Linux Life Episode 55
Hey ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Linux Life. My ongoing adventures in the sphere of the Linux world. There is no fixed schedule for these episode releases due to I don’t always have time to make one every month say consistently.
Anyway since episode I am still playing about with the Xeon. I managed to add the repo-ck to the listed repos checks. So now it doesn’t have to rebuild the kernel taking 4 hours it just pulls the latest version from the repo meaning it is a lot faster to update. Which is good considering it has had two updates since the last episode.
Pamac is still unable to connect to the internet very well so in the end I actually uninstalled it using Yay and have been using that to keep the Xeon up to date. Yeah I know it’s a terminal thing but I will just have to live with it.
The hope with Arch is using the terminal as little as possible, but if it means I can keep the software up to date its a small price to pay. In time I hope to upgrade the memory on the Xeon. Don’t get me wrong 12MB of RAM will ruin most things but its just nice to have that bit of overhead should you need it.
The HP Z400 workstation that it is can apparently be upgraded to 24MB of RAM according to them, but I have seen reports that if you get the right type of 16MB ECC memory it can actually have 48MB of RAM installed. However that is a long way off as at the moment i have a few things I need to sort before I even think about adding memory to this machine, but it is a future update plan.
I once put more memory in a Mac (can’t remember which one) it worked but was a bit temperamental with the extra ram so I may just settle at 24MB which is enough for most things.
Something I am intending to look at between this episode and next is a program called Scrcpy which allows you to connect your Android phone to Linux and display it on your desktop and control it. Why you would want to do that I am yet to know, but hey it will be fun to try out.
I was testing the Xeon with emulators. Now previously when using Amstrad stuff I was using Arnold. However most do say the best one is Caprice32. Now Caprice32-git is in the AUR but when you try and build it you get issues with the free-type libraries. SO I had never managed to get it to run properly from the AUR.
It seems the one in the AUR has not been updated for a long time and I am not even sure if anyone is ever going to update it as it doesn’t seem to have a maintainer keeping it in check.
So I just wanted to see if it was worth all the hype involved. So I downloaded the source and tried to build it that way. It also hit the free type error. The crazy thing is both Freetype and FreeType 2 libraries are on there so I don’t know why it doesn’t compile apparently some file is missing.
So I installed Snapd (yep I can now use Snaps from Canonical), I honestly was not sure it would work given that Snaps are based in Ubuntu and with the differences between Ubuntu and Arch I had no idea whether it would even work.
Sure enough I downloaded the Caprice32 Snap. Now I know Snaps are a self contained package which includes all the libraries it needs to run so obviously it’s a bit bigger to download. However I am happy to say it ram just fine.
Now i will admit I was not an Amstrad owner or user so although I have tested the system using DSK files of programs I kind of know. I really don’t know which Amstrad games are the best ones to look at to show it off.
I did try the Amstrad version of my favourite Spectrum game Tornado Low Level and man does it play slightly different. If you remain low the plane turns and moves much slower and the wings only sweep back when you get to max altitude and the screen then has a strange effect and the plane absolutely motors along the map.
It’s bizarre to say the least. It does however seem a lot of Amstrad games were just straight Spectrum ports and given that Amstrad eventually owned Sinclair this is not a huge surprise.
So has anyone got any Amstrad games to recommend to me to have a look at? If so feel free to add them in the comments or send me info via the Facebook group etc.
Also I installed Vice and Fuse (Commodore 64 and Spectrum emulators) on the Xeon just for test purpose. The Xeon seems to have no major problem running these.
As a man who absolutely adores emulation I believe I have looked at most of the possible available emulation options for Linux, but if you are aware of any I have not tried or checked out please feel free to let me know about them.
I keep meaning to start on YouTube videos but to be honest I keep backing up on them because I really don’t have a good enough idea to run as a series.
I did intend to do a thing regarding the history of emulation looking at the likes of MAME version 0-.1 and various DOS emulators but the timelines and history is so all over the place. It would be a nightmare to sort out the spaghetti.
Also many early emulators did not include dates so knowing when they were released is total guess work. I mean it is amazing some of the emulators that ran in DOS and how well some of them worked.
Maybe one day I will figure a format that works so for now that remains on the back burner for a little longer. I have no idea if anyone would be interested in seeing old emulators but I think it could be an interesting subject to look at.
MAME 0.1 for DOS only ran five games (Pacman, MsPacman(bootleg), Pengo, Crush Roller and Ladybug). Regarding Crush Roller the palette was guessed by Gary Walton as they didn’t have the actual palette information to hand. So Nicola Salmoria and crew ere really winging it in the first MAME release.
Any way I’m waffling on about nothing Linux related so forgive me. However if I do decide to take this series on I will no doubt be sorting the videos using Linux.
So it’s back to looking at the Likes of Davinci Resolve, KDEnLive, Natron 2, Flowblade etc. I notice a lot on YouTube seem to use KDEnlive and I have played with it and it seems reasonably easy to use.
I am open to suggestions regarding which video editor is best... Anyway that’s enough waffle for this episode so until next time.... Take care.
