Yesterday I was waiting... and waiting... and waiting for the patching to complete. I am pretty sure that it just completely downloaded the entire game again. What is the point of having 8GB of install files sitting around if the whole game is just going to completely re-download itself?

The good news is that the patching completed successfully. I'm now backing up the ~/.darkfall directory before I mess with anything further. I do NOT want to go through that patching horror again! :). My next step after backup is complete will be to install gecko and try logging back in to see if I get an improved character creation screen or not. Then maybe I'll try IE6 if that doesn't work. I'll also try installing the latest DirectX9 to see if that has any improvements over the default DirectX support in WINE.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Darkfall Online. My next task once that was done was to try and get it to work with WINE on my Kubuntu 8.10 laptop. Well it's not quite as smooth as I would like, but I did manage to find a web page that got me started on the right path. But in the end I pretty much just started from scratch and I think I'm close.

Because I was going through so many iterations, I created a script that deletes the .darkfall wine directory and then reinstalls. With this script I'm able to get the client to login and patch. I say that because at the moment it is downloading about 9GB of data and its going to take a while to finish. I'll post a follow up to let everyone know if I managed to get it in a playable state.

Here is what I posted over at Max's page in his comments section.

I switched to Dreamhost this week. A few of my sites were down for a few days while I transfered everything around, but everything is up and running and seems fine now.

I decided to go with Dreamhost.com because they had a great price... better than the already good price at IXWebhosting. But they also had shell access with SSH. Wow is that a nice breath of fresh air! 

I was able to wget my old sites directly to the new ones. I was able to import my databases on the command line instead of having to deal with file size limitations in PHPMyAdmin. I was able to easily created a shared .htaccess file for all my sites with a few "ln -s" commands to a single .htaccess file. I've done the same thing with my php-cgi directory.

I even have bzr installed on Dreamhost. That will let me do some really nice backup, versioning, and change control for the sites. All told its not just a cheaper price, but the shell access and the tools that I'm able to use are going to make my life much easier.

Oh! One last thing. Dreamhost is carbon neutral! They have taken a number of steps to reduce power consumption and they purchase carbon credits to offset the rest. I'll post more about that later.

So once you have your MythTV setup and connected to your TV, how do you continue to manage it with just a remote control? Well there are lots of options. There is the obvious solutions like VNC. VNC is nice, but it can be cumbersome, even on a local network segment.

But for things that don't require a "desktop" I like to use X over SSH. It's faster and more responsive than VNC. One of my favorites is when I have to run mythtv-setup. It works great using ssh. To run it remotely from my Mythtv I run the following

ssh user@mythtvbox -CX mythtv-setup

The "-C" turns on compression, which generally speeds things up. The "X" tells ssh to forward an X Windows session for the app to your desktop. It works really nicely. 

You can even do this with the mythfrontend as well. Its just faster if you have some configuring to do than to run around and plug in a mouse and keyboard and sit on the floor 3 feet in front of your 50' LCD TV. But don't expect to be able to stream video that way! :)

WICD is a python based network manager. I first started hacking around with it on my Sharp Zaurus, running Zubuntu. In the meantime, I've updated to Kubuntu 8.10 which implements KDE4. The knetworkmanager app, which in KDE3 was lightyears ahead of Gnome's networkmanager for quite some time, has become a horrid completely unusable hunk of crap in KDE4. 

I can't even imagine how someone thought it was a good idea to change it. It stopped using kwallet, which meant that all of my current wireless keys had to be reentered. On top of that, the interface changed, requiring more mouse clicks and extra hassle. Then on top of that, it hardly ever shows the available wireless networks properly. I've heard that there is a lot more work being put into a new KDE4 version of knetworkmanager. I just hope they don't base it off of the current version. It is beyond crappy.

So here I was using a perfectly good wireless manager on my PDA and a perfectly crappy wireless manager on my laptop. Now who is the idiot? So today I switched to using WICD. I don't know why it took this long to get my butt in gear on this but now that I've done it, I'm very happy with my wireless management in KDE4 now.

I've been messing around with some new hardware to replace my old "BubbaTV" MythTV box. It still requires a ton of tweaking to get everything to work right. One of the things that I have noticed (besides the fact that Adobe's Flash program seems to be getting buggier and less stable over time) is that there is a new beta 64-bit Flash client available. Because the existing one barely works on my new quad core AMD MythTV box (sadly, its slower than Flash on some of my Linux PC's that are 5 years old) I decided to install it.

I had already found a script that installs Flash 10 32-bit directly from the Adobe website and had edited it to install the  64-bit version. Then I realized that Alejandro Quervo had pretty much already done the exact same thing first. So I'll give him all the credit :).

The sad thing is that 64-bit Flash seems to run about as crappy as the 32-bit Flash did before. Maybe I'll look into upgrading to the latest Nvidia drivers and see if that fixes things. 

Thanks to Alejandro I also just read that Sun Java has a 64-bit Firefox plugin now too! I'm install that right away in my build as well!

The consumerist.com has an article up about the DRM scheme for Gears of War. DRM is bad enough to begin with. But when you add a poor implementation of it on top of the existing DRM, you have a perfect storm of stupidity.

It turns out that the Gears of War DRM storm of stupidity means the game won't play at all after 1/28/2009. My suggestion is that everyone just break federal law and crack the DRM so you can play a game you legally purchased. I doubt anyone is going to get upset about a 3 year old game. 

DRM is so ridiculous. What a horrible burden on our society. I hope the media and game companies figure this out before they manage to turn us all into federal law breakers just to be able to watch video, listen to music, read books, use software, or even just play a frakkin' game. 

If you own a Zaurus and want a really great Linux distro for it (this means you are insanely geeky by the way), then head over to Omegamoon's blog. Using the Mojo project and their repository for Ubuntu on the ARM architecture he has put together a really nice distro. Its still only a Release Candidate (RC) but its working well enough for me to really play around with it.

The really important thing that Omegamoon did was to create a multiple distro boot kernel. With it, you can have multiple partitions on the internal drive, a CF card, or an SD card. At first he didn't have instructions for how to load it up on an internal drive, but I figured out that as long as you get the drive formated and the files on their that his kernel will see the distros on the internal card and list them for bootup. 

Now, thanks to Omegamoon, I can have Zubuntu, Debian, Angstrom, etc... all on my little Zaurus. Sure there are some little issues here and there, but overall its pretty awesome. 

I've been having the absolute worst Firefox experience in Kubuntu recently. I can't pinpoint the exact time that it started but it got a lot worse when I upgraded to Flash 10 (what a hog! Adobe seriously? Flash 10 runs about as well as a Microsoft OS does!).

Once Flash 10 was there scrolling in Firefox became impossible. It was as if my whole computer was locked for about 5 seconds. Then it would scroll... slowly. Painfully even.

After poking around in Google for a while and not finding much in the way of solutions, I decided to try some new video drivers. I uninstalled all of the Ubuntu Nvidia drivers and downloaded and installed the 177.80 drivers. 

Wow! What a huge difference. Not only that, but almost all of my issues with hibernation (it was intermittent, but sometimes it didn't work) are gone now too. 

One thing I did run into was that I didn't uninstall the Ubuntu Nvidia packages and just ran the Nvidia installer. After a reboot, the Nvidia drivers didn't load properly. the i2c_core module was not loading, unless I unloaded and reloaded the Nvidia driver. Once I uninstalled all the Nvidia related stuff from the Ubuntu repository and reinstalled the latest Nvidia driver all those problems were resolved.