Martin Juhl's Blog

It finally arrived!! Last week the Beta-version of Left 4 Dead 2 arrived on Steam for Linux..

I (as well as many other gamers) have been waiting for months for this glorious game to hit the Linux platform.. Even though the game is now about 4 years old (released late 2009), the gameplay is still worth spending the £19.99 that Steam charges for this game, if you haven’t already purchased it for Windows..

Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) was the first game that Valve (the company behind Steam) ported to the Linux platform in the fall as a proof-of-concept.. but it took them more than half a year to get it ready for the Beta level..

Also the speed of the game as been increased from the Windows Direct3D implementation, so former Windows users will get a performance boost for those FPS-hungry types out there…

I think this is a big step towards more Linux games and this together with nVidia’s decision to offer support for their Optimus chipset, tells me that hardware companies as well as the gaming industry has finally accepted that gaming on Linux is a reality, and not something they want to miss out on..

Happy Zombie-slaying out there!!!

In November, the game-deployment-platform Steam, launched their closed Beta for Linux…

Just before Christmas the Beta was opened up to the Public…

And I must say, that I’m impressed.. It’s working great…

Right now “only” 57 games are available for Linux, see here, But more are arriving every week..

The only free game right now is Team Fortress 2, but a lot of the other games here are pretty cheap.. And I don’t mind spending a little money on games if they are worth it…

Steam can be downloaded here for Ubuntu, and should be convertable to other distros by just unpacking the file..

Happy gaming everyone…

Hi all

Just wanted to share some good experience, and I hope that this info will help some of you..

I just reinstalled my primary gaming machine from Windows 7 to Kubuntu.. Have had two seperate machines (1 windows and 1 linux) for years, but since the release of the Steam beta, I’m now convinced that I can use Linux on the primary one…

Primary computer:
Dell Precision 490
2x Quad 2.66 GHz Xeon processors
16 GB Ram
nVidia GTX 560 TI

I installed Diablo 3 by creating a wine bottle with:

WINEPREFIX=<bottle path> WINEARCH=win32 winecfg

then installed:

WINEPREFIX=<bottle path> WINEARCH=win32 winetricks vcrun2008

and Diablo:

WINEPREFIX=<bottle path> WINEARCH=win32 wine <diablo installer>

After waiting for the installer to download and install, the game started fine, but after entering a game, I noticed that the performance was horrible.. about 10 fps…

I fooled around with all kinds of wine and nvidia tweak settings, as well as taskset for locking the game to one physical CPU… this only gave me a few extra frames…

I then noticed that when disabling window effects in KDE (Shift+Alt+F12), I got a HUGE performance boost…

Now I’m running at about 40-70 fps, with all effects maxed…

On windows I have had alot of problems with microstuttering on Diablo, but I seems to have completely vanished on Kubuntu…

Happy gaming everyone…

I have been using XBMC and MythBox (http://code.google.com/p/mythbox/) as a frontend for MythTV Backend for quite a while now, and because MythBox doesn’t support MythTV 0.25, I have been stuck on the old 0.24 branch…

But now some of the guys over at the MythBox community has found a solution.. This requires some patching of XBMC, and a speciel version of MythBox.. all descriped here.

I have eased up this process a little by rebuilding the XBMC version bundled with Ubuntu 12.04 with the 0.25 changes.. this version is now available here:

https://launchpad.net/~mj-casalogic/+archive/xbmc-mythbox

Easy step-by-step guide on howto install:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mj-casalogic/xbmc-mythbox

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install xbmc

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/mitchcapper/mythbox.git

mv -f ~/.xbmc/addons/script.mythbox ~  # or just rm -rf
ln -s ~/mythbox ~/.xbmc/addons/script.mythbox

and that should be it... 

Happy TV watching...

For years and years I (as many others) have waited for Diablo 3. And now it’s finally here!!

For all gaming Linux people, one of the biggest excitements about new games is if they will run under Wine.

And Diablo 3 does.. Almost…

There are still some patching which haven’t (yet) been merged into standard wine, but besides of that it really runs well.

If you want to follow the way I run Diablo 3 on my Alienware X11M, here it goes:

Continue reading

Hi all..

Just wanted to write a few words..

First of all, thanks for all the support and the great feedback I’ve had over the last 7-8 months.. It has really been a ride..

Over the last few month my job situation has changed, I’m a Consultant and right now I’m at a place where I don’t have as much spare time as I used to have.. mainly caused by longer transport times..

So for the next 3-4 months there probably will be very limited support and probably no updates to ironhide…

I will be back though, and hopefully even stronger than before..

In the meantime, please help each other out (as you are doing) or check out TBP (The Bumblebee Project).. The guys over there are doing some great work, so go check it out..

Also just to clarify.. I haven’t got anything to do with the Bumblebee project anymore (expect for providing the original solution)… But we might merge again in the future… only time will tell..

Again.. Thanks for your support, and you’ll hear from me again in May….

/Martin

Yesterday I moved from Natty to Oneiric. I know that some users are already running Ironhide on Oneiric, but was still a little excited to how easy/hard the process would be.

It turned out to be an pretty easy job.. but still not without problems.. those problem where not caused by ironhide though, but by a change to udev, or rather to the folder structure of /var/run..

The /var/run directory has been moved to /run and /var/lock to /run/lock.. Either the Ubuntu people forgot this in their update scripts, or something didn’t go as planned.

When rebooting after the upgrade, I was stuck at the Ubuntu splash-screen. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong.. but here’s a quick howto.. I guess you could do this before rebooting.. but else reboot in recovery mode afterwards (holding Shift to get into the Grub boot menu) and select remount the root partition. After that, drop to a command prompt.

mkdir -p /run/lock
mv /var/run/* /run/
mv /var/lock/* /run/lock/
rm -rf “/var/run”
rm -rf “/var/lock”
ln -s /run /var/run
ln -s /run/lock /var/lock

reboot

After that I had to re-add the ironhide ppa:

apt-add-repository ppa:mj-casalogic/ironhide

and rerun ironhide-configuration, to get graphics running…

Everything else seems to work fine…

Today (night) I finally got bumblebee packaged into a Ubuntu Launchpad PPA. Something that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time now… At the same time I have introduced a new installer/configuration utillity. Basically with the same functionality, but it has been cleaned up and should be much easier to use.

Now what does that mean?? For ordinary users, that means that all the installation process should be a lot easier now for Ubuntu-based distributions.

All you have to do is run the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mj-casalogic/bumblebee

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install bumblebee

Does it get any easier???

I’ve moved the version of bumblebee in the PPA to version 2.0, to indicate that this really is a major step forward..

Thanks to all for your feedback, I know that you haven’t heard much from me for the last two weeks…

So now it’s back to fixing bugs, but from now on, i’ll focus on fixing the bugs in PPA version.

The complete PPA is available here:

https://launchpad.net/~mj-casalogic/+archive/bumblebee/

Ok, ok…

I made a BIG bummer in the end of may… and apparently it has only been discovered now …

Commit – https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/commit/6cd6b2485668e8a87485cb34ca8a0a937e73f16d

That caused this problem:

https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/commit/a047be85247755cdbe0acce6f1dafc8beb84f2ac

Again I’m sorry that I didn’t give myself the time to test the code completely, but working on bumblebee in the middle of the night and working “real” work in the days, doesn’t always gives the best results.. but I’m trying my best.. which I think people understand…

The positive thing here is how many people are active in the bumblebee community and that bumblebee have gotten even more attention:

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/i1c0p/oh_fuck/

Bumblebee was included in “This week in linux”..