The Linux Experiment

The other day I finally managed to get the classic RTS game Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 running on Linux, and running well in fact. I started by following the instructions here with a few tweaks that I found on other forums that I can’t seem to find links to anymore. Essentially the process is as follows:

• Install Red Alert 2 on Windows. Yes you just read that right. Apparently the Red Alert 2 installer does not work under wine so you need to install the game files while running Windows.
• Update the game and apply the CD-Crack via the instructions in the link above. Note that this step may have some legal issues associated with it. If in doubt seek professional legal advice.
• Copy program files install directory to Linux.
• Apply speed fix in the how-to section here.
• Run game using wine and enjoy.

It is a convoluted process that is, at times, ridiculous but it’s worth it for such a classic game. Even better there is a bit of a ‘hack’ that will allow you to play RA2′s multiplayer IPX network mode but over the more modern TCP/IP protocol. The steps for this hack can also be found at the WineHQ link above.

Happy gaming!

I wrote a simple script that you can download here that makes it easy to update your Gentoo system. It first re-syncs your portage tree so that you are pointing to the newest source files. Then it performs a deep update including build dependencies on all packages that have new versions or could be rebuilt because you have modified your USE flags. It also upgrades any build dependencies and tools. Finally it removes unused dependencies and attempts to fix any broken packages that now have new dependencies.

#!/bin/bash
emerge –sync
emerge –update –deep –with-bdeps=y –newuse –ask world
emerge –depclean
revdep-rebuild

I also found this excellent website that makes it very easy to search for Gentoo packages and see what use flags you can apply to them.

Graphics Drivers

Continuing where I left off in my previous posts I now had a somewhat working desktop but a few things still had to be done. For one I am running this on my laptop and while the open source radeon drivers are actually pretty decent they’re just not quite good enough when it comes to power management. Thankfully the Linux closed source drivers are up to the job.

After reading through these two sites I was able to install the closed source drivers and get full control over my graphics card. To be perfectly honest I’m not exactly sure what steps got me to this point but I do know it was a mixture of the two sites.

Wireless Networking

After careful consideration I had come to the conclusion thought I had bricked my wireless. Worse yet after following the guide here (even the parts specific to KDE) I just couldn’t seem to get it to work. Thankfully I stumbled upon this guide which instructed me to install networking components for KDE. Apparently once I had installed this package all was good.

Flash

Flash was actually incredibly easy to install. All I had to do was enter the following command in a root terminal and then restart Firefox.

emerge adobe-flash

Java

Another big install was the official Oracle Java JRE and JDK. To install just the JRE run the command dev-java/sun-jre-bin. If you want the JDK as well then run the command dev-java/sun-jdk. The only weird part about this was that this package is now considered restricted. To work around it simply download the bin file from Oracle and place it in /usr/portage/distfiles before running the command.

More to Come

There is still plenty more to do, like install LibreOffice and figure out why my computer currently can’t play audio CDs. I am however thankful that at this point I am at least a bit better off than some other fellow Linux Experiment participants.

My Desktop So Far

The high CPU load was because I had just finished compiling a bunch of stuff

Yeah… apparently the ability to restart or shutdown your system using a normal user account from within KDE SC is not something that is installed by default. In order to accomplish this you need to compile and install the kde-misc/kshutdown package using the following command from a root terminal:

emerge kde-misc/kshutdown

I also had to create a new file called /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords in order for this to work. Inside that file just put the following text

kde-misc/kshutdown-2.0

For this version of the experiment I have chosen to try my hand at installing Gentoo. Gentoo, for those who don’t know, or who weren’t following Jake’s posts during the original experiment, is a fully customizable distribution where you have to compile and install all of your applications from source code downloads. Thankfully they do offer some excellent package management tools, Portage in particular, that help automate this process.

Preamble

I suppose a bit of background is the best place to start. During the original experiment I ran Fedora which, while having a whole host of issues of its own, was more or less a straight forward experience. Since that time I’ve dabbled here and there with other distributions, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Linux Mint, among others. For this experiment I wanted a bit of a challenge. I now know the basics, and then some, about running a day-to-day desktop Linux system but I still don’t fully understand all of the inner workings that are going on under the hood. That’s where my choice of Gentoo comes in.

Getting Started

I began by following the rather excellent Gentoo Handbook which thankfully got me to the point where I was able to boot my machine, without the installation media, into a kernel that I had personally configured and compiled. To say that this was smooth sailing probably isn’t accurate, but considering what was actually involved in getting to this point, and how quickly I managed to do it, is a testament to how easy the guide actually is to follow along with.

