Shadowmaster’s Blog - Personal

After the Storm 0.9.0

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 04:16:00 +0000

After years and years of development, drama, script rewrites, field research, technological advancements, ~~budget cuts~~, and temporal shenanigans, today, March 5th 2013, I can say for sure that After the Storm is complete with the release of the most important milestone yet: version 0.9.0, with all three episodes completed with 13 scenarios each.

A few caveats for people upgrading from the previous release:

This release adds the final Epilogue scenario for Episode III, which will become a bonus feature in 0.9.1. If you had previously finished AtS Episode III using versions 0.8.90 or 0.8.90.1, you will have a start-of-scenario save for the Epilogue scenario which you can use after upgrading to this version.
As usual, for the most stable experience I advise using Wesnoth 1.10.x — preferably 1.10.5 or a newer version when it becomes available. All episodes of this campaign were primarily developed and tested on 1.10.x, and there are subtle behavioral differences in the game engine between 1.10.x and 1.11.x that may break some sequences or cause other unintended side-effects.
Various issues reported by playtesters on Wesnoth 1.11.1 were fixed. Most notably, it implements a workaround measure for mainline bug #20373, which is relevant for Episode III scenarios starting from Dark Sea. People who experienced player information loss (recall and recruit lists, gold reserves) after Dark Sea on 1.11.1 will need to replay that scenario from the start-of-scenario save (NOT the Turn 1 save!) in order for Wesnoth to install the code in charge of solving that issue in later scenarios. This code will not work on Wesnoth 1.11.2 — you will need to finish Episode III on 1.11.1 before switching to 1.11.2 (whenever it is released, anyway).

This... has been a really long journey, to say the least, and I pretty much lost all hope of ever finishing this campaign at various points over past years. Development started in 2008 and quickly stagnated for various reasons:

Perceived lack/loss of interest from the audience
Excessive perfectionism on my part
Various IRL struggles, including health and personal matters
Constant conflicts of interest amongst the few people who were actually interested in IftU and AtS’ development
Mainline development tasks taking up my spare time
Wesnoth.org forums moderation and administration taking up my spare time

To say that I was overjoyed when the Big Merge took place just a couple of weeks ago would be a big understatement. This campaign became for me more than just another Wesnoth campaign as time passed — it became a part of me I thought I had left behind when IftU was first completed, a testament to my chronic failure to drive my own projects to completion.

Development Hell

After the Storm changed a lot since it was originally conceived in 2008. The original draft was both over-pretentious and subpar, and it was not what I wanted to create after IftU. I wanted to create something better than IftU, but I locked myself in a trap by relying on source material that was already broken by design. Making a better sequel became my obsession, and that obsession led to AtS’ stagnation during the development of Episode I.

But some time mid-2011, I finally saw that trying to achieve perfection was a flawed goal in its own right. What I should have been aiming for all along was to make something fun, something from which I could learn, something I would enjoy to play and create. It was that realization that finally led me to complete Episode I, and the rest was a blaze; a blaze that culminates with this release, today.

The result

The final product is neither perfect nor it aims to be such. I do not think this campaign is for everyone, seeing as how the gameplay and plot are very tightly knit together, and the overall scenario count goes up to 39 without taking cutscenes, segmented scenarios, and bifurcation into account; however, unlike IftU, every episode is a separate campaign in its own right, and I believe that makes the overall experience more enjoyable and less chaotic, balancing-wise.

When I first wrote IftU, my grasp of the English language was as poor as my handle of storytelling in general was, to say the least. This also applies to AtS Episode I up to scenario 9, part 2 — which became the turning point for the campaign’s development when I finally chose to renounce perfectionism and embrace the fun in creation. But I digress. AtS’ prose is all my own output with minor amendments from my playtesters and proofreaders, and an experiment in style wherein I take breaks from mainline conventions on purpose, in a subtle and calculated manner. Attentive players may be able to point out those inflection points from just paying attention at the characters and their interactions — characters whose flaws and mistakes are not as detached from reality as the game’s fantasy setting or the subtext-based delivery may suggest.

The three-episodes structure was mostly an afterthought. AtS episode III became an amalgamation of a previous planned AtS sequel and an aborted IftU prequel. But this structure fits the narrative better than the original plan. Episode I establishes the setting and motivations for the protagonists, and provides more hints about the overarching plot than IftU did; Episode II gradually develops further on the characters’ inner struggles while providing entertaining gameplay and dropping even more hints about the grand scheme; and finally, on Episode III things go off the rails in pretty much every way possible—including gameplay—and the plot reaches its final resolution within the scope originally intended for AtS.

