Firefox 3.1(alpha) + Sun Java 1.6u10 (ea) + Flash 20080702(beta)
+
Linux Kernel 2.6.26(-helium0)
+
SMPlayer :-)

Ok, I have been lazy to write another log, though quite a few things to write about. But this might be some use to those like me who think firefox 3.0 has been a bit unstable, especially with flash. And since I am lazy to jot things again, here is the link to my post for the same in gentoo forums.

Other things, linux kernel 2.6.26 has been released recently and here is my 2.6.26-helium0 patch and precompiled kernel as usual. Nothing awesome to talk about. Have been happy with 2.6.24. Of course better driver support and so far feels nice(r).

And offlate, I have been getting annoyed with VLC. In their 0.9.0 beta, they have dropped support for WxGTK and moved over to QT4. While I have been trying to stick to pure QT3, looks that time has come to have it. But more annoying has been the broken drag-n-drop support and do-not-use-as-root crib. So I have been looking for a nice frontend to MPlayer, especially with nice drag-n-drop and playlist support. And SMPlayer it is. Its QT4, but it was worth it :). Have been very very pleased with it so far. Even the windows version is awesome. Do try out this nice player and chances are, this will become your default player, like mine.

Zero Day Game Over :o

Long story short, one word description - portal.

It was saturday night 3am. That usual jobless feeling. Got bored of compiling kernel and watching youtube videos and boring cricket match. (Btw, I still can't stop myself from laughing at this frog kick video, more on that topic sometime later.) Then came the idea of gaming. And usually, a spell of quake3 or doom3 or quake4 is enough to satisfy an ordinary saturday. If not, I am forced to reboot my machine to windows and play Test Drive Unlimited (TDU), but after about 4 months, I think I had enough of it. Time for something new. Time for Aperture Science. Time for Portal. I have been charmed by this game since december 2007, but I was stopped from getting it by a number of reasons. The main reason was that my last game (TDU) took me 4 months to complete and a couple of contests were really long and took a toll, and so I didn't want to start another episode of beating around the bush. Second reason was that portal is available for online download only by steam and I had heard of lots of concerns about it. Many of them were my own self-created myths. Especially that you can't play when offline and it downloads game content dynamically as and when you need it and one is never sure if you have the entire game content. But on the other hand, I hate the idea of buying game in a box. The shipping time and effort and blah. But yesterday I decided to do some googling on steam and realized its pretty cool. I got adventurous and decided to take the plunge. And the icing on the cake. Last week, I got an ethernet cable for free for my notebook. So goodbye wireless. Any download is now ~11 MB/s on a good day from any page (I won't get into my tales of downloading debian dvd's in 10 minutes on my workstation. Wireless anyway gives a kool 2.1 MB/s btw. PS : I didn't know that my notebook has gigabit ethernet :o.) Installed and set up steam, purchased and downloaded the game online (it took just about 10 minutes to download about 4 gigs of game files :D). Thats it, it was just an hour between the itch and gameplay. Instant karma :D.

I don't want to review this game. In short, its the coolest game I have ever played. Perhaps the geekiest game a geek could ever get. Just one weapon and its the philosopher's stone. Cleanest implementation of teleportation. No amount of BFG9000's (which is anyway a pseud hammer) or rocket launchers (artful, but still caveman kinds :p) can substitute this. Its a small cute game. As the title suggests, it just took me less than a day to complete. I started at 4 am saturday night/ sunday morning and was in 16/19 stage by morning 8 am. Woke up at 2pm sunday afternoon to finish the rest of it by 6pm evening and writing this blog now. I had a real rough time with the levels 18 and 19. I took about an hour to finish level 18, though the least time is a genius 58 seconds :o. And even though I have completed all levels, officially I have just secured 1/14 achievements, a paltry 14% :p. Who cares. I phinished it. But I am sure I'll play it again and again and again. I think its possible to finish the entire game in an hour or two if already completed once.

And after a long time since doom3, I have got those heebie-jeebie's. That eerie voice of the AI - GLaDOS might leave some psychological scars for quite some time :). Do listen to the final credits song (best enjoyed after completing the savage game :p).

A few final words to say about steam and online game purchase and download in general. I must say I am really impressed by steam. First off, it downloads the complete game to latest update in one shot. So you do have the entire game content. You can play off line. Best of all, the games are binded with your steam account and not the machine hardware. So you are free to download, install and play the game on any machine with your account. No hassles of keys and activation. And its fool proof. (Unless your acct has been cracked for some reason ;). This usual issue of game binded with hardware had plagued me last time with TDU. The publisher was Atari. I changed by machine a couple of times and my activation got borked. I had called their tech support (digital river) and they manually activated it several times for me. I was pretty impressed by their support, because I had heard tons of rant and flaming about such issues on various forums. At the end of the day, just one thing to say - the system works, just follow the guidelines. Disclaimer : Experiences may widely differ. PS : Things are easy when you have a nice network and phone connection (fill in the blanks ;).

