Finally. Get it here. I’m going to believe this when it’s working here.

I guess all those quizzes around the web are the next big thing. Not like ‘Hey, what a boner!’-big. I mean really big. Big like building your own spaceship or the space occupied by one mole of table tennis balls. Just wait and see. Over at planetdebianforum.de if one posts his quiz results, we’re all in. It’s herd instinct. And for I’m as stupid / weak / bored / <insertyoursuggestion> as everyone else:

I may not have the ultimate high-end gaming rig, but I’d consider my XPC decent hardware. It’s an XPC powered by a 2.4GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and an ATI X800XT PE graphics board. 3dmark & co support this statement. Anyhow, with Everquest 2, performance just sucks and you can’t even tell why. I started up the game today, and in zones where I had over 30fps with quality/performance set to ‘balanced’, I hardly got 10fps with q/p set to ‘very high performance’. I’m experiencing such issues with EQ2 quite frequently.

Anyhow, I tried to post the problem at SOE’s forums but found that I haven’t activated my account yet. I also didn’t receive mail from SOE with the activation-code like the activation page says. Further, I wasn’t able to request a new code on the appropriate page (actually I’ve been able to request a new code, but it never made it into my inbox). I also ruled out that any spamfilters caught the mail and used an unfiltered account. Still, no activation code. I tried to send a mail to the webmaster whose address was given on the same page, but the mail couldn’t be sent for there seems to be issues over at SOE. Great. That’s what I call support. You pay 15 bucks a month for a game that definitely has issues which are well known according to the forums, and SOE is not only not capable of fixing those, no, they make fun of their customers introducing new flaws every now and then using a mechanism called ‘update’ and then can’t even be contacted in any sane way.

Maybe re-installing the drivers or even use omega’s has some homeopathic effect on my box.. On the other hand, that might be total nonsense for I played the demo of F.E.A.R today, and it performed very well and looked pretty polished.

Hey, Sony, what’s up? Nice that you have this enduring engine that will draw neat graphics on our screens the years to come, but if that means that a PC like mine can’t handle it reliably and with at least some of the eyecandy turned on, you might as well keep it. The game is fun and everything, but I really consider not to extend my account in november. .

Last week I’ve re-installed my Debian-box, and well, it just feels great using KDE & Co again. I like OS X, it’s sexy and everything and I don’t want to miss the last months (ouch!), but it’s just no match for a properly set-up Debian with KDE on top. Which brings me to the things other operating systems are way more comfortable in:

• Removeable media. While this seems to work pretty good using the Gnome-Volume-Manager, KDE lacks proper mechanisms. In fact, Linux lacks proper mechanisms, GVM is just a good workaround. Maybe I’ll go for GVM for the time being.
• Wireless networking. It’s still a pain in the ass to set-up. Period.
• Configuring X. So I’ve had my Dell 2405FPW connected to my ATI X800 XT PE, used X.Org’s ATI/Radeon-driver and everything seemed pretty nice. Of course I headed for ATI’s proprietary drivers to unleash the full potential of my graphic board. At least I thought so.
  I downloaded the new installer and was pretty amazed of the ease-of-use. Just a few clicks and I had a couple of Debian packages. I installed the ones I needed, edited my xorg.conf and tara!, just couldn’t get a resolution of 1920x1200px, 1280x1024px was the max. After searching around a little bit, I found that I’d have to use modelines. Using get-edid it was pretty simple to make the appropriate entry to my xorg.conf. After restarting X, it came up with the desired resolution. (Note: unlike the Nvidia drivers, ATI’s need the option VideoOverlay enabled for XV to work.) The fonts have been way to big but that was fixed in seconds by simply adjusting them using kcontrol.
  So far so good, direct rendering was enabled and glxgears spat out 30kfps and I went on testing video using mplayer and xine.
  Unfortunately, they both screwed up the aspect ratio by stretching the picture. A friendly guy at #ati@freenode told me that mplayer needs the parameter monitoraspect set correctly (in my case 16:10 ) and xine uses xorg’s DisplaySize. Both players showed the correct aspect ratio after those changes, the only problem was that I had to re-adjust my fonts to sizes >32(!) to be readable. Checking the logs I found out why: the dpi have been set to 28x28dpi. Solution: just give DisplaySize in mm, not in pixels *cough*. After re-re-adjusting the fonts, the DFP and VGA-card seem to cooperate properly at least.

Notice something? Jepp, the only (well, mostly) issues I have with GNU/Linux are hardware-related. But that’s the fault of companies refusing to provide proper drivers or at least specifications so drivers can be written without having to reverse-engineer every single bit.