micolous.id.au

I installed MSN Messenger 7.0. What a mistake. It turns out it sucks. Though I am impressed that there is a “personal message”, so finally annoying people who like to have meaningless display names have somewhere to put them. Too bad that not everyone has installed it, or just still has to be annoying and use them.

There seems to be more cruft, with built in offers to pay for premade avatars and other junk. Nudges and Winks bring all the junk that is in Messenger Plus to regular folk for constant overuse and misuse. Maybe we just want a messenger program, with no stupid things like Flash animations in messages with sound, and without having people poke you contstantly. Maybe if you’re not responding to messages you’re actually away or just don’t want to be bugged.

Then there’s a really crappy review of Windows “we can’t correctly name the amd64 architecture” Edition. They note all the fun issues of running an operating system on a non-i386, like, shock horror: iTunes’ iPod driver only runs on i386 as
it is a kernel module compiled for i386, lolz, and not amd64. They also had some very poor benchmarking as they forgot that just because you run a 64-bit OS doesn’t mean that your existing 32-bit applications will run any faster. They use this as a gauge that performance will tottally suck in everything.

I’ll just stick to Linux anyway thanks. They were here first, and there seems to be very few applications that actually are compiled native. It seems that Windows has the problems Linux has with some vendors who only support i386. However due to Windows closed source nature, those problems are multiplied by 100, as there’s no option of a recompile and a little patching.

</bitching>

World of Warcraft is addictive, and I’ve fixed some stuff where my blog would report to be German for some reason. Also Matty finally started his blog…

Guten tag, alles!

This is what I’m guessing as chapter one of my amd64 fun. I finally have my Shuttle SN95G5, and I’m fairly happy with it after a shaky start. These things are extremely fussy about RAM, and sometimes need a little convincing. Otherwise they are an expensive doorstop with a very loud fan! I finally got it to boot after swapping some RAM around, and installed the Ubuntu Hoary Release Candidate for amd64.

The first of my problems was that the mouse was moving very chunky, and smoothly. Games were also running chunky. Apparently this is due to the network card, and a faulty BIOS. So until Shuttle release an update, I discovered a simple work around – remove the network status applet from the panel, as well as other network monitoring programs, and disable syslog. ifconfig won’t return the number of packets and bytes sent across the interface (it makes the module return
the error), so you can’t brag about how much you can l33ch off a network with gigabit ethernet

Next up is Unreal Tournament 2004. I have a nice installed copy of the Linux x86 version, and I discovered there is a binary called ut2004-bin-linux-amd64 in the System directory of ut2004. There is a problem with libSDL-1.2.so.0, where the copy that comes with ut2004 doesn’t work (after all, it’s a Linux x86 library). So I converted it into an amd64 install by creating a symlink to my system-installed copy in /usr/lib/. I also patched the ut2004 startup script so that you could easily move one install of UT2004 between x86 and amd64. It won’t autodetect the arch, however… you still need to set it. Because the patch is small, I’ll include it in the post:

--- ut2004~     2005-04-08 19:25:01.000000000 +0930
+++ ut2004      2005-04-08 19:25:01.000000000 +0930
@@ -1,10 +1,13 @@
 #!/bin/sh
 #
-# ut2004 startup script
+# ut2004 startup script - HACKED FOR AMD64
 #

 # Function to find the real directory a program resides in.
 # Feb. 17, 2000 - Sam Lantinga, Loki Entertainment Software
+
+UT2004BIN="ut2004-bin-linux-amd64"
+
 FindPath()
 {
     fullpath="`echo $1 | grep /`"
@@ -43,12 +46,12 @@
 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

 # Let's boogie!
-if [ -x "${UT2004_DATA_PATH}/ut2004-bin" ]
+if [ -x "${UT2004_DATA_PATH}/${UT2004BIN}" ]
 then
        cd "${UT2004_DATA_PATH}/"
-       exec "./ut2004-bin" $*
+       exec "./${UT2004BIN}" $*
 fi
-echo "Couldn't run UT2004 (ut2004-bin). Is UT2004_DATA_PATH set?"
+echo "Couldn't run UT2004 (${UT2004BIN}). Is UT2004_DATA_PATH set?"
 exit 1

 # end of ut2004 ...