Fumblings with Ubuntu
A little while before christmas I was visiting my sister, and she gave me two trashy laptops that she never used. I mean reeeeally old stuff that needed a lot of work to be bootable. For some months they've sat on a shelf gathering dust. Until monday night...
I don't know why, but for some reason I picked one of them and decided to try Ubuntu again. I had already given it a try on my regular PC, with less than stellar results, but wanted to give it another try. After all, gotta be SOME reason why the fanbois (hello Stigg) keep yappin' about Linux like it's the second comming of Christ, yes?
Anyways, here's my monster of a laptop, running at a staggering 1.6GHz and sporting ALMOST 1 GB of RAM.
As you can see from this extremely grainy picture (courtesy of Apple Inc's stellar iPod camera) I have some keyboard problems. Not only is the C-key missing (still works, just feel weird tapping on the rubber beneath), but the K-key is loose and requires some extra effort to push, and three keys (comma, period and hyphen) are at the shuffled in the wrong spots. A little annoying, but livable.
The installation was fairly simple, though I bolloxed a bit around with the partition-bit more than strictly neccessary. An hour or two later I had the machine up and running... And was ready for bed. I had started on this project way too late in the day.
First thing to do the next morning was to add support for a PS3 controller and installed ZSNES. Thanks for the info, Stigg. ;)
I mucked a bit around with how to get the ROMs copied over from my Windows PC, but eventually managed using Ubuntu One to get them over. The games worked perfectly, though with choppy sounds. That I solved today by raising the audio frequency inside ZSNES from 32000Hz to 48000Hz. Sounds perfect on an external speaker now, though the internal speakers are slightly shot and produce some noise.
I tried to install Netflix, and did it after a little googling. It wasn't difficult, but it was a pointless gesture. The videos run so choppy that it's like watching a slideshow with audio. Not much fun at all.
Spotify was more fiddly to get installed, but once in it's been working perfectly.
One major problem:
Every once in a while the computer hangs. Can be 30 min after boot or three hours. No telling. But suddenly EVERYTHINg slows down more than a govermentally appointed commitee and nothing happens. I can for the most part move the mouse, though it get laggy sometimes. A window that is about to open will update and become more and more opaque, one frame at a time, with 20-40 seconds between each frame.
Sounds like something is suddenly hogging all the system resources, but I don't KNOW that. So far I've "soved" this by hard-rebooting (holding the powerbutton down 10-15 sec).
Any thoughts?
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Very nice gorm! Make sure you check out some of the free games on the software center too, a lot of them are very minimilistic and wont be a system hog.
Im not sure what the stutter issue is. If you opena terminal and type 'top' it will show you your system usage. I've never experienced that before. Maybe ubuntu is trying to update or something?
You can also run 'ps -ef' to see all the processes you are running. That should tell you if something is popping up during that time period. If there is, look at the numbers next to the process (should be a large number, in the thousands) then run kill -9 (without the <>). That will stop the process. Worst comes to worse, if you want me to take a look I can tell you how to enable ssh and ill get on your system and do some checks.
Thanks.
Got a question, though. When I use that 'ps -ef' it keeps updating continously? Cause if it doesn't it's king of pointless since it would take 20-30 minutes just to open Terminal once the system start to hang.
No, its a onetime command. You can write a simple script to get it saved off though. Open a terminal and type gedit psef.sh
That will open a simple text editor. Type in the folowing:
#! /bin/bash
While true
do
Ps -ef >> output.txt
Sleep 60
done
Don't capitlize any of that, im on my phone and can't lowercase easily. Save and close that. Type chmod 700 psef.sh and press enter.
Then type. /psef.sh &
don't close that terminal. This will make a file called output.txt which every 60 seconds writes the ps -ef output to the end of the output.txt file.
Sweet! Sounds like just the thing I need to see what's buggin'.
Question...