Reception and expectations

Some people will be unable to find or interpret the hints and may see the finale as an out-of-the-blue succession of events, all because I avoided indulging in long and heavy exposition sequences that leave nothing to the player’s imagination and reading skills. I am perfectly aware that this is an inevitability, because it is absolutely impossible to please everyone, as I have learned from my experience with activities otherwise wholly orthogonal to the storytelling field. I think some UMC authors should really keep this in mind whenever they feel tempted to abandon their efforts just because a vocal segment of their players doesn’t like their output.

Other people will not like AtS because “it’s not like IftU”. Perfectionism aside, it is impossible for it to be like IftU after all that I have learned in the meantime about storytelling, life, people, and myself. The circumstances under which IftU was created were entirely unique and I would have to trade many things which I have gained or lost since then in order to create another IftU — and I would not be pleased by the result in the end.

I think AtS works just fine as an IftU sequel, and a sequel does not have to fully embrace the spirit of the original to be such. It’s not like AtS isn’t littered with callbacks to IftU in direct and meta levels anyway. There are a lot of things in it to enjoy, and a lot of things to hate — and both are part of the plan!

But in the end, all that matters to me is that I like the finished product, had fun making it, and learned lots of things along the road.

What’s next?

For those who might think that AtS’ finale is a definitive conclusion to the involved characters’ respective arcs: no, it is not — but I allotted a specific amount of time and scenarios for telling their origin stories, and the campaign had to end at some point. Is there enough material for sequels? Hell, yes, but I don’t see myself making another Wesnoth campaign given all the technical and non-technical limitations imposed by the platform. The three ultimate protagonists have a whole journey ahead of them (as well as more characters to meet), and I would like to explore that in some other medium in the future. For fellow Wesnoth UMC authors, though, there is plenty of material left to work with if you pay attention to every single minor detail.

Of course, I am open to questions about everything you may want to know about the campaign, be it via forum PM, or posts in the campaign’s development topic. But I would appreciate it if people didn’t post topics for every single thing in Writers’ Forum — when that happens, odds are I will just ignore those topics in their entirety and not take the effort seriously. As a matter of principle, if you want to ask a campaign author about their work, you ask them directly through their official communication channels instead of walking to the closest park holding a massive sign in your hand.

With AtS 0.9.0 released, all I have left to do is to take care of fine-tuning scenario and unit balance, fixing any remaining prose issues (especially those annoying unit type descriptions for the in-game help system), dealing with missing/placeholder/subpar pixel art, and somehow find a portrait artist willing to work under my specific terms. The latter part will probably take ages, so don’t hold your breath waiting for AtS 1.0.0.

Finally...

I will be forever grateful to the people (and pets) who helped me along this arduous and extended quest, even those who did so unwittingly — if you are reading this, odds are that you know who you are.

To conclude this post, the changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.9.0:
--------------
* General:
  * Milestone: all scenarios completed.

* Scenarios:
  * Deployed code to work around a side-switching issue affecting Wesnoth
    1.11.1 during post-Divergence (E3S6) scenarios. The corresponding
    mainline bug is #20373 and it is fixed on 1.11.2.
  * Fixed various "wesnoth.get_side is deprecated, use wesnoth.sides instead"
    warnings on 1.11.x.
  * Minor story text grammar, style, and punctuation amendments.
  * E1S6 - Quenoth Isle (Elves of a Different Land):
    * Minor prose tweaks.
  * E1S7 - The Search for the Past:
    * Minor prose tweaks.
  * E1S12 - The Queen:
    * Minor prose tweak.
  * E1S13 - Death and Rebirth:
    * Fixed minor prose issue ("take risky choices" -> "make risky choices").
  * E2S2 - The Heart Forest:
    * Minor prose tweak.
  * E2S11 - A Final Confrontation:
    * Minor cutscene improvements near the end.
  * E2S12 - Fate:
    * Minor cutscene improvements.
  * E3S8C - Breakdown:
    * Don't allow summoning Fire Guardians until the player enters the
      underground river passage.
    * Fix objectives display inconsistencies throughout the scenario.
    * Minor cutscene improvements.
  * E3S8D - Destiny, part 2:
    * Fixed Anya's movements not being undoable.
  * E3S9: Dark Depths:
    * Fixed minor cutscene glitches.
  * E3S10 - Blood:
    * Add a context menu item displaying a list of available attack
      combinations and their effects.
  * E3S13 - Epilogue:
    * New scenario.

