BSD & Gaming

Just released, PC-BSD 8.2 [Hubble Edition] go get it now!!

PC-BSD 8.2 changes include the following:

• FreeBSD 8.2-Release
• KDE 4.5.5
• Added ability to select file-system type and encryption during auto-partitioning
• Able to toggle between MBR/GPT partitioning
• Various bug fixes to the wireless / network managers

Read the release notes here – [LINK]
Download your free copy here – [LINK]
Download via BitTorrent here – [LINK]

(For a full list of changes in this release refer to the changelog.)

FreeBSD News is taking a poll asking people what sort of installer do you like to use now that there are more options available in the BSD community.

To get a better idea of what BSD users like the poll offers four general options of  ….only a text based installation, only a graphics based installer, an option to choose either, or it doesn’t matter either way.

Make your voice heard and go vote here! – [LINK]

Articles Include:

• ZFS and FreeBSD
• Network transparent rate limitation with ipfw
• Building an iSCSI storage with BSD
• How to setup a USB Memory stick for installing a pfSense SoHo Firewall/Router
• Mutt On OS X
• The Missing Links to Strategic Implementation
• Browser Wars
• Interview with Dan Langille
• PC-SYSINSTALL – A new system installer backend for PC-BSD & FreeBSD

Get it fresh off the press by going to BSDMagazine.Org for your free copy now.

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Back in 2000 when Red Alert 2 was first released I fell in love with it immediately.
While I enjoyed the previous C&C game Tiberian Sun very much and still play it occasionally, it just didn’t capture the imagination like Red Alert 2 did.

Growing up in the last gasp of the Cold War I can still remember doing Civil Defense safety drills in elementary school. Those years made a strong impression on me, the fear of war with the Soviet Union weighed heavily on everyone’s mind and even though as children we may not have understood all the details we knew it would be something bad. In fact to this day any book, movie, or game that reflects the feel or imagery of the Cold War era still evokes an emotional response and fires my imagination. That connection has even led to a need to collect some Civil Defense relics in recent years… go figure. There is something about that iconic CD logo that I’m drawn to. Anyway enough of that I’ll get back on track about playing Red Alert 2 on BSD using WINE.

The ‘Good News’ :

Playing Red Alert 2 on BSD [ FreeBSD or PC-BSD ] is possible and it seems to run well now that I actually have it installed.

The ‘Bad News’ :

I have not been able to get RA2 to install easily. I still don’t know what the issue is but for whatever reason trying to get RA2 to install properly straight from the CD just isn’t happening. I keep getting errors preventing it from completing the install. I won’t go into all the gory details but basically I gave up and did what the Ubuntu Linux folks did, installed it on a Winblows box – then copied it to my WINE drive.   @*&# !!! Bah!

Once the installation ‘goat rope’ was over I ran into issues with the damned cd copy protection crap, I hate games that insist on the CD being in the drive in order to play – it doesn’t prevent piracy it just exposes the original install cd to potential for damage. Needless to say I had to continue to take the Ubuntu communities lead and follow their advice on countering that nonsense.

Red Alert 2 is over a decade old, but I think it is still a great game and worth the effort to install. I realy prefer RA2 versus what I consider to be the ‘over the top’ cartoon graphics and general silliness of RA3. If anyone ever finds a ‘finished’ conversion mod making RA3 into a likeness of RA2 please let me know. I found a few mods that are or were being worked on but found nothing complete.

WineHQ’s information about Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Ubuntu documentation for Red Alert 2 under WINE – [LINK]

Wikipedia information on Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Red Alert Den’s custom maps, missions, and misc. files – [LINK]

Articles Include:

• Drupal on FreeBSD – part 3
• Email MX server in FreeBSD – Confguring FreeBSD as a mail MX server with Postfx
• Installing NGINX and PHP 5.3.x on FreeBSD 8.1
• Text Terminal magic with tmux
• Writing ‘bots using XMPP
• How to quickly make a bootable USB stick with FreeBSD
• FreeBSD and simple char device driver for real PCI-hardware
• BSD’s and Solaris on the Desktop. Are they ready to serve?
• Games Geeks Play!
• Why can’t offce employees get along with open source offce suites?

Get it fresh off the press by going to BSDMagazine.Org for your free copy now.

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SO… I cooked up a fresh install of PCBSD on my laptop and everything was great except for one issue, the system could not see the secondary drive. Normally that’s no problem since it is a WinXP ntfs drive. I seldom boot up XP, but on occasion it is helpful if I can read that drive and access the data.

I looked around the net and found some answers for my SATA problems.

Following the instructions I found I ran the following commands:

# pciconf -w -b pci0:0:31:2 0×92 0xff
# camcontrol reset 1
# camcontrol rescan 1

All of a sudden it worked I could see both my hard drives.

<Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00 SBDOC7DP> at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,ada0)
<>                                                                     at scbus0 target -1 lun -1 ()

<FUJITSU MHW2120BH 00400013> at scbus2 target 0 lun 0 (ada1,pass5)
<>                                                         at scbus2 target -1 lun -1 ()

However I did not know this was going to affect me in other ways. Once I enabled the second hdd, my system took a performance hit and everything had a slightly sluggish feel. I really noted the performance hit when I fired up WINE and launched Fallout3, it was horrible the game was so lagged out it was unplayable.

I don’t need to access the second hdd that bad so I said to hell with it and returned the settings back to where they were. As soon as I did everything speeded up and the game worked fine.