On my Windows PC I have a working examle of the ePSXe program (Playstation 1 emulator) that's also supposed to be able to work on Linux machines. Will it be possible to just zip it up and unpack in Ubuntu? Tthere was no installation required to get it set up initially, just unpacking og zip and rar files.
Or will I have to go through this long, annoying list of commands?
Probably not. You dont have any of the proper depencies already installed and its probably not cross compatible anyway. Try it though.
Spent waaaaay too long last night trying to install ePSXe. The installation wen't mostly without a hitch, but once things were all set up I ran into a problem. Some dependency files were missing (libgtk1.2) and they were almost impossible to aquire. The better part of two hours were spent googling and trying various fixes and downloads.
Eventually I found an old package that worked and ePSXe started up... Without sounds. Looks like I'll need to find some better sound plugins.
One thing bugs me...
I have my PS3 controller connected via an USB cable and it's worked flawlessly both in ZSNES and Ubuntu itself. But not in ePSXe. When I go to configure gamepad setup I can click on each "button" on the virtual representation in ePSXe, then the corresponding button on my controller... And nothing happens. Still works fine elsewhere, but it's as if ePSXe doesn't register its existence. :-/
:( I never did epsxe. I don't think I've ever actually touched an original Playstation before. You might want to look at this Emulator Instead.
I've had Ubuntu on my laptop for nine days now, and while it's perfectly functional and way more intuitive than I initially was afraid of, I think I'll stick to Windows. Not just because it's more in my comfort-zone, but mainly because running Linux excludes roughly 90% of my game library.
Yes, I've tried Wine, and while many games work well with it, a WHOLE bunch of other DON'T.
So last night I popped in my trusty Windows XP disc and gave it a spin... With no joy!
The disc booted well enough and I got the familiar blue screen with a lot of "XXXXXXX is loading" flashing at the bottom of the screen. Once that was done and I was about to start the installation proper things went south. I got a screen saying the installation process couldn't find any harddrives and only gave me the option of quitting the installation.
Some googling later (aprox 4 hours) I had found several "fixes" to this. None worked.
I've tried deleting and recreating partitions (and formating them, FAT32) using both the "try me" version of the Ubuntu install disk and FDISK on a DOS boot-disc I burned. I've tried using an application called KillDisk that's supposed to get rid of EVERYTHING.
It all ended in the exact same way: The installation can't find any partitions to install on. I've even DLed an XP disc from TPB just to test if it was my XP disc that was the problem. Same story.
My laptop has only one HDD, a 120GB thingie, and I'm trying to overwrite everything, NOT to make a dualboot.
Can any of you (mot likely Stigg) help me out?
Had to ditch XP and used a Win7 disc instead. Fixed the trouble by entering command prompt during the repair segment of the installation and typed "bootrec /fixmbr". A small eternity later I now have the laptop with a working version of Windows 7.
Guess I can reinstall with XP now, but seeing as the OS is running much smoother than I had feared I'm giving it a little while to see if things keep on going smoothly.
Ubuntu verdict:
Very streamlined OS with a lot of nice features, but seriously lacking in compatibility with games (despite Wine).
Ah sorry, I was gone this weekend. Glad to hear you got Windows back working.
Glad you at least gave Ubuntu a shot. It definitely isn't for everybody, and yea, wine is necessary for a lot of games. Hopefully with Steam moving to support it, it will begin to gain an interest in developers to make compatible games. Apparently the next set of Nvidia cards will be much better for Linux boxes, so that will be another push for developers to start adding *nix support.
I've been booting into Windows a little bit recently so I can use Dreamweaver easier. There aren't that many good WYSIWYG development platforms for HTML, and since my web development skill is lacking, it just makes it easier.
<3 Dreamweaver!
That and Fireworks are simply MARVELOUS programs for making nice-looking sites.
Hopefully the Steambox will push Linux-compatibility with games forward. I liked what I saw, but it excluded so much of what I wanted to do.