Deep thought :p

God ... is just an auxillary random variable :D.

Try this at home ;)

Kidding :). Its the workstation/server stable kernel 2.6.24. And I decided to make another addition to my helium sources - 2.6.24-helium1. I could have sticked to zen-sources, but wanted to be as close to vanilla as possible (in vanilla I trust ;) with the features I need, namely a bunch of filesystems like reiser4 (I don't use it), unionfs, aufs and squashfs (I do use them for my livedisks) and stuff like fbcondecor (aka fbsplash) and tux_on_ice (aka suspend2/hibernate). Without blabbering any more, here is the patchset and pre-compiled sources.

A few more words. This is a really good kernel. Rock stable. And equally fast. Looks that the CFS cpu-scheduler is finally complete. I always run a server kernel (100 hz dyn ticks, no pre-empt) and still its responsive enough to my taste. This is the first time I am using slub allocator and also 4K stacks. The only thing that had stopped me from using 4k stacks earlier was ndiswrapper, but it turned out that it worked fine for me even with that. In fact, on a better note, I don't require ndiswrapper anymore, because my bcm4311 wireless chip got a new driver - the b43 driver. Looks that the new mac80211 stack is finally mature. Although I doubt that the iwl3945/4965 are upto the same level. (I had a somewhat difficult time with the ipw3945 on my old notebook with anything other than the pseudo-binary ipw3945-1.2.0 drivers.) None the less, ndiswrapper is a lifesaver (especially for freebsd guys :p). One thing I didn't really checkout though was the power saving goodies in this kernel (guess its a marginal improvement ;). Also a special mention for the ever-improving alsa. Parallely, the nvidia-drivers 169.09 also got out, so another jewel in the crown. Nice day :D.

Birthday Kernel :)

Here's a little delayed account of the b'day kernel (and new gentoo plans ;). First a little background and nostalgia (the boring irreleavant part :p). Although I keep track of the linux kernel development in general, I usually jump in only into the stable kernel releases, i.e., the even numbered ones. I guess there are roughly two stable (by which I mean ultra stable) kernel releases a year, so I get busy roughly once every 6 months. The last time was back in june 2007, when 2.6.22 was in -rc (release_candidate, > beta) stage. Actually, even though I have used almost every kernel since 2.6.10 back from my undergrad days (many thanks to Deepak_Iyer aka PLD and Chetan_Reddy back in IITM whom I had really pestered during my initial days), the salvation was finally in 2.6.22. A mini salvation was the 2.6.14-nitro days (there used to be a nitro patchset to the vanilla kernel), but alas it didn't last long :(. 2.6.16 (~june 2006) was pretty good, but then came new hardware, and so 2.6.18 was necessary. I must say 2.6.18 - 2.6.21 was a real rough road. In fact, 2.6.19 didn't even boot up on my athlon64x2 workstation with a via (k8t890) chipset mobo. 2.6.20 (~january 2007) was woeful and probably a disgrace for an even numbered kernel release. It at least managed to boot clean, but there were these occasional hardlocks which were like a nightmare. Frustrated, I was forced to fiddle with another odd numbered release, 2.6.21 (~march 2007). But the bad run continued. In the end, I figured out it was something with my hardware, and 'nolapic' boot parameter resolved most issues (though it hit me a bit on power saving, but it was my workstation after all ;). I must say, it was almost the worst time of my life with linux kernels - that early part of 2007. All this time fortunately, my old notebook (hp dv5000t) was pretty fine with those kernels.

