Something Odd!

It’s been a while since I updated here. Since my last update my expectations of Linux as a demo platform have gone up and up. First of all, I rediscovered Quake2 on Linux. It does run better in Linux than in Win95, just so long as you have no services running in the background. 🙂
Running Megademo IV in X and even running a few small intros in dosemu windows just goes to show that X can handle all the traffic, even on my old S3 Trio64 video card.
The new release of Cross-elf gets me wondering again about producing cross-platform demos in Linux. As does the port of PTC , although that does require a recompile for other platforms.
I think lots of demo-sceners probably voted in my quizlet for GGI. For a long while X was leading by about 15%, but then GGI took the lead by that margin! GGI will be good, but not now. Now we have X, and that’s “good enough” IMO for todays’ coding. Besides, having to patch your kernel to run a demo is a bit too much, and the yellow cursor just drives me mad!

Interesting day today.. Check out next years’ prospectus for my college and look at some of the pictures to find out 😉
There’s special news of an Irish Linux site coming, but it’s not quite ready IMO to be announced, *probably*. Check here again soon!

The GIMP is a great program isn’t it? Even a person of relatively little artistic skill such as myself can create fairly cool and creative logos with it! The above logo and button below were done tonight in a fit of inspiration!
BTW – news of BeOS stuff in the future. Mail me if you know anything about this OS. I’m still trying to figure out why I can’t mount my DOS partitions in it.. (probably something dead easy to fix which I overlooked!)
That reminds me, I’ll have to try and compile MegaDemo IV for BeOS soon.. 🙂

The random-url maker is working. It’s written in Perl, and picks 10 urls at random from a list. I’ll post the source soon. (yeah, bet ya can’t wait!)

Question for you all.. I moved my desktop machine to a position lying on its side. Is there any danger of the hard drives in it going bust because they’re lying on their side? One is a Quantum Fireball, the other a Bigfoot. Sorry.. completely off-topic 🙂
I have to go study for my graphics exam again.. Still, it is graphics. Might as well tell me to study demo coding techniques!
Get and install a copy of xfstt from Freshmeat now! My page and most pages on the Internet will look much nicer with it. The DemoNix logo looks completely different!
Cross-ELF, a package to use the same ELF 32 bit 386 object files on a variety of operating systems (Linux, Dos and Win32) has been updated to version 0.19. Most of the examples work fine except for the GL example which had problems (change GL to MesaGL and then problems linking to the MesaGL library). I urge all demo coders to try this. It does work and it’s cool to compile a demo once on Linux and see it run again in Dos and Win32 without recompile! A second computer to run Dos/Win95 is now looking more enticing. Develop in Linux and export the directory with Samba.. cool!
See those buttons at the side of the page? I’m going to code a little random generator that’ll change the buttons around from a list, so if you want your site featured email me the button (must be 88×31 in gif or jpg format and not more than 5k in size). They’ll stay up there between updates, anywhere between a few hours and days on end! Mail me at xeer@hotmail.com.

New version of Install-sendmail. Lots of changes, including support for FreeBSD and lots more Linux distributions, .fetchmailrc creation is more flexible, and a few bugs were cleared up!
Download Install-Sendmail-4.4.tar.gz

news://news.scene.org hasn’t got a feed for comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos at the moment. Can anyone suggest a news site they can feed off/post to? Mail Redhound at redhound@scene.org if you can help!
I just found out about a multi-platform demo available at http://come.to/mdiv2. I haven’t tried it yet but it compiles and runs on: Amiga (68k/PPC), BeOS (PPC/x86), Linux x86 and MSDOS. It should work on any platform with an ANSI-C compiler. Source code and binaries for the above platforms available at the above site! A big thank you to Juhapekka “Jiipee” Tolvanen who runs the “Linux Penguin Sticker Movement Official Homepage” at http://www.jyu.fi/~juhtolv/linux-sticker/ for telling me about the demo.
Seems like the Beginners Linux Guide has gotten off to a flying start after being mentioned on Freshmeat. Cool job Owen! 🙂

New design! It takes a little longer to load but I think it’s nicer on the eye. Not sure about having all those links at the side. Same for the guest book. Seemed like a good idea at the time but now I’m not so sure. Use the guestbook to tell me if it sucks please! 🙂
Two more exams to go. I’ll be finished on the 10th. Due to a cock-up by my college they’ll go on longer than I thought 🙁 Once they’re over I have plans for more stuff here so make sure you come back often!
Have a look at the quizlet to the right. If anyone has suggestions for questions and suitable answers please mail me or drop me a note in the guestbook.
I seem to be getting a number of hits every day which is very gratifying in itself, but why not make your mark felt on the page by adding an entry to the guest book? It’s quite simple and the guest book is on this page..
A big thank you to Jer at the PC Demo Fanclub from whom I borrowed some HTML ideas and found the link to the quizlet!

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.. 🙁