Monthly Archives: May 1998

Here’s a nice little dos 4k demo, par-tv.zip. I like it and it runs very nicely in dosemu too!
Version 0.1.3 of the ALSA driver has been released. (I had /dev/dsp probs with it though..)
Besides that, nothing much else. I had lots of fun getting Linux to run on an 8meg 386SX16 without a harddrive. Almost got svnc to run too. No mouse though 🙁

2 down and 4 exams to go. I even mentioned Linux in my graphics exam when asked about graphical effects in movies. I just _couldn’t_ resist Titanic and Linux 🙂
I had a slight problem compiling PTC yesterday. I downloaded source.zip instead of source.tar.gz (I was going to try it in VC5 as well..) There’s a shell script and makefile included but they wouldn’t run. That’s solved (MSDOS characters..) but even with source.tar.gz it complained. Here’s what you do:
In the source directory, before you do anything, type:

mkdir ../library

mkdir ../library/linux

mkdir ../library/linux/gcc
and then

sh ./linux
and everything should work fine!
When you’re compiling the demos and example programs make sure the path to libvga.so is correct. Mine is at /usr/lib/ instead of /lib/
Hope that helps!
On a totally different note, take a look at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/memory-tuning.txt for some nice hints on fine tuning your Linux box. I have a 32 meg machine here and after trying the suggested setting I have around 3 megs of RAM left all the time and the system appears faster.
Why aren’t you all posting on news://news.scene.org/coders.os.linux then, eh? The people who post there know their stuff (well, except for me, but then, you always get exceptions 😉 so let’s have some good demo coding chat.. Anyone wanna try code a scrolly and some effects on the X root ? That would be kinda cool, something along the lines of Flush by TBL and Analogue (demo on the Win95 desktop.. somewhere on ftp://ftp.skynet.stack.nl/pub/demos) but better 🙂 It can be done. Linux does multitask, and if you tune your memory as suggested above it probably won’t throw out the bckground demo in a hurry!
Back to the study.. 🙁

Not bad, I lasted just over ten days without updating. Only lasted a day though without the modem.. ho hum!
I added a page with a screenshot of my WindowMaker desktop. You might like to have a look at it. I’m running two demos at the same time in two xdos sessions.. 🙂
There’s a news server dedicated to demo scene discussion groups now open at news.scene.org. They have a group called coders.os.linux which I posted a message in last week. Not many replies though even considering what I posted 😉
You all probably know that ALSA has gone up to version 1.0.2 and it works nicely with my AWE64. My fault originally, my conf file wasn’t setup properly.
If you have a 3dfx take a look at this dos demo(TG98 demo winner), Dimension. It’s over 4 megs in size and IMO not worth downloading over a modem but the last part of the demo is nice – nice use of colours in textures and light-balls. The first part is standard “flying-through-space” fare..
Clanlib, the graphics and sound lib for multimedia coding on Win32 and Linux has reached version 0.1.4 and although it doesn’t yet support sound in Linux, it could be worth keeping an eye out for.
Have you read about all the trouble MS got themselves into recently? On slashdot a comparison was made between MS and cars.. Check it out at Microsoft Car. Very good 🙂
As soon as my exams are over I’m going to implement some ideas for the page. Keep an eye on this space!
BTW – exams are on until 5th June..

A new page for TSN has been done up. Follow the link on the left.

Minor release of TSN. I forgot one perl script, “configure.fonts.pl”, in the dist package so it’s now included and the licence in each perl file was placed incorrectly. Get the new package: tsn-1.0.1.tar.gz
I’ll write up a proper page for TSN tommorow.
Wow.. my head’s spinning, I need to get some sleep.

Source code for my project, TSN is now available! Click on tsn-1.0.0.tar.gz to download the 137k package. Make sure you read the INSTALL file though! Comments are very welcome at xeer@hotmail.com!