Debian 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:

Broken Apper on Debian Unstable/Sid

Sat, 14 Sep 2013 12:08:42 +0000

All of my Debian desktop installs running KDE received an update a month or two ago which rendered the “Apper” package management application broken, failing with the following error:

Unable to open database read-only: Database action 'prepare dependency insert 
statement' failed: table dependencies has no column named items_installed

The solution is to delete the Listaller cache DB:

rm -r /var/lib/listaller/db/

The cache will be recreated automatically with the expected structure on the next run of Apper (or other PackageKit type thing).

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.