* Units:
  * Balancing:
    * Decreased Demon Slashing Gale's melee attack from 11-3 to 10-3.
    * Decreased Demon Slashing Gale's ranged attack from 10-5 to 9-4.
  * Fixed Chaos Arbalestier ranged attack animation failing to trigger.
  * Fixed Shaxthal Turret not getting the biomechanical trait.
  * Fix multiple "Descriptions should no longer include the name as the first
    line" warnings on 1.11.1 and later.
  * Fix unit types with missing faction prefixes in their names:
    * Arbalestier -> Chaos Arbalestier
    * Cataphract -> Chaos Cataphract
    * Crossbowman -> Chaos Crossbowman
    * Heavy Longbowman -> Chaos Heavy Longbowman
  * Hide private variations for regular unit types from the help system on
    1.11.x.
  * Killed Kri'tan.

The full changelog—for versions 0.3.0 through 0.9.0—can be found here.

After the Storm 0.8.90 (a.k.a. “0.9.0 minus one”)

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 05:10:00 +0000

Version 0.8.90 (a.k.a. “0.9.0 minus one”) is out!

Episode III (Final) is now complete in this version, sans the final Epilogue scenario (which will eventually become a bonus feature) that is not part of the scenario count for various reasons that will become evident once 0.9.0 is released.

Some important caveats:

All scenarios after E3S6 (Divergence) were developed and tested on Wesnoth 1.10.x only, so if you are playing on 1.11.1 and you experience any issues, please report them on the forum topic.
Some code in later scenarios seems to be somewhat CPU intensive, performing significantly worse on my dual-core 2.1 GHz laptop than on my quad-core + HT 3.4 GHz desktop.
If you will play the last scenarios of Episode III with music, you must make sure you have upgraded the AtS Music add-on to version 0.2.0 first! This version was published on the add-ons server in advance a few days ago to give people time to upgrade in preparation for version 0.8.90 of the campaign proper.
Official support for Wesnoth versions 1.9.10 through 1.9.14 has been dropped in this version. In theory, Wesnoth 1.9.14 should work just fine, but there are several minor bugs that were addressed later during the 1.10.x stable series that may affect this campaign.

Special thanks go to vultraz for playtesting this beast starting from E3S6 in less than a day (around 14 hours with breaks), and the other two playtesters (you know who you are!) who reported some glaring issues with E3S6 and E3S7A.1, which were addressed after the Big Merge and before the packaging of this release.

I will save the longer announcement (including plans for the future) for later, when the final Epilogue is done and 0.9.0 is released.

The changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.8.90 a.k.a. "0.9.0 minus one":
----------------------------------------
* General:
  * Dropped remaining compatibility code for Wesnoth 1.9.14 and earlier.

* Scenarios:
  * E1S11.2 - Return to Wesmere, part 2:
    * Removed compatibility code for Wesnoth 1.9.5 through 1.9.8.
  * Completed Episode III (sans Epilogue).

* Units:
  * Balancing:
    * Increased Elynia's resistance to impact damage from -10% to 0%.
    * Decreased Demon Shapeshifter's ranged attack from 8-2 to 7-2.

After the Storm: Not so fast

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:16:00 +0000

Everyone who follows me on Twitter can stop reading here.

Continue reading "After the Storm: Not so fast"

After the Storm: Big Merge done, 0.8.90 on the horizon

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 04:48:00 +0000

The first After the Storm commit to Wesnoth-UMC-Dev’s trunk happened on May 17th, year 2008.

Today, February 19th 2013, after years and years of development, with various real life and non-real life issues getting in the way and dooming the campaign to Development Hell until version 0.4.0 with a completed Episode I finally happened on October 16th 2011, I can say for certain that...

After the Storm is finally complete.

With the Big Merge done and all the Episode III post-Divergence content (sans the Epilogue scenario) finally landed in Wesnoth-UMC-Dev trunk, the next step is releasing AtS version 0.8.90 to the public.

r17177 | AtS: bump version from 0.8.5+svn to 0.8.90-svn in the changelog after the Big Merge
r17176 | AtS: [Big Merge] workaround issues with the test suite and macros from data/core/units.cfg
r17175 | AtS E3: [Big Merge] land post-Divergence maps and scenarios
r17174 | AtS E3: [Big Merge] land post-Divergence ancillary macros, story text, character macros, and death handlers
r17173 | AtS: [Big Merge] land post-Divergence units WML, baseframes, halos, and animations
r17172 | AtS: [Big Merge] merge macros used for post-Convergence content
r17171 | AtS: [Big Merge] remove conditional loading of finale-stage scenarios and units
r17170 | AtS: bump version from 0.8.5+svn to 0.8.90-svn before the Big Merge
r17169 | AtS E3S6: enable scenario in regular gameplay

There will be a delay between this and the actual public 0.8.90 release while my primary playtester (vultraz) does the playtesting thing with the scenarios. Some balancing changes before 0.8.90 may also be necessary.

