Summit, Con, Release...

The last weeks before my holiday have been quite crazy for me. SUSECon, openSUSE Summit and of course the openSUSE 13.1 release. Meanwhile, the openSUSE Board Elections have started... I decided to really try and stay away from things for two weeks. I'm not particularly good at that and I did a few thingies but I managed not too shoddy. Saw a museum, did pick up running again, watched some movies...

Now, back to SUSECon, the Summit and the release!

SUSECon,oS Summit

First things first, SUSECon and the openSUSE Summit were awesome. It is always wonderful how much energy these events give - so many enthusiastic people, ideas, plans...



On the press side during SUSECon, I kept myself busy with talking to 7 of the journalists, doing and arranging interviews or finding answers to their questions about openSUSE. And with Robert Schweikert I presented a session (twice) about the collaboration between SUSE and openSUSE. ITWire reported on this talk. We ran a booth at SUSECon as well and it was, as always, great to talk to people there.

On Wednesday was a Pirate Party, Thursday a visit to the Epcot park. I'm not a huge fan of such parks but it was entertaining enough to get food there... And I had great company!



At the Summit I presented two sessions, one about handling a booth and one about building local communities. In both cases, there was a lot of awesome feedback from the room and at the Orlando airport and further during the trip back I worked the suggestions in the presentations for further sharing. Thanks! I also really appreciated the private conversations about these topics which took place later on.



But the most important thing, for me, was meeting old friends again. Andi, Drew, the openSUSE Forms guys, the Greek delegation and many more. And bumping into new people like Navid and Christopher, two guys who run a media production company and want to help out openSUSE with web things. That's where the inspiring conversations happen. There were discussions about how to proceed with the Summit, how to handle community building in the Americas but also the great town hall meeting where I presented the 'Karmafication' idea for our infrastructure. This is something I might blog about later.

After the openSUSE Summit was over, Alex, Stella, Ludwig and myself went for a beach trip, video below. It was fun - although we drove an order of magnitude longer than that we actually spend on the beach ;-)

The release

Then the release, on the day I landed back from the US of A (and yes, they lost my luggage, luckily it is back). I think it went great, and seeing the response from the press I think others agree.

Now, we're debating changes to our development process on the mailing lists. Let's see how that goes!

Wine gaming on Nouveau

In my previous blog, I mentioned that I was finally free of proprietary drivers. But that story wasn't completely over. While basic 3D acceleration and things like glxgears worked fine, wine did not run Windows games yet. So here's a report on the progress since then and some tips on how to get these things to work!

I'm not exactly a gamer. I play two games, each of them approximately 6-7 times a year. One is natively available for Linux and these days even Open Source: Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, an online 1st person shooter. The second game I have to play through wine: Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. And if I could, I would be playing a third game: Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour. Which, according to Wine's App DB should work fine. Doesn't for me, unfortunately - despite spending more hours on getting the game to work than I would play it this year...

Anyway, let's move to some (Wine) Proprietary-Gaming-on-Linux tips you'd need. Both with and without Nouveau, by the way.

RTCW and similar old, closed games

Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Linux. You want sound? And you have a modern Linux? Your game depends on an ancient sound driver system called oss... You need to install the alsa-oss layer and make sure you have the kernel stuff loaded for oss. Oh and you can forget about running both a music player and RTCW or another game which requires this compatibility, won't work. It is one or the other!

Now, the commands. Install whatever oss stuff you can find:

zypper in alsa-oss alsa-oss-32bit

then add to your /etc/rc.d/boot.local:

modprobe snd_seq_oss
modprobe snd_mixer_oss
modprobe snd_pcm_oss

That should give you all the auditory gore you need ;-)

update: I didn't know about aoss which provides an even better solution for the sound. It is simple: start et with "aoss et.x86" and that should already take care of it... It mixes now with other sound as well so you can play music while you frag away. Read more here.

Does the game work with Nouveau? Sure, but I experience occasional instability, as in - hard freezes of the system. I recommend enabling the sysrq keys and using REISUB to avoid data loss. I'll be waiting a bit until it is all more stable until I play that game more.

Gaming with Wine

I'm going to assume you managed to purge the proprietary NVidia driver from your system (yes, this can be quite hard actually) and have nouveau installed and working already. That gives you 3D effects with Compiz/GNOME Shell/KWin/etc and some other basic openGL stuff. Not enough for windows games in wine, however.

I wanted to play Warcraft III and it took me forever to get that working. Turns out error messages like "Can't load Data.dll" or Put the DVD in the drive have little to do with the actual problem. Most of the problems turned out to be related to missing openGL stuff. I had to install the experimental Mesa drivers developed & maintained by Johannes Obermayr in his home project. You should be able to download his Mesa here (although at the time of writing there was a problem with OBS and it gave an error). You will also need some other packages so I suggest to switch the systempackages to those from his repository (see screenshot).

Getting it to work

Once you've installed all new nouveau-stuff, reboot and configure wine by modifying user.reg (in ~/.wine) adding the following under the "Direct3D" header:

"OffscreenRenderingMode"="backbuffer"

like this:

[Software\\Wine\\Direct3D] 1331547889
"DirectDrawRenderer"="opengl"
"Multisampling"="enabled"
"OffscreenRenderingMode"="backbuffer"
"RenderTargetLockMode"="auto"
"StrictDrawOrdering"="enabled"
"UseGLSL"="enabled"
"VideoMemorySize"="256"

PlayOnLinux and winetricks both have this as options you can enable via their GUI's.

