After some hesitation, I have deployed Prosilver Special Edition on the Wesnoth.org forums, with multiple changes meant to make it more similar to mainline Prosilver in terms of layout. Wesnoth’s custom Prosilver changes have also been applied on our copy of Prosilver SE.

In fact, Prosilver SE as used in Wesnoth.org depends completely on the main Prosilver template rather than its own partial template set, and it also replaces the default Prosilver theme/stylesheets and imagesets, since otherwise very few people would choose to use it. Besides, OAB.

Of course, further changes are not unlikely to occur, depending both on the users’ feedback and my own testing experiences.

Most people who frequented phpBB 2 forums have met the Subsilver theme at some point. Wesnoth’s community is not the exception, and the phpBB 3 switch completed by cycholka/Mist in March 2008 during the third-to-last host migration involved switching everyone to Subsilver2, which is the last incarnation of the good old Subsilver. Most of us Wesnoth forumers have become accustomed to the cleanness, quirks and old-school feel of Subsilver2.

However, that will eventually change.

Maintaining patches for mods affecting the forum user and moderator front-ends involves editing three template sets, which are Prosilver (phpBB 3’s new built-in and default style), Subsilver2 and AcidTech, which is Subsilver2-based with some essential layout differences. There are even some mods that don’t provide MODX instructions for Subsilver2, since it’s not essential for approval in the official modifications database to include support for this style that’s most likely going to be dropped in future phpBB release series.

If you take a look at my Projects section you’ll also notice that I’ve needed to write a couple of Subsilver2 hacks in the past to add minor functionality that’s present in the official phpBB 3 “Olympus” forum theme by default. There’s a third custom change in my tree, corresponding to the Quick Reply editor toggle button.

Finally, now that I have a 2 TiB external hard disk drive, I can start making regular, complete backups of my dear laptop. With rsnapshot fully setup after experimenting for a while using Bluecore’s own internal hard disk as target, a full copy of all major filesystems, and a partial copy of my /home — filtering useless crap for now, to avoid including caches and such — as of this writing the system is being backed up. Considering that it resides within a 250 GiB hard disk, of which 28 GiB are allocated for the preinstalled copy of Windows Vista, this couldn’t have been a better investment.

The next logical step is backing up Greycore and Blackcore’s hard disk contents, in particular the latter since its hard disk is already dying, and many blocks near the end of the drive are unusable.

After finishing Bluecore’s backup, I intend to send it to technical support if possible, to solve the issues with the noisy fan, partially stuck touchpad buttons, excess of dirt and lint inside the case and beneath the keyboard, loose screen panel articulation, … so yeah. And I also need a new, better battery (although the current one got better!). I’d probably consider just replacing the whole damn thing, if it weren’t that I already feel comfortable using it, and that we recently invested money on a laptop for my father — which happens to be completely useless, but whatever.

Besides, I didn’t buy an extra 2 GiB RAM module to throw it away with the laptop.

(Granted, I could just use Bluecore as a backup laptop by itself, but really, it’s hard to get rid of it since I’ve had better experiences with it than Greycore, despite all the problems derived from using AMD/ATI hardware.)

I’m also considering relocating and resizing partitions since my current configuration isn’t really optimal anymore, now that I have an use for those 250 GiB.

Not very long ago, I had a rather frightening experience that made me reconsider my testing practices of the increasingly popular Kernel Modesetting (KMS) support for various ATI Radeon chipsets on Linux. While I couldn’t determine exactly what happened back then, I’ve now got another similar story of KMS-related bugs that can cause permanent damage to your hardware.

My Wesnoth-UMC-Dev collaborator and personal friend of mine, Espreon, owns a Dell Inspiron e1705 laptop which ships with an ATI Mobility Radeon x1400 graphics controller. This is in contrast to my HP Pavilion dv5-1132la notebook (bluecore) which has an ATI Radeon HD 3200 (RS780-based) controller.

Espreon’s laptop is now damaged and unusable after some minor testing of KMS + Gallium3D drivers. The screen simply doesn’t work anymore.

I feel the need to carefully and meticulously analyze our stories since the KMS-enabled Radeon drivers are slowly becoming a standard amongst X.org-based Unix distributions including Debian GNU/Linux — Squeeze (6.0) is going to ship with a configuration apt for running on Radeon controllers in KMS operation without any user intervention. This is not to be unexpected since the KMS stack is clearly superior in terms of security and stability to the Xfree86/X.org based device drivers since it doesn’t require such things like making the X server’s executable setuid root, and allowing direct access to the host’s memory, video BIOS, etc. from a userland application.

But, is it really worth the risk? Is KMS really well-tested and safe enough to feature in stable mainline Linux kernels and in major general-purpose system distributions such as Debian? Let’s take a look at our personal experiences with the new graphics subsystem and drivers which are due to become mainstream around the end of this year.

