Somewhere out there!

I was trying a Windows Live game on Steam yesterday and got the above error. After a lot of googling I discovered that I needed to install Game for Windows Live. There is version 1.2 and 2.0. Once this were installed the game run correctly.

I tried several methods last night including Unetbootin, and this is the one that worked best.

• Using Windows to prepare USB install of Ubuntu 8.10
• Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting

Basically copy the ISO on the USB root directory, add vmlinuz and initrd.gz from main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/. Then add syslinux.cfg with:

default vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.gz

If you have boot problems you might also need to run install-mbr /dev/sda from the mbr package.

I keep smacking into this issue. So a couple notes to myself for future reference.

• Tinydns / DJBDNS on Ubuntu Hardy Heron
• upstart breaks inittab

Before install touch /etc/inittab and afterwards add this to /etc/event.d/svscan:

start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5

stop on runlevel 0
stop on runlevel 1
stop on runlevel 6

respawn
exec /usr/bin/svscanboot

A few useful vim indenting links:

• Toggle auto-indenting for code paste
• How to stop auto indenting
• Turn off per-filetype auto indentation
• Getting cool auto-indent in vim

This is the most useful bit when pasting into a vim window.

nnoremap :set invpaste paste?
imap
set pastetoggle=

Lanuchy is a quicksilver-like key stroke application lanucher for linux and windows. Very cool.

Shared subtrees – in depth look at bind mounts.

Windows* client CIFS behavior can slow Linux* NAS performance:-

We have compared the performance of Windows* and Linux*-based CIFS* (Samba*) servers for digital media applications and found that the ext3*-based Linux server’s throughput was up to 53% lower than the Windows server’s–although both used identical hardware (Figure 1). An XFS*-based Linux server had roughly the same performance as the Windows server. Our investigation shows that the difference lies in the filesystem allocation and handling of sparse files. In particular, the Windows client makes an assumption that the CIFS fileserver uses NTFS*, a filesystem that assumes files will be data-full (not sparse). This contradicts a fundamental assumption of ext3–that files are sparse–and leads to fragmentation of files and degraded performance on ext3. Further, we’ve seen this behavior manifested for a broad range of media applications including iTunes*.

Check out this video from oblong. Very cool future-is-now operating system.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

From mike.

SGI Makes Molecule Supercomputer From Intel Atoms

Silicon Graphics SGI is showing off a concept supercomputer that could pack as many as 10,000 Intel Atom processors into a single rack. The name SGI gave the concept computer was fittingly cute too, calling it the Molecule.

According to ExtremeTech’s report, the Molecule could offer the computing power and memory bandwidth of more than 750 high-end PCs, while consuming less than half the power and occupying no more than 1.4 percent of the physical space.

Couple useful articles from Andy Millar.

• Concise and clear explaination of linux load averages.
• Bug fix suggestion for VMware server which can hang on installation. Remove the floppy device. I’ve got another issue where a linux vm on vmware server hangs on startup and I’ll have to try this.