Here’s my question… is there anything I can do that would allow access to the second hdd but not lower performance?

As far as settings go everything is stock BSD 8.1 out of the box and #pciconf -lvbc shows the following ICH8 controller information:

isab0@pci0:0:31:0:      card=0xff001179 chip=0×28158086 rev=0×03 hdr=0×00
vendor     = ‘Intel Corporation’
device     = ’82801HEM (ICH8M-E) LPC Interface Controller’
class      = bridge
subclass   = PCI-ISA
cap 09[e0] = vendor (length 12) Intel cap 1 version 0
features: SATA RAID-5, Mobile, 4 PCI-e x1 slots, SATA RAID-0/1/10
atapci0@pci0:0:31:1:    card=0xff001179 chip=0×28508086 rev=0×03 hdr=0×00
vendor     = ‘Intel Corporation’
device     = ’82801H (ICH8 Family) Ultra ATA Storage Controllers’
class      = mass storage
subclass   = ATA
bar   [10] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0x1f0, size  8, enabled
bar   [14] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0x3f4, size  1, enabled
bar   [18] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0×170, size  8, enabled
bar   [1c] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0×374, size  1, enabled
bar   [20] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0x18a0, size 16, enabled
ahci0@pci0:0:31:2:      card=0xff001179 chip=0×28298086 rev=0×03 hdr=0×00
vendor     = ‘Intel Corporation’
device     = ‘Mobile SATA AHCI Controller’
class      = mass storage
subclass   = SATA
bar   [10] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0x18d8, size  8, enabled
bar   [14] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0x18cc, size  4, enabled
bar   [18] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0x18d0, size  8, enabled
bar   [1c] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0x18c8, size  4, enabled
bar   [20] = type I/O Port, range 32, base 0x18e0, size 32, enabled
bar   [24] = type Memory, range 32, base 0xf7504000, size 2048, enabled
cap 05[80] = MSI supports 4 messages enabled with 1 message
cap 01[70] = powerspec 3  supports D0 D3  current D0
cap 12[a8] = SATA Index-Data Pair

If any guru out there can help with this puzzle I’d be grateful !!

I’ve been pretty lazy about updating my laptop with the latest version of PCBSD v8.1 and only got around to it the other day. I decided to go with a clean install this time since I had done an upgrade on previous occasions keeping everything intact. I figured the system could use a good cleaning since I tend to be a pack rat with all sorts of downloads. The fresh install forces me to do decide what is worth keeping out of the junk I accumulate.

The setup was flawless, I chose to do mine from a USB flash drive and had no problems getting everything working the way I wanted. The PBI files for the software I use are really convenient since ports can kill some serious time, not to mention the potential frustration when ports get borked up from conflicts.

I’m a happy camper with my fresh install of PCBSD (FreeBSD 8.1) and loving it so far! My laptop is getting to be a bit outdated however my resources for anything new are non-existent and it gets the job done. Plus it has just enough muscle to play most games with decent graphics so I really cannot complain.

Laptop Specs:

Toshiba X205-S9349
Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 1.80GHz
Nvidia 8600M GT
2Gig Ram

I recently bought Dawn of War II on Steam. I haven’t kept up with gaming news and information much at all in the last few years so  I was surprised to find how different DoW2 was than the first release. There’s no base building, you get a handful of squads instead of armies, and the game is primarily focused on the campaign mode of play. Also, there’s no skirmish mode and you are limited to the Space Marine faction, the other races are not available unless you play online or choose the last man standing mod…. Meh to that.

I personally don’t care to go back and replay campaigns once I have gone through them, there are no surprises so to me it’s no fun, because of that and no skirmish mode option I won’t get much replay value out of the game. It’s ok though …I can get my W40K fix by going back to DoW: SoulStorm.

Photoshop is a really powerful application, and the recent versions have some pretty amazing capabilities. The downside for somebody like me is the cost of it. While many software applications give discounts to students, that doesn’t help me because my student days are long since over. Even if I had a student discount it still requires an investment which I need for other things given the state of the economy. If I was a professional in a position where the expense was necessary it’d be worth it. However I’ve been using a free open source alternative that does everything I’ve needed so far.. The Gimp.

The Gimp has been around a really long time, I’ve been using it off and on for ages now. While I love the fact that there is a version available for FreeBSD, PCBSD, or the various linux flavors, there are even downloads compatible with Windows making it available to a huge audience. It is a quite powerful image manipulation program in it’s own right with plenty of free plugins, filters, and brushes to suit your needs.

The Gimp’s layout can throw people off balance if they are used to photoshop. Even though many of the features and tools are the same in function, they may have a different name or place to find them that can be confusing for photoshop users. There is a version available that tries to ease that learning curve with a more familiar layout called GimpShop. Since I am not a photoshop user I’ve never tried GIMPshop, but for someone interested in trying an alternative or wanting to transition over to free software it might be worth looking into.

The Gimp definitely has a slot in my “must have software” list and I think if you give it a shot I believe you’ll like it as well.

The Gimp – [LINK]

GimpShop – [LINK]

FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE is available.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

-zfsloader added
-zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14
-NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities
-UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support
-SMP support in PowerPC G5
-BIND 9.6.2-P2
-sendmail updated to 8.14.4
-OpenSSH updated to 5.4p1
-GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5

Announcement – [LINK]

Release notes – [LINK]

Download via official BitTorrent – [LINK]

Download via FTP mirrors – [LINK]