Then came the ray of hope in june 2007 - the 2.6.22 kernel. It was in -rc stages when I had tried 2.6.22-rc4. It was beautiful. Everything worked like a charm. I was so impressed that I even created a patchset (to include all the extra features I use, not present in vanilla) to it - called helium-sources. (<-- ps : if you happen to go this gentoo forums thread, the first guy who replied to this thread was vipernicus, who was one of the pillars of the gentoo forums community, and sadly he expired sometime in october last year :|. Btw, helium-sources was mainly created out of individual broken-out patches from various other contemporary sources, namely Wainkoko's kamikaze-sources.) Eventually, it was such a wonderful kernel to become that I had decided back then, that I won't touch a new linux kernel unless something really needed to be fixed. Beautiful life since then. Six months on, its january 2008. That resolution was pretty successful - I didn't even touch the next odd numbered release 2.6.23 (partly because of the notorious feeling about odd releases and more because of the hell I saw with 2.6.19 and 2.6.21). But there was that itch finally. Six months is too long for me to resist the kernel temptation. Although everything was working, the spark was ignited when the guys who used to maintain two nice patchsets - kamikaze and skunk sources decided to make it one big and do it proper - zen sources was the name. (Btw, it has a pleasantly surprising logo - 'om', instead of the penguin, though I prefer the penguin ;). And by doing it proper, I meant that they established a machinery to maintain it properly - by creating a git repository. And the 2.6.24-rc releases were praised so much that I jumped straight in. My first attempt was a krash - 2.6.24-rc4-zen0 didn't even boot on any of my machines. I decided to stay quiet till it was officially released. But I was so bored to death during holidays that I tried 2.6.24-rc6-zen1 and it was a charm. Thats it, hooked. The birthday kernel was in fact 2.6.24-rc7-zen0. Truly a bliss. I believe that 2.6.24 will mature to a very nice stable kernel, just like 2.6.22. Future is bright :D.

For those interested, they can visit the zen-sources link directly for the kernel patchsets (one needs to use git), or for the impatient, here's the patch and precompiled kernel directly from me - http://hirakendu.mooo.com/zen-sources-stuff/20080107/.

Disclaimer : This stuff is strictly for those who are into compiling custom kernels for themselves. Don't try this at work. Try this at home :D. Expert supervision is advised. A small howto from me about compiling a custom kernel is here.

And for those who want to know the dreamland I was (am?) in for last 6 months, here's my last stable helium sources release - 2.6.22-helium9-r6 : patch, precompiled and readme's. PS - Its really really stable - like 'the wall' :D.

Meanwhile, apart from the kernel resolution back in june 2007, I had also decided that I would stick on to my current gentoo 2007.0 compilation for at least a year (and preferably as long as I can - may be 3 years :o ? :p). As with kernel, everything is picture perfect with this current gentoo system too. Be it gcc-4.1.2, glibc-2.5, xorg-7.2 or kde-3.5.7 - it seems like utopia. So much that I want this moment to last forever :p. But then evil lurks at every korner :D. In 6 months, there is gcc-4.2.2, glibc-2.7, xorg-7.3 and kde-3.5.8. In early december, I was almost sure (w.p.1 :p) that I was gonna compile a fresh gentoo system in winter holidays. But eventually, I stopped because of two reaosns - I wanted 2.6.24 stable to be released by then. And also xorg-7.3 is pretty buggy, mainly xorg-server-1.4.0 that is. So I wanted to wait till xorg-server-1.4.1. Well, both didn't happen even as I write this today :(. The nicer part - kde 4.0.0 has been released today. Although throughout the kde 4 hype in late last year, my stance was not to use kde4 till at least kde 4.1 is released. After all, its a new beast altogether and everything is already picture perfect in kde 3.5.8, and then of course the stability concerns. But as it turns out, not only is kde 4 aesthetically superior (which I am least bothered about), its faster and technically and functionally superior too. And its already looking pretty stable. All these factors are brewing into evil plans for the spring break :D. For the moment, here is my current gentoo (its a live_dvd, also installable), named neon.

Here is a quick way to get sopcast and gui running on linux, using sopcast backend and a gtk2-frontend called gsopcast. Get this script (self-explanatory howto) sopcast-install.sh :

#!/bin/bash
mkdir -p sopcast-install-downloads
cd sopcast-install-downloads
## fetch and install sopcast from sopcast website :
wget http://download.sopcast.com/download/sp-auth.tgz
tar -xvzf sp-auth.tgz -C /opt/
ln -s /opt/sp-auth/sp-sc-auth /usr/local/bin/
ln -s /opt/sp-auth/sp-so-auth /usr/local/bin/
ln -s /opt/sp-auth/sp-sc-auth /usr/local/bin/sp-sc
## fetch and install gsopcast :
svn checkout http://gsopcast.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/gsopcast-read-only
cd gsopcast-read-only/
./autogen.sh
make
make install

and run it as root. It assumes that one has libstdc++ (v3.3? aka 5?? or its virtual package) and svn installed. Also uses mplayer for playing (can change that in config to use vlc / xine etc). Thats it. Start it as 'gsopcast' from terminal or from multimedia menu and then search, launch, play :). Here is a screenshot :

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