In the meantime, people can check out After the Storm from Wesnoth-UMC-Dev trunk using the Subversion client of their choice, and provide me with feedback via forum PM (in particular, about any possible bugs or balance issues that might plague some specific scenarios), or private messaging on IRC — I am on irc.freenode.net, channel ##shadowm most of the time, but I would rather avoid people dropping spoilers in the presence of my aforementioned playtester, who also hangs around there.

UPDATE: Since I haven’t gotten around to publish version 0.2.0 of the AtS Music add-on, you will also need to obtain the latest version from SVN separately, since it introduces a few music tracks used in the new AtS Episode III scenarios. Of course, this is only necessary if you want/need to have in-game background music.

UPDATE 2: AtS Music version 0.2.0 is now in the 1.10 and 1.11.x add-ons servers. The previous version was 12.3 MiB in size, whereas the new version is 22.7 MiB. I actually had to do some re-encoding to bring it down from 33.1 MiB, but there shouldn’t be any noticeable compression artifact build-up — or at least, I cannot perceive any with my headphones on.

svn co https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/After_the_Storm
svn co https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/AtS_Music

You can also grab tarballs of the latest trunk snapshots through SourceForge.net’s SVN web interface:

/trunk/After_the_Storm file listing (tarball link at the bottom)
/trunk/AtS_Music file listing (tarball link at the bottom)

This last alternative is probably not the best, though, since you will not be able to track future updates. Subversion makes it far easier to update every time a changeset is committed, without having to download the whole thing every time.

I am not going to provide any further instructions for installing using either of these methods, so I’m leaving this to people who actually know their way around Subversion tools or manually installing add-on content. I am not going to post any spoilers either; in particular, I am not going to reveal the Epilogue sequence until version 0.9.0.

Special thanks go to Espreon, Gambit, and vultraz for making all of this possible in their own ways. I will probably explain the deal with AtS’ troubled development in a new post in the near future (probably after 0.8.90 is properly published).

Thanks to all those who waited this long for this to happen. For those who are eager to playtest this and don’t know their way around the aforementioned things, I can only promise that the wait for 0.8.90 will be much shorter. A couple of weeks, tops.

Finally, the usual disclaimer applies: this campaign is not for everyone.

Late After the Storm development roadmap

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 05:55:00 +0000

It is February 16th already, and it has been a long while since my last update on AtS’ development on this blog, unless we count the January 1st teaser.

Well, here is another teaser in the form of a more concrete roadmap for AtS 0.9.0’s development:

Continue reading "Late After the Storm development roadmap"

My New Year resolution

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 03:13:00 +0000

...
screen #0:
  dimensions:    1920x1080 pixels (513x292 millimeters)
  resolution:    95x94 dots per inch
...

I regret nothing.

Note: the physical dimensions might be wrong, as usual. The above yields a diagonal of ∼590 mm, whereas the monitor’s specifications state it should be 584 mm, or 23″ (584.2 mm).

Unbreak

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 05:19:00 +0000

Back to regular business on IRC and Wesnoth for now.

Not a nice touch

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 18:12:00 +0000

Ever since I got my first laptop, I always wondered what kind of people are actually meant to use the ‘tap’ capability built into touchpads.

I remember being stumped at first when I would try to do normal things (on Windows) only to get continuously interrupted by some unexplained drag-and-drop action or accidental click. There was absolutely nothing anywhere evident explaining that ‘tapping’ was a thing I was expected to do, and in fact, was accidentally doing repeatedly. It took me some experimentation to get the gist of the interface and its configuration, and as soon as I understood it better I went and disabled it.

Later when switching (back) to Linux I would encounter the same issue and I’d have to check the X.org synaptics driver man page to figure out the necessary options to add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf to get rid of that questionable ‘feature’. Fortunately, nowadays I can just install the kde-config-touchpad package on Debian and configure everything according to my preferences through a more user-friendly mechanism.

