Use the power!

Picked up a pair of Devolo DLAN AV200 HomePlug adapters, since my wireless connection to my desktop which had an USB USRobotics wifi adapter was flakey at best.. and it's not because there's many wireless networks in my neighbourhood (only 3 and my laptop's Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 works fine).

The box mentioned linux compatibility, but I wasn't expecting to find source code to the configuration program for linux.. afterall these things can be run without any computer intervention, so I figured that's why they listed linux.

The copyright notice on the source files is a bit odd though:

/*
   dlanconfig.c: dlanconfig software for HomePlug devices for linux

   Copyrighted 2007 by devolo AG

   Redistribution in source form, with or without modification,
   are NOT permitted.
   This program uses explicitly confidential information
   about HomePlug standard.
*/

Anyway... first impression is positive... the speed is nice, stability also.. the 200mbps claim is a bit misleading since they just have a 100mbit ethernet port, but all of the homeplug devices use that marketing ploy.

Wine fun #4

As I mentioned before, I was fooling around with running a game via wine on a remote server. After fixing wine to run the game, it was time to look for improvements in the remote connection.

While it worked via vino / VNC, it wasn't really playable.

VirtualGL and TurboVNC seemed like they could provide a satisfactory experience. My first attempt using TurboVNC as the X11 target for VirtualGL didn't work. It always resulted in a busy loop inside the nvidia closed source OpenGL library.

VirtualGL using the VGL Transport to my fedora 11 laptop, does work however! It's actually quite playable over a Wifi connection. The nice thing about this setup, is that the server is doing all the hard work, hence you could even use an under powered netbook as a game station.

I wonder if there would be much to gain by implementing a more advanced video compression engine in virtualgl. Maybe if I find the time, I might try to hook it up with libavcodec or something along those lines.

Wine fun #3

The icing on the cake has finally arrived!

After reversing large parts of the game code and spending a silly amount of time in a debugger, I was finally able to track down the code path that caused the game to crash on wine.
Once that was clear, it was just a matter of comparing the difference in return values when running the game directly on a windows box.

Since I just hacked up the wine source to return the value I needed, it isn't a proper fix.. but I'm hoping the wine devs can come up with a solution that is acceptable for everyone.

The bug details can be found in Bug 10832