I have just rebooted from a 2.6.35 kernel to 2.6.34.2 in order to have the ability to hibernate bluecore with Tux-on-Ice again. However, the laptop acted up after the warm reboot as a consequence of running Linux in KMS operation mode, apparently. The greatest sign of doom: the Giant Blinking Cursor of Doom.

It’s normal for these HP laptops to display the text-mode blinking cursor for a bit after the BIOS splash screen, right before transferring execution to the first available boot medium. The cursor’s size is similar to Linux’s or MS-DOS under a default configuration with any generic VGA-compatible video adapter. In this transition state, the bold-white cursor blinks a few times at the top-left corner of the empty black screen, before changing its color to the normal text terminal white when GNU GRUB takes over.

However, whenever the AMD ATI Catalyst drivers lock up the laptop and I perform a warm reboot using one of the Magic SysRq sequences, the laptop doesn’t get past the system initialization code and after the BIOS splash screen disappears, instead of the usual bright blinking cursor, an abnormally large and wide white blinking cursor appears as the computer gets stuck forever.

I had not seen this occur after running with the open-source KMS drivers before, but I guess it might indicate I own a faulty GPU or motherboard.

EDIT: now I have pictures — taken with my three years old cell phone — showing the GBCoD and the normal blinking cursor:

The Linux kernel 2.6.35 was released today, and I compiled and installed it before all the download links appeared on kernel.org’s front-page thanks to Akregator.

There hasn’t been an official release of Tux-On-Ice for this kernel version yet, but I still went and booted 2.6.35 with Radeon KMS support enabled by default. I should say that I don’t notice any performance improvements since the last time I tried this thing, and in particular, stencil buffers seem to be still unsupported by my Mesa/kernel drivers combination, which makes Frogatto fall back to using fading for level transitions, as opposed to the cool iris effect used otherwise.

(I might even bug the Mesa developers about the stencil buffer thing if I like KMS enough now...)

Nonetheless, the VSync support in the Radeon KMS driver, just like in 2.6.34, is much better than the crap AMD ATI's proprietary suite has to offer. Watching videos in VLC with no tearing at all is just wonderful.

It’s one of those moments where I can’t decide whether I want features, or quality. Right now KMS appears to offer more quality than UMSm if only because it has VSync at all, but as far as I can see, the UMS driver is more mature in terms of OpenGL features. Granted, I may give the AMD ATI Catalyst 10.7 drivers a try later now that the SuperTuxKart issue I mentioned before appears to be fixed according to their changelogs.

EDIT: only a few hours after, I decided to file a bug report for Mesa, now #29350. Let’s hope for the best!

In the past, I've seen many people from Wesnoth's user community and Development Team advocating the use and implementation of WML in Wesnoth and, potentially, other games.

Even I have participated in some debates over whether WML is good or bad for content developers. I have also expressed my opinions on topics such as the old, scrapped Python AI and the currently thriving embedded Lua support, all of this on IRC, usually in #wesnoth or #wesnoth-dev, and even #wesnoth-umc-dev.

I have got to admit that my personal opinions on programming languages have changed over time, mainly because I've learned from real experiences when maintaining or starting small to medium-sized projects built upon some of them. WML sort of counts as one of those since I'm the author and former maintainer of Invasion from the Unknown and, more recently, After the Storm. I have also worked on the WML events engine a bit implementing new features or fixing known and unknown bugs, including some I've found while developing my own WML content.

At this point, I think I am qualified for thoroughly examining the pros and cons of WML with a less partial point of view, so here's a rather lengthy review of both, despite the title of the article, which deliberately sounds like flamewar bait for the audience.

I just found out that Chromium (browser) has been in Debian experimental and Sid for a while.

I'm currently tracking Squeeze and pulling some packages from Experimental, in particular Iceweasel 3.6, which feels much more stable to me than its counterpart in Testing, version 3.5 — which will probably have to remain in the upcoming Stable release as explained by one of the package maintainers.

(Granted, I'm a fool who doesn't care about security because I don't visit unknown odd sites at all. If it weren't for this, you'd say I should not be pulling packages from Experimental, but I am, fully understanding the risks!)

Despite I can see other packages from Experimental in my package manager, including a localization package for Chromium, I can't see Chromium itself, which is really odd. I have Google Chrome installed and I pull it from Google's repository because…because it added itself to apt's sources after I installed it for trying it out last year — which unfortunately reeks of Internet Explorer's old “integration” thing that started with IE 4, frankly. I mean, why didn't it even ask me about adding the source? Is it modifying other parts of my system's configuration without my consent? What the hell, Google?