For sound to not block your soundcard, use pulse-audio and its alsa plugin:

zypper in alsa-plugins-pulse alsa-plugins-pulse-32bit

Conclusion

It is all rather painful but in the end it's possible to get nouveau to work with Wine (and other) games. But I don't recommend moving over to nouveau if you play games and if you're not desperate to get rid of proprietary drivers (and you usually only are if you want a newer kernel for its hardware support or greatly care about that Freedom stuff). It's not completely ready yet and will give you some issues.

On the other hand, we're getting there. I'm quite happy to see progress in the area of free drivers for both NVIDIA and AMD graphics hardware. If only NVIDIA would be helping the efforts to create open drivers...

counters

A kind soul (Hosein-LS from linuxshare.org) pointed out to me that this persian KDE wiki page has some wickedly cool looking Release Counters:

click

Two pretty pics:




Basically, the text could probably be improved, probably using our 'be free' slogan, saying X days to release of KDE SC 4.4 and Be Free with KDE SC 4.4 or something. But we'll surely rock anyone with the new release ;-)

Either way, I don't know anything else about who did this besides the fact they DID - as I don't read farsi/persian, but I do wanna say: you guys and girls rock, please rock on!

(and do send me an email and get in contact, esp if you plan on doing more stuff like this hehe. google will tell you my email as I'm horribly uncarefull with it)

kwin screencast

Hi everyone,

For a presentation I gave last saturday I made a KWin screencast showing off KDE beta 2 stuff. Quality in Youtube is rather low, but viewable (with annotations). Here you go.

And here's blib.tv (better quality & oggfile available).

Enjoy.

edit: blip.tv is still transcoding the video to a flash-format, so you can now only view the ogg file if your system/OS is capable of viewing that format. I wouldn't know why it wouldn't be as the video format doesn't have any associated costs or royalties and has been around for years. But if it is not available for you, you just have to wait for the flash version to be ready...

Now in better quality...

Hi everyone,

For those interested, here some locations were you can get the full-sized full quality videos I made a few days ago:
Niels v Mourik was nice enough to provide me with some diskspace and bandwith. Kudos!

Plasma video (22 mb)
KWin video (32 mb)
Dolphin video (27 mb)
Gwenview video (11 mb)
video with other applications (40 mb)

And another (clearly very) nice person, Mel Mazzone, put them here.

Further, here the videos on Youtube in much better quality (thanks to Quintesse:

Plasma


If video does not work try this link

KWin


If video does not work try this link

Dolphin


If video does not work try this link

Gwenview


If video does not work try this link

Other applications like Konsole, systemsettings, Dragonplayer, Skanlite, KSysguard and more.


If video does not work try this link

New screencasts

Next week will be the Dutch Ubuntu Release Party. Not sure where that link points too - it shows the dutch release party page for me, but being a rather generic URL - www.releaseparty.eu - I guess one could expect to get a local page served or something. If that's true it would be both neath and annoying.

Anyway. I also gave a talk about KDE 4.1 at Guademy in Valencia (Spain) a couple of weeks ago. It went relatively well, except for the live preview. Shouldn't have done that - not only didn't it work very well, it also destroyed the whole 'flow'. Got lost, so to say. That's why for the Ubuntu Release Party I've spend the last 2 days making screencasts of what I want to show. Took a lot of time so I began uploading them to Youtube. They were made in 1024x768 resolution (My little laptop uses that res natively, and I hope to encounter beamers with the same resolution) for a sharp image.

Guess what Youtube did to them... Yeah, they look horrible.

Now I want to put them online somewhere. But they are - well, what is big? 100 mb together. So, first I decided to create a torrent. Which can be found HERE. Please seed, and ehm - I have a horribly slow upload so it's gonna take a while...

I will also try to find a location to put the files online for faster and easier download, but for now the torrent is all I have.

If you insist on viewing the Youtube videos (or just can't wait a couple of days until the torrent is done downloading :D) just go to my profile on Youtube.

Edit: that was quick - already 4 ppl on torrent. One even KTorrent 3.0.2, I wonder why that person wants to see the videos ;-)
Anyway, if they all share, speed might not be that bad.

Edit2: apparently, it's videos not video's ;-) And screencasts would be even more correct, right?
Downloading the screencasts should be pretty fast now, btw, 25 seeders...

Bugs

While making screenshots for my presentation, I found a few bugs. First in the file open/save dialog, where drag'n'drop to the bookmark bar on the left didn't work. Yes, DID not, Rafael Fernández López fixed it a few hours after my report ;-)

Now there's a weird problem in dolphin, which I stumbled upon while I was making a screencast - the Columns view doesn't work properly with Split screen mode - see the Youtube video:



As there's a huge bugfixing and coding frenzy going on (do you guys ever sleep? I think there's an average of 100 commits/hour right now, been like that since yesterday). So I hope this gets fixed too. Rafael is already in contact with Trolltech about the "horizontal scrolling in Dolphin's Columns view goes with 1 pixel per scroll" issue. Boy, is that a busy guy :D

Anyway. If someone has a working Dolphin, I'd love to see a screencast like the one I made earlier - but then with Oxygen style, and also with some Columns view animations.
I can't get kde to compile right now - which makes sense with our Special Extra Extra Binary Incompatibility Day - but you know, I've got a presentation tomorrow and I want to show off some stuff ;-)

Back to the (too much) work I have...