A decent FPS for the EeePC

Because of the limited graphical performance of the EeePC, FPS choices are rather limited, the best I've come across so far is AssaultCube. It's a modified version on Cube that runs very well right away on the EeePC. In order to get better frame rates, you do have to tweak down some of the graphics, but overall it played very well. So if you're looking for a decent FPS to play on the EeePC, do give AssaultCube a go.

Tips for playing wormux on the EeePC

Due the screen resolution limitations of the EeePC, many applications will have windows taller than the screen. This is typically solved by using Alt+Drag to move the window around, typically so you can click the buttons at the bottom.

This resolution also posed some interesting problems for some games, while most games would happily run at 800x480 or 640x480, games such as wormux expects the minimum resolution to be 800x600. So running wormux on the EeePC has a few problems.

Fist off, it's necessary to modify wormux's ~/.wormux/config.xml file to set the desired resolution:
width 800
height 480
full_screen 1

After this you should be able to start the game nicely fullscreen. In the player selection screen you'll see the first problem crop up. Your ok & cancel button are not visible, they are lower down & can't be seen. You can overcome this easily using the keyboard, Enter for OK and Esc for Cancel.

Finally the last obstacle is in actually playing the game. Your right click weapon selection menu is too large & goes beyond the top of the screen. Making it impossible to choose the topmost weapons (such as the Bazooka which incidentally is the most common weapon of choice). Fortunately this last problem is solved using the keyboard shortcuts F1 through F5, these keys will allow you to cycle through and select a weapon/gadget from the 5 categories.

Enjoy blowing up them gimps. :)

Gaming on the Asus EeePC

I figured out that Asus EeePC worked quite well as a portable game machine. I installed Dgen & Snes9x into it, they work great. Playing Contra on it was excellent. I also installed a host of native linux games that all worked out very well.

Here's a list of em:
- abuse
- armagetron
- neverball
- pinball
- supertux
- wormux

I just can't get enough of wormux, it's excellent.

My new toy - Asus EeePC

Wow, it's been a while since I last posted. Been bz with work & haven't had much time to hack. Over new year, I decided to get myself an Asus EeePC to use as my blog anywhere machine & Starbuck companion. I already have a Toshiba notebook, but at 14.1" & weighing over 4kg with the adapter, it was just too cumbersome to carry around.

I ordered a 4G 701 Galaxy Black EeePC and it arrived within a week hand delivered to my doorstep. Even YouTube cannot describe how truly small, light & portable this thing is. The first thing that strikes me is how impossibly small the keyboard is. It almost looks impossible to type on, even with my relatively small hands. So I'm typing this post to prove to myself that is does work with a little practice.

Overall the OS works just fine for it's intended market. The PDA like icon interface is fine for everyday use but I find it lacking any depth, so I quickly began hacking it into something more usable. I decided to stick with the Xandros because it's very fast & designed to minimize writes to the SSD. Other distros will no doubt need much tweaking in this area.

So this is what I decided to do for now:
- Activate the icewm start menu.
- Populate it with my preferred menus.
- Added essential firefox add-ons
- Run the system update

Overall I found the EeePC to be excellent for me. I'll definitely recommend it to anyone looking an ultra portable companion to their PC or notebook that has wifi and a decent keyboard. In fact I'm so taken by it that I'm posting my Toshiba up for sale.

Get GNU/Linux

I came across these interesting sites lately & I had to share:

get GNU/Linux is a site that really help to explain why there's a large community running GNU/Linux & why someone should consider switching to Free Software.

Compare Distros is a site that makes some comparisons between the major distros and helps potential users choose the best fit. I have to agree that there is no perfect distro & there shouldn't be one.

Compiz bug workaround

Couple of days ago I mentioned a bug in Compiz that made kscreensaver not cover the whole screen as it should. I accidentally discovered the solution to this problem by way of a botched upgrade to Compiz 0.6.2.

Here's the story, I read on a adamw's blog that the backports for the new Compiz and Compiz Fusion releases have hit the 2008 repositories. Of course I immediately jumped in to upgrade. Well, things didn't go too well. After upgrading I found compiz-fusion refused to start. It complained that ccp was still on the old version, I couldn't figure out what happened, so I gave up, uninstalled the new stuff & installed the original back but not before I had a quick look around ccsm to see what's new. This is where I found an entry I didn't notice before, this is where I found my workaround.

OK enough history, this is it; Window Decoration -> Decoration windows: any & !name=kdesktop_lock

Basically, this completely solved the kscreensaver issue. I'm not too upset with the bad upgrade, the only reason I wanted to upgrade was to get rid of bugs.

Tips for running Mandriva 2008 on a Toshiba Satellite M200

KRandRTray
If you have a Intel Graphics card like mine, you can't miss out trying KRandRTray. You'll have access to all the functions of the video card, like clone / extended desktop and even rotate. It's excellent for working with projectors.

Toshiba Fn Hotkeys
As to be expected, not all the hotkeys would work. Luckily all the important ones did. Already working were the LCD/VGA display switcher, brightness up/down and suspend to ram key. The keys that will not work are the media player, lock pc, backlight off, suspend to disk, wifi scan & touchpad toggle keys. To enable the other hotkeys on this Toshiba, you will need to change the keyboard type, the standard installation set the keyboard to a "Generic 105 key (Intl) PC" keyboard. You will need to change this in Mandriva Control Center (MCC), under Hardware->Set up keyboard layout->Keyboard type-> Select Toshiba Satellite S3000. This will enable the remaining hotkeys, namely Wifi killswitch, Volume dial, browser, play/pause, stop, prev & next keys.

LCD Brightness
In Mandriva 2007.1, the LCD is brightness can't be changed by either the hotkeys or kpowersave. I had to resort to a hack using /proc/acpi and laptop-mode. This time round the LCD brightness worked with the hotkeys & kpowersave but reacted strangely to the brightness slider in kpowersave, as you slid down the bar the brightness would go up & down erratically. Eventually I discovered again through /proc/acpi that only the following percentages worked 10 25 35 50 60 75 100. Using these values in the kpowersave profiles worked very well. Any other value would set the brightness to the lowest.

Chicony 1.3MP Webcam
This webcam works very well in aMSN. It's a little iffy in Kopete with intermittent color. Completely useless in Pidgin.

Some compiz-fusion bugs
There only 3 bugs with compiz-fusion that I've encountered. First is an issue with the kscreensaver whereby the screensaver will come out but not cover the whole screen as it should. This can be solved by using the workaround in CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) called 'Fullscreen Legacy Support'. However locking the screen using the lock button still causes the issue. The second bug is an intermittent issue when I login in & out of a session, sometimes the hot corners / screen edges stop working until I open ccsm & make some changes. The final bug is a intermittent crash of compiz-window-decorator whenever I switch the K Menu button to another style, such as Kickoff or Default KDE. The issue only occurs during the change, once done it does work fine.

That's all I can write about this topic, Mandriva has been working great so far on this laptop & is actually giving me very decent (better than Windows Vista) battery life. I'm lovin' it.