – because it’s the only voice chat client Malachai is comfortable with – and there is no suitable version for Linux. Running the Windows version through Wine is also proving difficult, as it not only does not recognize my USB headset, but also fails to receive audio due to the codecs being missing.

Particularly telling is this post from UbuntuForums:

Not that I’m bitter, but I posted details of how to run the Windows client on Linux using Wine several times on their forums, only for it to be removed… repeatedly, and I just recieved abuse when I complained about it…

I also don’t see why the Linux forum on the Vent site is locked, or why a Linux client has been “Coming Soon” for almost 3 years.

IMHO, just use Teamspeak instead.

So yeah. One more reason why I can’t just leave my main computer booted into Linux all the time.

The Silver Machine lives again.

It took me all of half an hour to return Silvermachine, my deliberately-aged DOS rig, to a glory not seen since 1996. I had previously tried to install Windows 95 on it (chronicled in my last post, more or less) and basically totally blew it up.

Today, all it took was a freshly-burned copy of FreeDOS 1.0, a quick backup of the C drive (just moved all its contents to D, really), and then a nuke-and-reload. FreeDOS 1.0, with Windows 95 Service Pack 1. An easy-as-pie dual boot system.

“That’s it?” I asked myself. Well, I did have a system that could run Slam Tilt Pinball at 100% without any issues – but my more recent laptop can accomplish much the same feat. So I took it one step further, and rifled through Dad’s stash of old PC hardware. (He regrets hanging on to all that old stuff, but it’s saved my ass on several occasions now.)

The treasure was found: a Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, the same video card that got me through the days of Quake 2, Jedi Knight, and Tomb Raider.

It took virtually no effort to plug the thing in, alongside the Diamond Stealth 64 Video. Voodoo cards can’t render everything by themselves; they only render 3D. Everything else needs to be handled by a 2D card. The two cards are connected by a VGA crossover cable. It’s also possible to daisy-chain a second Voodoo 2 with another crossover cable, and enable a special driver setting for Scan-Line Interleave (SLI, before NVidia made it popular). Unfortunately for me, this requires me to have two identical 3Dfx Voodoo 2 cards (same brand and everything), which I don’t have. Admittedly, there are third-party drivers available that enable SLI to work between two different kinds of Voodoo 2 cards, but I didn’t feel like digging for a second card or messing with said drivers.

The card installed and the drivers in diagnostically working order, I needed something to test it with. The first thing I pulled out of my ever-increasing stack of “CD’s That Will Run On Silvermachine” was Tomb Raider 2.

I’ll go on record to state that I didn’t really like the Tomb Raider games back in the day. The more recent ones by Crystal Dynamics aren’t too bad, but I didn’t much like the originals. Though I was willing to forgive control issues and the fact that I got mauled by a tiger in the first level, over the sheer awesomeness that is Voodoo. (And the fact that TR2 only takes up a meg of disk space, as the whole thing is run off the CD-ROM. Since space is at a premium with only two 500 MB hard drives, this is a godsend.)

So, yeah – Silvermachine is rocking again, and do not mock the Voodoo.

I’ve screwed up another machine with the simple addition of an operating system.

SilverMachine, my retro DOS machine that I got for all of $30 from Craigslist, has been serving me well enough this past month or so. It’s a Pentium II running at 233 MHz, with 64 MB of RAM and all the hardware you’d expect out of a DOS machine of the era. Last night, I had the absolutely genius idea that I wanted to put Windows 95 on it.

Yep – that was a mistake.

Now I can only seem to boot Windows 95, can’t get to DOS mode unless I boot with absolutely nothing (i.e. no EMM, no CD-ROM, no sound), and Windows doesn’t get any sound or video. The system’s been turned into an aluminum brick, because I don’t know how to get rid of Windows 95 (or better, fix it to be a proper dual-boot system). I was so sure I did everything right, too! That’s what’s killing me!

In his previous post, Malachai more or less chronicled the process of my ill-fated attempt at installing Xubuntu on my aging laptop. What spurred me on to it? Well, partially it was due to Mal’s suggestion that I scrap the Win2K install and get something on it that’ll run better and support a wider variety of more stable programs – I don’t entirely disagree with it – but more than that, it’s because I’ve been running Ubuntu 8.10 on my main machine (dubbed Zeus) for several months now, and to make the understatement of the year, I love it.

I’ve been attempting to “get into” the world of Linux and open-source software for several years now. The first time I had heard of Linux was in 2001, when my brother had stumbled upon (not StumbleUpon) Linux.org, through which he found Mandrake Linux. A little non-destructive installation later, he was running Linux – though since neither of us had any idea how to work the thing, poor Bro had no network or sound drivers, effectively neutering his experience. When the time came to upgrade his machine, he opted to completely wipe the hard drive and just start from scratch on Windows 98. (We were difficult to please in regards to upgrading Windows, as Dad hadn’t had the best luck with Windows 2000 and we heard nothing but problems with XP at the time.)

It was about 2002 that I gave Linux a try myself, with the Topologi distro. Topologi was designed to operate out of a self-contained hard disk image left lying around on the C drive, and was supposed to be accessible through a boot loader, but strangely, this feature wouldn’t work in Windows 98, forcing me to boot it with a CD-ROM instead. Topologi ran well enough, but a lack of sound drivers made the experience a little boring for me, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to get help with the thing.

I goofed around with other various editions of Linux for the following years, mainly in enclosed environments like MS Virtual PC, VMWare Player, QEMU, and Sun VirtualBox.

Only around the turn of 2009 did I finally work up the deluded notion that I actually wanted to have a Linux install on Zeus. I cleared a little space and set aside about 10 gigabytes to stick Ubuntu 8.10 on the machine. While I did initially have some difficulties getting sound and video drivers to work, most of the onboard hardware on Zeus’s motherboard worked out of the box with Ubuntu, and the parts that didn’t were easy enough to install drivers for. I never did get my Sound Blaster X-Fi working properly, but that problem kind of took care of itself.

Now, with just a smidgen of help from Malachai and the folks at #mzx on EsperNet (round of applause for both, please), I’ve got Ubuntu running pretty much everything I do in Windows.

Well, except the games. That’s a rant for later though.