Tony’s Cafe

“I think it’s gonna be an UNREAL night!”

I am an advocate for excellent games that don’t need the latest and greatest hardware to run. More specifically, a fun, networked first person shooter that can run on an Athlon with 256MB of RAM! Unreal Tournament 2004 is one of those few games. A few years ago, the demigod of DOOM, Fred, gave me the Special Edition of UT2004. This particular edition comes in a silver case with a stereo headset mic and UT2004 on a DVD. To this day, Fred and our friends still play this game. I wanted to install UT2004 on a Linux box — so here are my notes on doing so on Debian Sarge.

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There have been plenty of times where I want to implement a simple daemon in Debian Linux. I know, I know… I could just install a Debian package and have the daemon created for me (if it’s included). There are times, though, where I want to compile the latest version of an application (like Asterisk). Also, I might want to compile darkice with lame support. (Darkice only has ogg support in the Debian Sarge package). Preferably, I’d like to create a daemon which sets mixer levels then runs darkice. I’ve found various tutorials and howto docs on the Internet but they haven’t been simplified enough. This post will outline a straightforward way to create a daemon in Debian Linux. In this example, I am running Debian Sarge.

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Honestly, where would rogue dynamic DNS servers be without a proper DDNS client to point users to? ddclient is an excellent DDNS client for Linux users who need to update their DNS name whenever their IP changes. Unfortunately, ddclient doesn’t seem to work “out of the box” when used behind a Linksys firewall. When ddclient is installed in Debian (with apt-get install ddclient), the install script prompts for the proper values to update your DDNS name. These values are placed into a generic /etc/ddclient.conf configuration file, but won’t update the dyndns.org DDNS service from behind a Linksys router / firewall. After some research on the Internet and some trial and error, I was able to create a ddclient.conf that works. What follows is an /etc/ddclient.conf file that you can modify to use on your Linux server if you’re having the same problems I had. I’ve tested this configuration file with a BEFSR41 Linksys firewall / router.

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In a past post, I described creating a 1980s videophone with Linux and a Brooktree chipset capture card. This particular card has three video inputs; two composite and one S-video. Since the S-video input takes care of the videophone’s camera, why not use one of the other composite inputs for a webcam?

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I inherited a computer from my brother with one of the best motherboards out there — the A-Bit BP6. This motherboard has withstood the test of time, and even has a following: the BP6 Network Community. This mobo can support two (that’s right, TWO) Celerys (as in Intel Celeron) and has 1 AGP, 5 PCI, and two ISA (!!) slots. Also, there’s 2 IDE controllers and 2 UDMA66 controllers. Besides its versatility, the BP6 is very well known for its overclocking abilities. Two other friends (Doug and Patrick) have BP6s as well, and have been running strong to date. I also have another BP6 running Linux in the basement — supporting my 1980s Videophone.

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I’m running wu-imapd and Squirrelmail on my Debian Woody system. I was getting a

Allowed memory size of nnnnn bytes exhausted (tried to allocate nnnn bytes) in /usr/share/squirrelmail/functions/imap_general.php on line 215

error when trying to open an e-mail that had an attachment. Apparently there are two solutions to this problem: Change my apt-get sources to “testing” or patch wu-imapd. I opted for the latter!

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Remember those TV shows in the 70s and early 80s which depicted a videophone that we’d all be using in the near future? You know, the one where a person could pick up the telephone receiver, and see the person on the other end via a little screen? Well, that’s what I wanted to build. With Linux. GnomeMeeting is an open source H.323 video confencing program used primarily in Linux. It is very similar to Microsoft’s NetMeeting, but much more versatile. Gnomemeeting has everything you wished NetMeeting had. Initially I was going to use OpenH.323‘s ohphone, but GnomeMeeting has more features, more support, and a larger user base. As far as the rotary phone, well, I couldn’t be talking about anything but your 1980s-era real-bells rotary dial telephone.

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In a previous post, I had troubles getting the Composite Out on an ATI video card to work in Linux. I even tried framebuffer support (even though I shouldn’t have to) but that didn’t work either. I ended up purchasing a nVidia card with Composite Out, since nVidia has better Linux support. So, the nVidia MX4000 card with composite output arrived today from NewEgg. After replacing the ATI PCI video card with the new nVidia AGP video card, the composite video on boot already looks sharper and clearer.

First, I made sure my kernel was compiled with AGP support as a module, with NVIDIA support enabled. (I am using the 2.6.10 kernel — I was having problems with the 2.4.28 kernel with getting X Windows to run with Video for Linux enabled.) Then, I downloaded the Linux drivers from nVidia, and ran the installation file. The installation file would try to install the nvidia module it compiled, but, it wasn’t able to insert it. I kept getting the following error:

./usr/src/nv/nvidia.o: init_module: No such device

After much digging, I checked in my BIOS… the “Assign IRQ for VGA” was disabled. I must’ve disabled it a long time ago on my ABIT BP6 motherboard in an attempt to conserve IRQs. Oops! (I completely wish every device in my computer could share one IRQ, and I know Doug will have a field day with that comment.)

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After all the stuff I went through to troubleshoot getting X Windows and a video card’s composite out to work under Linux, I better write this post! I have an old ATI Rage 3D (Mach64 chipset) PCI video card that has composite out (and S-Video out) which currently resides in my Debian Linux server at home. I want to get the composite out working with my old Commodore 1702 monitor, which has a composite input. Why, you may ask? Well, since most of the stuff on this website is pure geek, it’s because I want to be able to videoconference, using my Linux server, with the Commodore monitor as my video display.

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