Alas, just like the power button, that laptop’s touchpad buttons were not designed for daily use — thankfully KDE (like Windows) includes a feature to control the pointer with the keyboard.

What touch-based input lacks is intrinsic tactile feedback. Unlike button or key-presses, I cannot feel the action of tapping a touchpad any more than I can feel the action of casually or accidentally sticking my finger on it. A very small amount of pressure counts as a tap, whereas pressing a normal touchpad or mouse button requires a much larger amount, and with good reason; that pressure could be the difference between holding back an embarrassing post and inadvertently submitting it, or (when dragging gestures are enabled) ruining one’s system by dragging half of the Windows system files to the wrong place. Fortunately, most of my experiences in that regard have been of the “cannot drop a folder onto itself” kind.

There is also the issue that not everyone has the common sense to keep their hands clean at all times. Helping other laptop users can be a quite unpleasant experience without a mouse handy — yuck.

And then there are cell phones. Touchscreens are becoming irritatingly common (even in the low-end market) and they are even worse than touchpads in most respects. Sure, you can see what you are going to tap right there, but is that any help against “fat finger” mistakes? Scrolling gestures are a hit or miss action by design, and it is awfully easy to screw up the timing and have the device register it as a tap. These are your time and money in the balance here; you do not want to miss while navigating cell phone menus. And exactly how am I supposed to point other people at some element on the screen without activating it or giving up accuracy and pointing from afar?

In any case, I am pretty sure I do not want to be forced to use a touchscreen-driven phone to call an ambulance.

The obscene joke that is Windows 8 was clearly intended to push OEMs to produce more and more touchscreen-based garbage, as if we needed to merge phone and tablet user interface paradigms with desktop and laptop computers. I could rant some more about Windows 8, but that would take at least a dozen more paragraphs for a worthless tangent. The only thing that matters is that Microsoft will most certainly succeed regardless of the platform’s user experience merits (of which there are basically none compared to Windows 7), simply because of the OEMs and software vendors’ obligation to lick Microsoft’s smelly boots. I can see non-touch monitors becoming increasingly rarer in the future for this reason; I can see the pain for user interface toolkit developers and clients (users) in a few years when everything is required to support touch input — yes, even Wesnoth.

And in this case, mice are not an optimal alternative. I have tried the Windows 8 Release Preview on virtual machines with a mouse and I can safely say I find any other version from 3.0 through Windows 7 to be more efficient for daily use. I guess your mileage may vary after a while, though. Perhaps technologically-challenged kids and elders will learn to use the “modern desktop” faster and better than us veterans?

Not my business anyway — as long as the KDE crowd doesn’t fuck up, that is. Let us all hope Canonical doesn’t fuck up in a similar way too, because everyone likes to imitate Ubuntu nowadays.

My initial experience with computers was through MS-DOS and old-fashioned keyboards. I grew up using standard two-button mice in tandem with more old-fashioned keyboards, and later upgraded my experience with scrolling wheels, and wireless mice. Scrolling wheels are great for web browsing, coding, examining lengthy terminal output buffers, and even drawing, but the cheaper mice out there don’t really last very long, and lint and hair do not really help matters when the design doesn’t include a simple way to access and clean the wheel’s gear.

Wireless mice are apparently a love-it-or-hate-it subject. My current mouse has lasted over a year, it is large enough to work well as a laptop mouse and a desktop mouse, and the battery charge tends to last nearly a month. I bought a couple of rechargeable AA batteries with it and I always keep one fully charged for quick replacement; the mouse only uses one battery at a time. All of my previous mice used two AAA batteries, which lasted significantly less. Their scroll wheels were evidently not designed to last either.

I am pretty sure I will not be buying any touch-based devices for the foreseeable future. My new cell phone is more than enough to keep my patience below nominal levels for a while, at least when using it; I am grateful that the manufacturer was kind enough to include a physical numeric keypad along with two actual call and dismiss buttons.

Wesbreak, IRC-break

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 07:12:00 +0000

Just wanted to note that I am ceasing my online Wesnoth and IRC related activities for an indeterminate amount of time while I tend to some matters of greater priority. In case you are wondering, yes, everything is fine, but I do need a break.

You can still message me through Twitter, email (preferably!), or private message through the Wesnoth forums (which result in email notifications) if something absolutely important crops up in the meantime other than the forums being down. I have provided the other Wesnoth.org administrators with instructions in case I’m needed for something specific, and for other issues you can always PM the Forum Moderators or Administrators groups or email the forums support address, which is displayed whenever things go completely wrong.

