BSD & Gaming

Christmas came early this year for me thanks to the generosity of my family. They know I haven’t had the cash to splurge on any new tech stuff in ages and I’ve been daydreaming about a new PDA or Tablet PC for a while. I just had to decide what I wanted.

I knew I didn’t want to spend the insane dollars required just to get an iPad with very limited features. In my mind things like USB ports, built in WiFi, and flash card readers should always be included as standard fare. Neither should getting any of those items be an excuse for sellers to donkey punch your wallet and suck higher fees out of you….  No thanks Apple you lost my interest with that business model!

Being old school some facts didn’t really sink in till I started researching my choices, I found that the days of stand alone PDA designs are long over, they’ve all been incorporated into cell phones.  Bleh! No more cell phones, they oughta’ be outlawed! Get off my lawn ya dam punks!

While netbooks are appealing, actually using the super tiny keyboards and looking at the small screens for any length of time lost my interest. Ah well, crosses netbooks off the selection list. Given my idiosyncratic preferences the choices are down to some sort of a tablet and picking what operating system I wanted.

Apple’s OS is definitely out since as I already stated I have zero interest in the whole iPad boondoggle. I also tend to stay as far away from Windows as I can. That left the final contender being an ANDROID based device.

Once I decided on a DROID based tablet I spent a many hours, days actually, looking at options, system specs, etc.  I kept getting drawn to the Zenithink tablets despite a few complaints I found, which included a particularly snarky magazine article deriding them. The article was dismissive of the ZT-180 because it wasn’t the omnipotent Apple-Killer they wanted it to be. While I can see their disappointment over not having a rival to flaunt at Apple, I couldn’t agree with their conclusions at all since they based them on silly expectations.  In my view if you take the ZT-180 for what it is and what it offers in it’s price range, then it makes a very nice choice with a broad range of abilities compared to some competitors.

Pricing from stateside dealers ran anywhere from fifty to eighty dollars more than dealers outside the U.S. so I ordered one from over-seas instead. Delivery took less than ten days to arrive from time of order. I’ve had it for almost two weeks now and it’s been a heck of a lot of fun to mess around with. Once I’ve had more time to kick it around and mod it to my preferences I’ll write up the details.

In conclusion Santa was very good to me this year and I’m really pleased!!  ANDROID ROCKS!

ZT-180 Wiki page from SlateDroid

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 !!

As promised I put together the details of my FO3 adventure and what it took to get it running. The WineHQ page had tons of good info on it, many of the people there had already done the hard part of figuring out what was needed. I just had a few minor changes for my hardware and that was about it.

I’m hoping Fallout: New Vegas will also work when I get my hands on it.

Details here – [LINK]

Ok I finally got it up and running, it’s far from ideal, there are definitely some bugs but it is running. I’ll put together and post the full details in a few days once I’ve had time to tweak it some more and see what I can accomplish.

Basically a combination of following the details found on WineHQ [LINK], some hacks, and lots of lost sleep. The sound or lack of it is the one major hurdle I’ve hit so far, the game doesn’t think there is a sound driver/card setup. However if you check the details on the WineHQ link above you will see it is a WINE bug not specific to Fallout 3 that I hope they will remedy in the not too distant future.

I have to say I’m thrilled just to have it running at all. Now if I can load up all my favorite mods and have them work I’ll be a happy post-apocalyptic camper! Say that three times fast and you get a free box of ‘Cheesy Poofs‘!

Time to sleep – g’night!

I tried, I really tried with Firefox 3 to learn to like the “Awesome Bar“. To begin with, the name bugged me, “awesome bar”… really?

Ok be good, that voice in my head told me in that sickening patronizing tone that is so prevalent in today’s politically correct culture.  The voice continued to badger me with guilt saying – just give it a try and stay open minded.

Grumbles…. fine fine whatever.

I’m a card carrying member of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t goddam fix it!” and the “Keep It Simple…ya Stupid idiot!” groups. SO, needless to say every time I hear about how someone somewhere gets what they think is a bright idea, usually in my world….it ain’t.

Well here I am many many, months later and my final conclusion? It sucks the big one. It almost never gives me anything related to what I want. Instead of saving me time it wastes it by feeding me useless crap to look at.  I end up typing the URL by hand if I know it or hitting up a search engine to find it.

Fine… it’s faster that way anyhow… so how do I get rid of it? Ahhhh the ever helpful about:config

Search for browser.urlbar.maxRichResults and change the value to “-1“, you can change it to “0” which most sites suggest, but I find it creates a slight flicker at the bottom of the URL entry field. By using a value of “-1” that flicker does not appear for me.

I’m putting together a little list of the FireFox add-ons I have found to be useful.

Please take a look at the page Recommended add-ons for FireFox.

The newest Firefox 3.6 makes a big change in how new tabs are loaded. The old way opens a new tab to the far right. The new way opens a tab immediately to the right, this bugs the hell out of me.

If you like or want to know more about the way version 3.6 handles tabbed browsing and the changes to come, then take a look at this page – [LINK]

For those dinosaurs like myself who prefer the old way it’s a simple enough fix.

Go to about:config and filter for browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent, then change the value to “FALSE”.

All done, PHEW! now I can go back to surfing the way I like it.

I put together a little list of the mods I felt were deserving of getting on a ‘must have’ list. The FO3 developers fell short in many areas and these mods really help bring your Fo3 game experience back on track.

Take a look at my list here – http://www.bsdgaming.com/must-have-mods-for-fallout-3 and try them for yourself.

I liked Mozilla before they split off Firefox and then renamed the suite from Mozilla to “Seamonkey” blegh! What a name. I refuse to use it, sorry in my opinion that name is just lame. I can’t believe they couldn’t come up with something better. Ah well… I rant…. blah blah blah.

Anyway… I’ve used tabbed browsing for ages and I prefer to have the close button to the far right in the tab bar. The recent changes of a new page button, a list all button, and having a close button for each and every tab is just annoying. I don’t need all that crap. So every time I setup firefox on a new computer here are two things I do right away.

First – edit the userChrome.css file for your profile by adding these lines after the
@namespace line:

.tabs-container > stack {display:none!important;}
.tabs-newtab-button {display: none !important;}

Second – go to about:config and filter for browser.tabs.closeButtons and change the value to “3“.

TADAH! Once again the tab bar is cleaned of all the junk I don’t want and my close button is on the right where I prefer it. This works great in FreeBSD so I assume it should work fine for windowsz and linux based os’s.