2141

Technology & Information / Re: HeartBleed - Why so long?

« on: April 10, 2014, 11:21:10 PM »

Are you saying that it shouldn't be a surprise that a know bug this serious should take so long to fix?

...

2142

Technology & Information / Re: HeartBleed - Why so long?

« on: April 10, 2014, 12:33:23 PM »

You ask those questions as if this surprises you.

2143

Status Notices / Scheduled maintenance, 2014-04-12

« on: April 09, 2014, 03:00:17 PM »

The forum and wiki will be going offline for about five minutes on 2014-04-12, between 07:00 and 07:15 UTC.

For convenience, this means:

EDT (USA east coast):
2014-04-12, 03:00-03:15

BST (UK):
2014-04-12, 08:00-08:15

AEST (Australia east coast):
2014-04-12, 17:00-17:15


The intent is to install security updates on the server which hosts the forum and wiki. A particularly critical security fix has just been released for the OpenSSL package, which is not used for the forum or wiki, but may impact other services on the server. These will be non-disruptive to functionality, as the server is running a stable OS release that gets critical fixes only.

2144

Technology & Information / Re: Linux in weird/awesome places

« on: April 01, 2014, 04:34:07 PM »

None of these is particularly weird, given how versatile Linux is as a platform.

2145

Technology & Information / Re: New home network hardware

« on: March 28, 2014, 01:04:41 PM »

I have installed OpenBSD 5.4 on my new home router. Next up, I need to configure it to be a router.

2146

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Flat Earth Blog?

« on: March 28, 2014, 06:25:17 AM »

The homepage is made using blogging software called BlazeBlogger, which generates static HTML pages and so is very responsive to reads (which I think is ideal for an infrequently updated blog like ours would likely be). Anyone is welcome to submit posts to publish (currently the only way of doing so is to send them to me), although so far nobody has done so.

If there's enough interest, I'm happy to work on an interface for people to publish blog posts to the homepage themselves, but given the current lack of content it seems like it would be a waste of time.

2147

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 26, 2014, 07:02:42 PM »

It would be unusual to find a field without a sheep in it. Therefore all animals in fields are sheep.

Thanks for the obvious straw man. It's made it clear that you're trolling.

2148

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 26, 2014, 06:25:27 PM »

Evidence?

I could put in the effort to track down some numbers to post, but I don't care enough. Instead, I'll name a few projects that started as volunteer efforts and continue to be maintained in large part by volunteers: Linux, GNU, Debian, Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, Xfce, Mesa (a free OpenGL implementation). Any of these sound familiar?

Community != Volunteer

Communities are typically made up of a healthy mix of paid and volunteer developers. It would be highly unusual to find one lacking in volunteer effort.

2149

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 26, 2014, 04:52:09 PM »

Here's my experience:
The proprietary driver (legacy) was a pain to install.  Once in I found that steam games were visually faster but produced graphical glitches (flashing shadows, missing renders, etc..).
The open source drivers worked without glitches but produced noticeably visually slower rendering.  I think it was a 15fps difference. 

Sounds to me like the open-source driver is what needs optimising. The proprietary driver needs bug fixes.

I haven't actually tried the proprietary driver on my HD 6850, but I feel no need to, since the open-source one works perfectly well for my needs.

2150

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 26, 2014, 04:48:38 PM »

Sure there'll be the occasional hobbyists but they're not really what drives open source development. In my opinion.

Too bad your opinion doesn't correlate with reality.

Yes, there are open-source projects that are backed by companies, but there are also many successful open-source projects which are primarily community-driven. Both are significant sources of development effort, and neither should be underestimated.

So what's the model really?

Valve will take a cut of games they sell via SteamOS.

Paid developers will do a significant part of the work on SteamOS. They will be paid because they are games developers who sell games on SteamOS.

I never suggested that Valve would have to do no work at all, only that they would also benefit from the work of volunteers.

Game players will buy games on SteamOS.

A very small fraction of those game players will have the wit and know-how to make changes to source code. This is a volunteer coder.

I would imagine that most players on SteamOS won't want to fix bugs, as it's a commercial product targeted at gamers. This is irrelevant as long as SteamOS is based on Debian, and people who write code on Debian run Steam.

2151

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 26, 2014, 12:09:36 PM »

Make Money By Not Paying People. Ah the ethics of open source.

They're volunteers. If they didn't want to be writing code for free, they wouldn't be.

There's enough companies already releasing shit games safe in the knowledge that they're getting paid in return for free beta testing. I'm not sure how I feel if those beta testers get promoted into coders.

They're not getting promoted; open-source developers are already writing code for free. Make your proprietary games available for that platform, and you expose new bugs (such as the one I fixed recently). On Windows, you have to wait for Microsoft to do something about OS bugs, which they will only do if they have some financial incentive. On Linux, anyone can get the source and fix it, and someone will usually do so for free.

I know which platform I'd rather target.

1. Because open source drivers are written by people without direct access to the card's firmware and that makes things oh so much nicer.

This isn't a problem in the slightest if your card has a well-documented interface; unlike certain vendors which start with an "N", end with an "A" and have "VIDI" somewhere in the middle, which is why nouveau has precisely this problem and why I recommend AMD to people building Linux computers.

Have you actually tried the open-source AMD (or any other manufacturer that makes their hardware supportable) driver, or are you making the assumption that it's bad?

2. Valve has a fair bit of games and a lot of pull as a major software distribution service.  Its not unreasonable to see them convincing both AMD and NVidia to optimize their opengl drivers.  Especially when they throw around words like "half life 3".

Fair enough.