Rant aside, this is a strange coincidence, which could be related to a mirroring issue in any case, but I don't rule out the possibility that Chrome is somehow banning Chromium from my package manager. Alternatively my laptop might be possessed by some evil spirit that wants me to leave Debian's free-as-in-freedom packages for evil “Big Brother” software suites. Uncanny?

(For the Google lovers and haters in the audience: I'm perfectly fine with using Google stuff, mind you. My main email account is from Gmail, my preferred only search engine is Google's, I also use Google Maps, Google Earth, and this memory/method call profiling suite of sorts that Sirp recommended to me. I also use Google Translate and reCAPTCHA. So, no, I'm not really bothered by Google Chrome's additions, but I'm really mildly pissed off at their decision to change my package manager's sources without asking me through debconf or something.)

It's been really long since the last time I talked of my work on Wesnoth, so I figured it'd be a good idea to talk about one of our most mysterious projects that have involved a few artists from the community during the last month.

Long ago, Under the Burning Suns, quartex's campaign, was introduced to mainline. It caused some minor controversy and some later confusion as to whether or not there's a No Religion In Wesnoth policy. The latest answer to this matter stems from this older post, in which Sapient touches the subject.

That said, we are very soon going to step into dangerous territory with the UtBS-IftU-AtS-TSL campaigns continuity, which we also intend to establish as Wesnoth's canon as soon as we can. This is, Project Y.

SPOILERS ABOUND IN THIS ARTICLE for those who haven't played or finished Under the Burning Suns or Invasion from the Unknown. There may also be spoilers for the upcoming releases of After the Storm!

Also, note that this article will be much longer than the usual. Prepare to digest some plentiful doses of bad English over the next few hours minutes.

Sometimes people (especially Windows users) ask me what I use for some common task in Linux. These are my software preferences when working on various environments; your mileage will definitively vary.

For those who won't be following me on Twitter, or aren't following the relevant website closely, Frogatto's just been released for the three main platforms! Now we are only missing the Apple appstore approval, so soon this game and my levels will be available for mobile users so they can waste their time playing a colorful and pretty platformer no matter their location!

Just as planned.

After unsuccessfully trying the ATI Radeon Kernel-Modesetting driver with Linux 2.6.34, and reading about some performance comparisons with AMD/ATI's proprietary Catalyst drivers and the free Mesa DRI drivers, I decided to give AMD/ATI Catalyst (a.k.a. fglrx) another try.

When I decided to do that, fglrx 10.5 was in Debian's Testing, so I waited until the next day for fglrx 10.6 to enter Testing.

I've been using fglrx for the last 2:30 hours and haven't experienced any difficulties so far with OpenGL or Xv. Switching consoles works, suspend-to-RAM works, suspend-to-disk works, and I don't hear any buzzing from the screen, although I can't be very sure since the fan has been making very loud noises since around December last year. I have suddenly regained my faith in AMD.

There is one minor issue with Tux-On-Ice since it seems to run out of memory for drivers for the atomic copy step, probably due to fglrx. This causes TOI to try the same step twice or thrice before hibernating successfully ­— but solving this is most likely a matter of increasing CONFIG_TOI_DEFAULT_EXTRA_PAGES_ALLOWANCE (currently 2000) in the kernel config.

TuxOnIce debugging info:
- TuxOnIce core  : 3.1.1.1
- Kernel Version : 2.6.34-bluecore280-suspend2
- Compiler vers. : 4.4
- Attempt number : 2
- Parameters     : 0 667656 0 1 -2 5
- Overall expected compression percentage: 0.
- Compressor is 'lzf'.
  Compressed 1638621184 bytes into 554865401 (66 percent compression).
- Block I/O active.
  Used 78251 pages from swap on /dev/sda10.
- Max outstanding reads 851. Max writes 3700.
  Memory_needed: 1024 x (4096 + 320 + 104) = 4628480 bytes.
  Free mem throttle point reached 0.
- Swap Allocator enabled.
  Swap available for image: 1496831 pages.
- I/O speed: Write 91 MB/s, Read 105 MB/s.
- Extra pages    : 4118 used/4503.
- Result         : Succeeded.

The Extra pages line is what matters here.

While performance overall is much better than with the open-source drivers from Mesa, and Frogatto is usable with Kwin's compositing at last — even if still slightly slower than in non-compositing mode — there are some occasional odd messages in the kernel's log.

[fglrx:firegl_acpi_video_event] *ERROR* Could not find private acpi context by video busid: LCD

Nothing to worry about, I hope.

UPDATE: Effectively, increasing CONFIG_TOI_DEFAULT_EXTRA_PAGES_ALLOWANCE seems to have solved the hibernation issues.

- Extra pages    : 4041 used/5200.