And of course, I may continue to post about non-Wesnoth things here as I see fit.

Nanacore: GPU support addendum

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 23:02:00 +0000

UPDATE 2012-11-30: The problem described in this post no longer applies since yesterday 2012-11-29, as the ia32-libs* multiarch transitionals have finally landed in Testing. Installing libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386 after previously installing the rest of the NVIDIA stack from Experimental appears to work flawlessly.

From my previous post:

Quite notably, everything is working fine with the latest Debian wheezy packages (although I compiled my own newer kernel later anyway) except for the onboard sound controller.

Ah! But not so fast! I had forgotten that Debian wheezy’s half-baked multiarch support has serious implications for 32-bit OpenGL-based software on the amd64 platform (a.k.a. x86_64 for everyone else), regardless of whether one is using a proprietary (e.g. NVIDIA) or free (Mesa) stack. In Reicore’s (Mesa) case, this meant that I had to stick to the version from ia32-libs in Testing, which is Mesa 7.7.1 — contrast with the native version, which is 8.0.4.

In Nanacore’s case, the implications span even more packages. The description of the libgl1-nvidia-glx-ia32 package in Testing (amd64 arch) says:

This is an empty transitional package to aid switching to multiarch. Run the following commands to install the multiarch library:

dpkg --add-architecture i386 ; apt-get update

apt-get install libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386

And, surprise, surprise. That doesn’t work in Testing because of bug #686033 — fortunately for me, apt-get was wiser in blocking the operation due to some perceived conflicts.

In an attempt to solve this, I pulled the NVIDIA driver packages from Unstable and then tried to install libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386 again to no avail — it requires me to upgrade ia32-libs from the version in Testing to the one in Unstable, which is really a multiarch transition metapackage. After watching multiarch in Debian wheezy become such a major disappointment over time, I decided to do something different with libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386.

I decided to install it by hand.

The procedure was a little convoluted and involved a lot of symbolic links, and I’m not completely sure whether what I did works because I don’t have Wine installed right now and I don’t really want to install Debian’s packages because—again—they use multiarch support to pull nearly 92 MiB worth of redundant crap:

shadowm@nanacore:~$ sudo apt-get install wine
[sudo] password for shadowm: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  gcc-4.7-base:i386 libasound2:i386 libc6:i386 libc6-i686:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libdrm-intel1:i386 libdrm-nouveau1a:i386 libdrm-radeon1:i386
  libdrm2:i386 libexpat1:i386 libffi5:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libgcc1:i386 libgcrypt11:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386
  libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386 libgnutls26:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libgpm2:i386 libgsm1:i386 libice6:i386
  libjbig0:i386 libjpeg8:i386 libltdl7:i386 liblzma5:i386 libmpg123-0:i386 libncurses5:i386 libodbc1:i386 libp11-kit0:i386 libpciaccess0:i386
  libpng12-0:i386 libsm6:i386 libssl1.0.0:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libtasn1-3:i386 libtiff4:i386 libtinfo5:i386 libuuid1:i386 libv4l-0:i386
  libv4lconvert0:i386 libwine:i386 libwine-alsa:i386 libwine-bin:i386 libwine-gecko-1.4 libwine-gl:i386 libx11-6:i386 libx11-xcb1:i386 libxau6:i386
  libxcb-glx0:i386 libxcb1:i386 libxcomposite1:i386 libxcursor1:i386 libxdamage1:i386 libxdmcp6:i386 libxext6:i386 libxfixes3:i386 libxi6:i386
  libxinerama1:i386 libxml2:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libxrender1:i386 libxslt1.1:i386 libxxf86vm1:i386 uuid-runtime wine-bin:i386 zlib1g:i386
Suggested packages:
  libasound2-plugins:i386 glibc-doc:i386 locales:i386 rng-tools:i386 libglide3:i386 gpm:i386 libmyodbc:i386 odbc-postgresql:i386 tdsodbc:i386
  unixodbc-bin:i386 wine-doc:i386 libwine-cms:i386 libwine-sane:i386 libwine-ldap:i386 libwine-print:i386 libwine-openal:i386 libwine-gphoto2:i386
Recommended packages:
  uuid-runtime:i386 ttf-liberation:i386 xml-core:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gcc-4.7-base:i386 libasound2:i386 libc6:i386 libc6-i686:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libdrm-intel1:i386 libdrm-nouveau1a:i386 libdrm-radeon1:i386
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0 upgraded, 70 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
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Not to mention that by pulling Mesa it might as well break my little patchwork setup with NVIDIA’s 32-bit libGL here. This is not something I’m too keen on trying out while stuck on shitty 3.5G mobile broadband.