2152

Announcements / Re: Status update, March 2014

« on: March 25, 2014, 08:21:57 PM »

I got some time to work on FES things this month, though I'll confess to have been working on interesting things rather than getting the bug tracker sorted. Soon, I promise.

What I've been working on instead is breaking up the forum codebase. Our current git-based source tracking works well for making changes and deploying, but it has major shortcomings when it comes to maintaining those changes against newer versions of SMF, as I found when I tried playing around with SMF 2.1 alpha.

My solution is to separate logically distinct parts of our changes. I've already worked out which git commits apply to the core SMF code and converted those into a set of quilt patches, and created new git repositories (currently private, but they will be on GitHub once we start using them) for the two themes we're maintaining, which will be separate to our SMF patches. This has numerous benefits, including improving the reusability of our code and the maintainability of our patches.

The final piece of the puzzle is static assets. There are a small number of assets which need to live on the same host as SMF itself for one reason or another, which will be tracked in their own git repository (this will stay private, as it will additionally contain Settings.php with the database password -- not strictly an asset, but it can be treated as one for the purposes of distribution). The remaining assets, including all theme images and CSS, smileys and avatars, will then be outsourced to Amazon S3 and served via CloudFlare, improving page load times and reducing the load on the server.

I'd also like to say that pizaaplanet has been doing a spectacular job of maintaining both Tintagel's FES theme and the Christmas theme in CN. I hadn't realised just how much time he'd put into those until I separated our change history, and I noticed I've been focused on fixing and improving SMF itself. Almost all of the maintenance that has gone into the forum theme in the past four months is pizaaplanet's doing.

2153

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 25, 2014, 05:46:59 PM »

1. Better opengl drivers (proprietary)
This has already been done by valve.  Thanks valve!

Why do they need to be proprietary, and how has Valve been able to have any influence at all on what NVIDIA and AMD are putting into their drivers?

2154

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 25, 2014, 02:04:45 PM »

$ Sudo apt-get install attackclone
No command 'Sudo' found, did you mean:
 Command 'sudo' from package 'sudo-ldap' (universe)
 Command 'sudo' from package 'sudo' (main)
 Command 'udo' from package 'udo' (universe)
Sudo: command not found

If you don't have sudo, you have bigger issues.

He probably does have sudo.

Also, I don't see why anyone makes a big deal of whether Linux becomes a major gaming platform among existing Windows users. I know plenty of Linux users who keep a Windows desktop around for the sole reason that they like to play games. When enough games begin supporting Linux (and it is a when and not an if, given the current rate of adoption), they will be glad to be rid of Windows.

Couple the above with the fact that many Linux users are technical enough to fix bugs in the underlying software stack (such as the one I linked on the last page) and the fact that Linux is open-source, and you have an immensely powerful platform for Valve to create a console supported in part by volunteers they don't have to pay. What sane for-profit company wouldn't jump at the chance? It seems to me that Valve are in agreement with me on this one.

If Windows remains the dominant PC gaming platform but Valve continue to support Linux because they want to make a console out of it, who really cares? I sure as hell don't; I can keep using the superior features of Linux and play all my games without having to reboot into Windows. It doesn't matter to me if other people prefer to stick with Windows.

Linux is successful in every way that matters: it's useful to the people who use it in a way that most operating systems could never be. People who complain about its usability either have a different use case that it doesn't fit, or aren't giving it a fair chance; and people who continually spread hype about this year being "the year of Linux on the desktop" seem to be missing the fact that Linux has been usable on the desktop for years.

On behalf of Linux users everywhere: We don't care if you don't like it; we do.

2155

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 25, 2014, 05:12:36 AM »

The big issue here is: customers don't give a crap if it's your fault or not. If what they're trying to do doesn't work, they'll just try something else. And in case of your average computer user, that something else won't be a different Linux distro. It'll be ¬Linux.

This is probably why Valve are making SteamOS, so that the average computer user has minimal thinking required.

2156

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 25, 2014, 05:04:04 AM »

I don't think it's fair to call me a noob.
I got it to work.
I ran a few games on steam.

The way in which you got it to work has a small chance of introducing malware on your system, unless you verified that the RPM was signed by a trusted key first. It's also likely to break if you ever upgrade your system.

My problem is that most games I play are only optimized for Windows and not Linux.  And the open source drivers for Linux (which are stable) are not optimized as well as the proprietary drivers.  But the proprietary drivers are not as stable for the games.

Do you have a source for any of this information?

If I can't download Steam on Linux, double click an executable, and have it just work, then I won't use it on Linux, and neither will millions of other gamers.

But you can do that. Lorddave was trying to do so on a release unsupported by Steam. Your argument is kind of like saying that Windows isn't usable because I can't download and run a Windows 8-only program on Windows XP.

2157

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 24, 2014, 05:50:46 AM »

This thread is a monument to why no sane person would use Linux as a gaming platform.

Why, because Lord Dave is a noob and software developers aren't perfect?

What Linux kernel does Debian stable use?  When was this kernel released?

Who said anything about Debian stable?

2158

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 23, 2014, 06:52:05 PM »

Yes, because Debian is so quick about implementing fixes.

Having submitted several patches to Debian before, I can assure you that yes, they are. 6 to 8 weeks is pretty quick considering it's both a volunteer project and the largest distribution of free software in existence.

2159

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 23, 2014, 06:40:35 PM »

Debian might implement your fix in 6 to 8 years.

More like 6 to 8 weeks at most, but nice try.

2160

Technology & Information / Re: Steam on Linux

« on: March 23, 2014, 05:40:14 PM »

I just fixed a bug in Debian that prevented me from playing FTL:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742433

Now that it's fixed, I will proceed to play FTL on Linux. And so can you!