One thing I would stress to Linux users who may want to try Gentoo and are coming from a more user friendly distribution like Ubuntu is to make sure to get a list of hardware before you start. Run lshw in your Ubuntu (or whatever) install and save the output somewhere. This will show you the list of hardware devices and more importantly the drivers required to run them correctly. I ran into a snag early on where my network card wasn’t working even though Gentoo claimed to be loading the drivers correctly. A quick modprobe later of the driver that was shown to be in use from my earlier install, tg3, and I was back and Internet enabled. Sadly even the lshw output didn’t provide a whole lot of direction when it came to picking and choosing some of the more obscure configuration options for my kernel.

The Challenge

So what do you do when you can finally turn your computer on and boot into your kernel? Well install X I suppose. Unfortunately it was this step that caused me more grief than any of the others. You see apparently you’re supposed to remember what graphics card is in your machine before you try and build a kernel that supports it…

Following along with the X Server Configuration Guide I made it all the way up until the point when I had to specify which “in-kernel firmware blobs” I wanted to compile into my kernel. After, literally, hours of compiling X and then a series of trial and error attempts I finally found a combination that seemed to work. For my own reference the only firmware blob I seem to require is

radeon/R700_rlc.bin

The Wait

I finally had a system that could start X and present me with multiple(!) graphical terminals. By this point I had sunk about ~5 hours into this project. Now it was time to try setting up a desktop environment. My two main choices were GNOME 3.x or KDE SC. I opted for KDE for two reasons:

1. I hadn’t used KDE 4.x in a couple of releases and didn’t mind it last time I had tried it
2. I have yet to try GNOME 3.x but since it is quite the departure from the 2.x series I figured I would go with what I know for now and maybe try GNOME 3.x later

Pulling up the Gentoo KDE guide I began my compilation of KDE SC.

emerge -av kde-meta

More than 400 packages needed to be compiled and installed. My system, a Core2Duo at 2.4Ghz and 4GB of RAM, took approximately 24 hours to finish this single process. Gentoo is certainly not a system that you can expect to have up and running in an afternoon if you’re expecting to have a fully working desktop environment.

Miscellaneous

USE Flags are ridiculous. I understand the concept for them but the fact that you have to continuously add to this list in order to compile programs you explicitly told it to install is a bit much. If you don’t know what a USE Flag is consider yourself lucky. For those thinking about installing Gentoo, don’t worry you’ll know soon enough.

Be sure to change the root password and add any user accounts after you chroot into your new installation. Otherwise you’ll end up like me and boot into a system that you can’t log into!

Next Steps

Well I’d like to finish setting up my desktop. I now have KDE installed but there seems to be some missing components that I hope won’t require a re-compilation… I’ll let you know how that turns out. I also need to sort out my wireless card and get that working. But hey at least for now I can browse the web in my new installation!

As Jake pointed out in the previous post we have once again decided to run The Linux Experiment. This iteration will once again following the rule where you are not allowed to use a distribution that you have used in the past. We also have a number of new individuals taking part in the experiment: Aíne B, Matt C, Travis G and Warren G. Be sure to check back often as we post about our experiences running our chosen distributions.

Rules

Here are the new rules we are playing by for this version of the experiment:

1. You must have absolutely no prior experience with the distribution you choose
2. You must use the distribution on your primary computer and it must be your primary day-to-day computing environment
3. The experiment runs from November 1st, 2011 until January 31st, 2011
4. You must document your experience
5. After committing to a distribution you may not later change to a different one

Achievements

For fun we’ve decided to create a series of challenges to try throughout the experiment. This list can be found here and may be updated as we add more throughout the course of the experiment.

No seriously, it does. Whenever it makes a connection to the router it causes it to enter some bad state wherein it refuses to allow any connections to occur. This also has the effect of booting all other machines from the network. Apparently I’m not the only one to have this problem either.

I did manage to find a bit of a work around though:

1. Set your wireless router to Mixed B/G mode only (yes I know, you lose out on N by doing this…)
2. Enter the following into a terminal:
   echo "options iwlagn 11n_disable=1" | tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlagn.confg
sudo modprobe -rf iwlagn
sudo modprobe -v iwlagn
sudo service network-manager restart
3. Maybe reboot?

I’ve also heard of some people getting it to work by enabling this instead of disabling it. To do so simply change the 11n_disable=1 line above to 11n_disable=0.

Hopefully they will have this annoying bug fixed soon.