I intend to revisit and unravel this conundrum at a later point and try to understand and document my libGL installation solution but, again, I have bigger fish to fry.

Nanacore

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Six machines. Six plus one equals seven. My current laptop is named Reicore, where rei れい is a possible reading of zero in Japanese.

It was only fitting that the seventh machine—a desktop—would be Nanacore (nana なな) then.

Name	Year	CPU	RAM	Hard disk	Graphics	OS
Reicore	2010	Intel Pentium T4300 2.1 GHz dual core	4 GiB	500 GB	Intel GM45	Debian testing (Wheezy)
Nanacore	2012	Intel Core i7 (Ivy Bridge) 3.5 GHz HT quad core	16 GiB	2 TB	NVIDIA GeForce GT610	Debian testing (Wheezy), Windows 7 (???)

Quite notably, everything is working fine with the latest Debian wheezy packages (although I compiled my own newer kernel later anyway) except for the onboard sound controller.

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

The Intel HDA codec for these controllers is apparently not quite ready yet; as a result, the mixer sliders are slightly broken in that there is no master channel, the speaker channel has no actual volume slider, changing the PCM channel’s volume causes some slight noise, and I suspect some features are missing as well. Despite this, the driver works for basic usage given some precautions with the KDE sound system to choose the correct (PCM) channel for audio instead of the sliderless (speaker) channel. I would not mind to spend some additional time researching the situation later, but I really need to get back to work on non-audio stuff (a.k.a. AtS) right now, so that will have to wait.

Incidentally, the Debian KDE desktop task includes PulseAudio now (I believe this wasn’t the case with Squeeze). Rather unsurprisingly, PA continues to be a considerable annoyance for my usage (e.g. lockup during KDE login, 1% extra CPU usage during playback from any application), so I ditched it after a day or two for plain ALSA. I don’t really have a need for the extra layer of indirection since PA uses ALSA anyway and my sound needs are very basic — basically, just playing sound from media players, games, and application notifications.

For graphics I’m using a decidedly inexpensive NVIDIA graphics card for the sake of having an NVIDIA graphics card and parting ways with Mesa for a good while. And while I had intended from the get-go to install the proprietary drivers, a forced and thankfully short Nouveau intermission confirmed that Nouveau indeed eats kittens. And that’s really all there is to say on the matter.

Both the machine and Debian wheezy can do UEFI, but I quickly stumbled upon a couple of issues:

Using the EFI version of GRUB means the only way to get a working text console on Linux is to use a framebuffer console driver such as efifb. This is not supported by NVIDIA and the driver complains quite loudly about it.
The machine appears to enumerate my (USB) 3G modem’s built-in storage as the first and second hard disks when it is connected, breaking GRUB’s expectations about the location of the disk from which it will boot, which becomes the third (SATA) hard disk in such a situation. The PC BIOS version of GRUB only gets to see the real hard disk drive.

Since this is my first time dealing with an UEFI-based system yet, I don’t really know whether the second point is a bug in GRUB, or the platform itself. Regardless, the first point pretty much convinced me to not spend any further time on that and just go back to the BIOS flavor of GRUB. This doesn’t seem to have done anything for my broken Windows 7 installation, which I probably don’t really need.

I have been working on transferring my configuration and files from Reicore since this Monday, approximately, and I think I’m nearly ready to get back to business now.

(I actually wanted to post this on the 7th but I got sidetracked by the system migration and testing.)

My short inventory and history of personal computing devices

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 08:35:00 +0000

First there was an old (1997) Windows 95 OSR 2 box boasting a P55C Intel Pentium processor with an staggering clock frequency of 166 MHz; 16 MiB of RAM (later expanded to 32), a 1.2 GB* hard disk; it had an onboard S3 Trio64V+ with 1 MiB of video RAM.
* Hard-disk manufacturer ‘gigabytes’.

Then, there was another OEM machine (2002), running Windows XP on a 1.3 GHz Intel Celeron (“Celeron-S”) including 256 MiB of RAM and a 40 GB hard disk; before it was decommissioned for good, it ran both Windows XP SP2 and openSUSE 10.0; it was the first machine on which I ever installed Linux (SUSE Linux 9.3), and my original introduction to Wesnoth (0.9.5 from openSUSE 10.0) happened there; the onboard Intel 810E IGP became the victim of various Linux graphics-related shenanigans. (This was the last computer I ever owned that included a 3.5" floppy disk drive; unfortunately, it was broken and it took me a year and various casualties to figure this out.)

