Linux on ShrimpWorks

Running Unreal Tournament 99 on Linux (part 1)

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With all the talk of Unreal Tournament 4 possibly being cancelled one of these days, due to Epic’s runaway success with Fortnite, I’ve decided there’s really no reason to not be playing UT99.

Thus, we set about trying to run it on modern hardware, with a modern Linux installation.

As much as this is about setting things up on Linux, it’s also partially my own attempt at some knowledge preservation, as a lot of this stuff ends up being forgotten or lost over time (it’s been almost 20 years! a lot of the old sites and things you expect to find this info on simply do not exist anymore :()

This is part one of two, and will focus on installing and running the game using Wine.

Publishing Server Status to StatsD with no additional software

Sat, 27 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently wanted to set up a couple of rough monitoring services to keep track of simple server status, load, disk etc. While there are options available like Munin which can do this by installing agents on the machines to be monitored, I wanted something a little simpler and more portable.

I’m quite fond of the StatsD + Graphite + Grafana stack, which is quite easy to run thanks to Kamon’s grafana_grafite Docker image, and I realised you can actually quite simply write counters, gauges and timers to StatsD using nothing but the standard Linux tools nc and cron.

Lirc 0.9.4 and Kodi on Debian Sid

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is a small follow-on on from the Kodi on Debian Sid guide I did earlier this year to get lirc (IR remote support) working once more, following an upgrade to version 0.9.4, which changes how the lirc services and configuration work (shakes fist at systemd).

After upgrading and following all the instructions in /usr/share/doc/lirc/README.Debian.gz, I was left with the problem of Kodi not responding to any remote input at all.

Kodi and Steam on Debian Sid

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently went through the process of reinstalling the media PC connected to my TV, which I use to run Kodi for movies and TV, and Steam in Big Picture mode, which allows me to stream Windows-only games from my desktop to the couch.

I thought it would be useful to describe my setup and the process to achieve it, in case anyone else is interested in creating their own custom Kodi/Debian/Steam builds.

User Directories and PHP with nginx

Sat, 25 Apr 2015 08:53:16 +0000

I’ve become fond of using nginx on my development machines, rather than a full Apache.

There are no explicit options built-in which allow something along the same lines as Apache’s userdir, however it’s easy enough to tweak the default configuration to support that behaviour without the need for external modules.

I also do some PHP dabbling from time to time, so need to enable that as well.

Install the required bits:

Clean and Lean Debian Install with i3

Sun, 29 Mar 2015 09:33:28 +0000

Recently, I’ve made the switch from KDE being my preferred Linux desktop environment/window manager, to i3, a tiling window manager, for both my work and private development environments (my home desktop is still Windows 7, since I do still game enough for it to become painful to dual-boot - so I do most of my development within a VM these days).

I really like it’s absolutely minimal approach - essentially it does nothing itself, it provides a simple window manager, and near limitless configurability. This has proven an excellent learning experience for me, since it’s forced me to get a lot closer to system components usually “hidden” behind sliders and widgets in KDE or Gnome, as well as a host of alternatives to applications those environments provide by default. It’s also resulted in a much cleaner and faster system, containing only the applications and services I actually want.

Simple photo enhancements with GIMP

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 22:04:21 +0000

So, being stuck without access to Photoshop and my regular Windows PC has taught me a little about GIMP – basically it’s exactly the same as Photoshop with a less slick UI :D.

Also, since I haven’t really written anything tutorial-ish in many many years, so this is as much about brushing up on those skills as anything else.

This is a guide for quick and simple photo enhancement using GIMP.

Spam filtering with SpamBayes

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 09:12:04 +0000

Alright, so I’ve been getting more and more spam in recent weeks, and they’ve been getting harder and harder to build basic filter rules for.

My mail works in a pretty round-about way:
I have multiple POP accounts all over the place, which have sort of accumulated over the years. It becomes a bit of a mission to always set up and check all these accounts, so what I have now is a small Python script that connects to each of the servers, grabs the mail, sorts them based on some simple filters (like, containing a [mailinglist] type subject), and places them within a Maildir structure based on that sorting. In addition, it does the same thing for deciding if it should delete a message - extremely basic spam filtering rules can be set up to check out certain headers for possible spam flags, etc.

Debian Powered Notebook

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:06:33 +0000

Yay, on Friday, I decided to take the plunge, and install Debian on my laptop. I’ve always wanted to try working in a Linux desktop environment, considering I do practically no Delphi development any more, everything’s either PHP or Python. Since Debian has plenty of support for both of these, it seemed quite ideal.

I’m not dumping the existing Windows install though, so I had to partition my drive. Now, partitioning drives is about the most nerve-racking thing I’ve ever done, no matter what software I’m using, no matter how little data I stand to lose, I’m always scared as hell something will go wrong. Doubly so on this laptop since I use it constantly for work, and it’s the default installation HP put on, which I’m not really eager to bugger up. Luckily, that all went smoothly though :D.

SmoothWall

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 10:04:41 +0000

I must say, I’m rather disappointed with my “SmoothWall experience” so far. I’ve been tasked with setting up a SmoothWall firewall/proxy machine at work, and from what I’ve read, it’s like the best thing since sliced bread.

Unfortunately I cannot agree.

The installation tends to go fine, it partitions the hard disk by itself, installs fairly fast, then steps through a simple setup ‘wizard’. Here we are prompted if we want to enable or disable ADSL. Now, I want SmoothWall to connect via our ADSL line. BUT, it seems the developer’s idea of “ADSL” is in fact “USB ADSL Modem”.