dbaranski.net

For some reason the Pidgin messaging program that comes with Ubuntu seems to think users want to receive messages from the entire world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but there are too many spam bots out there to make this particular feature quite annoying.

Luckily it’s a simple fix to turn off said spam (thanks to Techtites article)

1. Run pidgin and open the buddy list window.
2. Go to Tools > Privacy.
3. Choose the account that’s bothering you with spam (in my case MSN) and select the desired contact options (again, in my case it was Allow only the users on my contact list)
4. Enjoy spam free living.

The Problem

For some reason the Linux version of the dedicated server does not auto-update properly. It will simply fail to find the srcds bin file and have you do it manually for every update which gets very frustrating.

The problem originates from the introduction of a new subdirectory for all “new” source engine games. Luckily, this can be fixed with just two new “cd” lines in the script file!

The Fix

1. Find and open the file srcds_run for editing (It will be a script file). It can be found in the game directory like /orangebox or /l4d
2. search for the line update(). It can be found around line number 295.
3. Make it look like this:
   update() {
       PWD=pwd
       cd ..
       updatesingle
       cd $PWD
   }

This should update any “new” srcds server by going back one directory, running srcds, and returning to the previous directory.

Notes
I suggest saving this new copy of srcds_run as something else like “srcds_run_tf2″. This will prevent the file from ever being overwritten by an update and will keep the original file if ever needed again.

Updated: Nov 26th
- Made this how-to more generic for any game like l4d

If you’ve ever used the GNOME CPU Scaling Monitor before you will know that it does not allow the switching of stepping speeds or governors off the bat.

Thanks to Carthik it is only a matter of entering one command in your console and selecting the option ‘Yes’ to enable said scaling:

enjoy

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 comes a relatively radical change from the norm; The obsolescence of the xorg.conf file!

The xorg.conf file is now replaced with the use of .fdi files that can be “plugged” and “unplugged” without the need to restart the computer.  More information on the usage of these fdi files can be found on Ubuntu’s wiki site. Overall they provide more flexibility then the previous xorg.conf syntax, make use of XML, and allow for “matching” or “pairing” if the system has enabled components.

Here’s a .fdi file I whipped up for my touchpad that I called touchpad.fdi and placed in the /etc/hal/fdi/policy folder as per the wiki’s instructions.

I’ve been running srcds servers on Linux for over a year now and I could say that I’m modestly happy with the support and software that Valve gives to the community. But more frequently then not (even over the course of one year) Valve has repeatedly broken its own server binaries multiple times and released them to the public as “usable”.

To me this seems rather stunning that such a well sized company could possibly produce software so unstable. Though mind you that building computer games is exponentially harder then other types of software there is still a line that must be drawn!

The mind boggling thing is there are many simple solutions to this problem that once implemented could be re-used forever! Note that there are two sides to Valve’s software: the server side and the client side. The client side software has seen its own share of problems but today I’m going to focus mainly on the server aspect as it goes generally untouched. I, personally, believe that server side software must be far more stable then the client simply because no server equals no players. So here’s a small list of things I’ve got qualms with that Valve could have avoided from the get go:

Exhibit A)
Crashing server binaries after a just freshly released update.

Now this has happened MORE then frequently and can be avoided by some testing setups. First thing that comes to mind is the use of Mozilla’s Tinderbox or Jira’s Bamboo systems to set up a testing network with various OS distributions that constantly rebuild and/or run the servers. This would show most problems instantly and after initial setup there is little maintenance.

Exhibit B)
Features no one asked for are put in before features that are asked for

Now this has always bothered me so I’m going to stray from the “server side banter” into a general one for a second. I’m a subscriber to the Valve mailing list and day in and day out people request the SAME features. For example, a way to connect to their own left 4 dead servers and play versus mode.. These useful requests seem to get bypassed for other needless improvements which in no way help the game become more playable. I’m not entirely sure why these requests are passed on but it would be good to have some feedback as to why they are passed on. (Except to make it look more like an Xbox release..)

Hopefully Valve will shape up a bit with it’s client base and start telling us when things will be implemented and when stable binaries will become the norm. Otherwise they make great games