Later during 2006, Blackcore appeared: another OEM machine running Windows XP SP2, equipped with a 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott) with Hyper-Threading; 1 GiB of RAM, a 160 GB hard disk, and an IGP from the biggest piece of shit chipset manufacturer otherwise known as VIA. This was my first named computer, a practice which has truly paid off to this day. It currently runs the same original installation of Windows XP upgraded to SP3; it has run various Linux distributions and versions and I’ve not stuck with any of them simply because VIA is the biggest piece of shit chipset manufacturer.

Following the color-themed naming scheme, Greycore became the first laptop I ever owned around mid 2007; an Acer Aspire 5050 including an AMD Turion 64 MK-36, an amount of RAM I don’t remember anymore, 80 GiB hard disk drive, and Windows Vista. It first ran openSUSE 10.2 and openSUSE 10.3 besides Windows for a long time, until I got fed up with an incident involving a security update utterly ruining my system with terrible timing. It took a while before I finally decided to switch to another distribution instead of keeping the same old 10.3 installation around, but it was worth it — Debian Lenny (testing at the time, Q3 2008) was my choice and I have stuck with Debian ever since.

Greycore was decommissioned once Bluecore took over; an HP Pavilion dv5-1132la running Windows Vista SP1. It was a much better deal than Greycore in the long term, as I acquired it on Christmas Eve 2008 and it lasted until January 2011 with mild wearing symptoms until it finally kicked the bucket (it got better later); Greycore did not last more than a year before it got utterly wrecked.

Bluecore started with 2 GiB of RAM and ended up with 4 GiB as Wesnoth began to demand significantly more memory for compiling. The 2 GHz dual core AMD Athlon 64 performed very well at the beginning, but our favorite open source game’s development largely outpaced it. The 250 GB hard disk served me well despite running into low space situations in various opportunities as I began to experiment with the processor’s hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities. This overheating beast (51 °C - 64 °C idle, 65 °C - 92 °C under load) has only run Debian as its native operating system besides Windows — first Lenny (testing, later stable), then Squeeze (testing), and very recently, Wheezy (testing). The ATI Radeon HD 3200 was an infinite source of frustration when it came to OpenGL on Linux until very late 2009.

Its untimely and infuriatingly IGP-driven demise resulted in Reicore taking over; first temporarily, and then permanently as its 2.1 GHz dual core Intel Pentium T4300 and Intel GM45 graphics processor ended up proving far more worthwhile than Bluecore’s AMD-based configuration. Reicore (an HP Pavilion dv4-1624la) was purchased for someone else at first, and ran Windows 7 until she became mine, and then I proceeded to wipe it out to make room for Debian — first Squeeze (stable), and now Wheezy (testing). I have never run out of space with its 500 GB hard disk, and even today my /home partition has a little more than 50% of free space. It helps that the processor’s lack of virtualization capabilities has not been very encouraging in the virtual machine department, I guess.

Notice that Reicore also breaks the naming pattern. This was explained before.

Name	Year	Decom.	CPU	RAM	HDD	Graphics	OS
―	1997	―	Intel Pentium (P55C) 166 MHz	32 MiB	1.2 GB	S3 Trio64V+	Windows 95 OSR 2.0
―	2002	2006	Intel Celeron (‘Celeron-S’) 1.3 GHz	256 MiB	40 GB	Intel 810E	openSUSE 10.0, Windows XP SP2
Blackcore	2006	―	Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott) 2.6 GHz HT	1 GiB	160 GB	VIA piece of shit	Windows XP SP3, Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (Squeeze)
Greycore	2007	2008	AMD Turion 64 MK-38 2 GHz	??? GiB	80 GB	ATI Radeon Xpress 1100	Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (Lenny), Windows Vista
Bluecore	2008	―	AMD Athlon 64 X2 QL-62 2 GHz dual core	4 GiB	250 GB	ATI Radeon HD 3200	Debian testing 2012-10-22 (Wheezy), Windows Vista SP1
Reicore	2010	―	Intel Pentium T4300 2.1 GHz dual core	4 GiB	500 GB	Intel GM45	Debian testing (Wheezy)

Six computers — that’s quite a lot! I wonder what will come next... (Written wink!)