If you’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 and are a developer you may notice some things missing. For one there is no longer an option to install the sun-java6-jdk or JRE from the repositories. Worse they also removed the Netbeans IDE. Apparently this had something to do with licenses but if you’re going to offer MP3 support the least you could do is make software like this available for those who are willing to look for it.

Anyway with that rant out of the way I did manage to find a way to install both.

Install sun-java6-jdk

Following the instructions on this excellent post I was able to successfully install sun-java6-jdk using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

There are alternative instructions for installing Java 7 as well.

Install Netbeans

My first attempt at installing both was to head to the official Oracle Java website and download the Netbeans + JDK installer. Unfortunately the installer seems to crash in this version of Ubuntu. However since the above process had installed the JRE I was able to simply grab the Netbeans only installer from Oracle which ended up working surprisingly well. Just remember to run it using sudo if you want other users to be able to use it as well.

Once again I’ve decided to re-run my previous tests this time using the following distributions:

• Debian 6.0.2 (GNOME)
• Fedora 15 (GNOME 3 Fallback Mode)
• Fedora 15 (KDE)
• Kubuntu 11.04 (KDE)
• Linux Mint 11 (GNOME)
• Linux Mint 10 (KDE)
• Linux Mint 10 (LXDE)
• Linux Mint 11 (Xfce)
• Lubuntu 11.04 (LXDE)
• Mandriva One (GNOME)
• Mandriva One (KDE)
• OpenSUSE 11.4 (GNOME)
• OpenSUSE 11.4 (KDE)
• Ubuntu 11.04 (GNOME Unity Fallback Mode)
• Xubuntu 11.04 (Xfce)

I will be testing all of this within VirtualBox on ‘machines’ with the following specifications:

• Total RAM: 512MB
• Hard drive: 8GB
• CPU type: x86

The tests were all done using VirtualBox 4.0.6 on Linux Mint 11, and I did not install VirtualBox tools (although some distributions may have shipped with them). I also left the screen resolution at the default 800×600 and accepted the installation defaults. All tests were run on August 14th, 2011 so your results may not be identical.

Results

Following in the tradition of my previous posts I have once again gone through the effort to bring you nothing but the most state of the art in picture graphs for your enjoyment.

Things to know before looking at the graphs

First off none of the Fedora 15 versions would install in 512MB of RAM. They both required a minimum of 640MB and therefore are disqualified from this little experiment. I did however run them in VirtualBox with 640MB of RAM just for comparison purposes. Secondly the Linux Mint 10 KDE distro would not even install in either 512MB or 640MB of RAM, the installer just kept crashing. I was unable to actually get it to work so it was not included in these tests. Finally when I tested Debian I was unable to test before / after applying updates because it seemed to have applied the updates during install.

First boot memory (RAM) usage

This test was measured on the first startup after finishing a fresh install.

Memory (RAM) usage after updates

This test was performed after all updates were installed and a reboot was performed.

Memory (RAM) usage change after updates

The net growth or decline in RAM usage after applying all of the updates.

Install size after updates

The hard drive space used by the distribution after applying all of the updates.

Conclusion

As before I’m going to leave you to drawing your own conclusions.

Sort of a follow up (in spirit) to two of Jon’s previous posts regarding pulse audio loopback; I noticed that there was quite a bit of delay (~500ms to 1second) in the default configuration and began searching for a way to fix it. After some research I found an alternative way to achieve the loopback but with must less delay.

1. Install paman

First install the PulseAudio Manager application so that you can correctly identify the input device (i.e. your mic or line-in) and your output device (i.e. the sound card you are using).

sudo apt-get install paman

You can find the input sources under the Sources section and the output devices under the Sinks section of the Devices tab. Make note of the names of the two devices.

2. Unload any previous loopback modules

If you had followed Jon’s previous posts then you will need to unload the modules (and potentially change your PulseAudio configuration so they don’t get loaded again on next restart). This is to stop it from doubling all loopback sound.

3. Create an executable script

Create a script and copy the following command into it:

pacat -r --latency-msec=1 -d [input] | pacat -p --latency-msec=1 -d [output]

where [input] is the name of your input device found in step 1 and [output] is the name of the output device. In my case it would look like:

pacat -r --latency-msec=1 -d alsa_input.pci-0000_05_02.0.analog-stereo | pacat -p --latency-msec=1 -d alsa_output.pci-0000_05_02.0.analog-surround-51

4. Run script

By simply running the script now you should get correct loopback and with much less delay than using the default loopback module. Even better if you set this script to run at startup you won’t have to worry about it ever again.