Re: Tools

[Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com>]

Erik wrote:

I'm replying in private to the parts that are getting off topic... The
rest is posted in the newsgroup!

> > Oops, I meant Quake 3: Arena, by the way! :-)
> 
> ahhh, different game :) q3 barely sludges along on this thing, I was
> playing it on a p166/48m with a v2 and at a noticable disadvantage to
> my coworders (all v3's on 400's with 128m ram)... i was only leading
> them by a little bit :) One thing I'd like to say is that my coworkers
> became very envious of my stability. They would crash many times a night
> and I would have no reboots or anything, I just kept going. My boss was
> asking a lot of questions about office productivity stuff, so I got to
> show him stuff like star office. Unfortunantly he chickened out, but
> I may still turn him :)

Me, I am currently *crap* at Quake3. I just made the transition from
being a pretty good deathmatcher at Doom2 (played Quake2 single-player
briefly), but the catch was that I played with the keyboard! With Doom
adjusting the elevation of my shots automatically, it was cool, but for
Quake, I had to go to the mouse. Now I suck. :-)

I am getting Linux into the place around here, workstation by
workstation, server by server... ;-)

> > Hmm, G400 are okay, but trailing in most benchmarks and tests (I look at
> > Tom's Hardware and Ars Technica every once in a while). nVidia hardware
> > seems to be the best, with TNT2 Ultra and GeForce 256, but Voodoo3
> > hardware seems to be the biggest bang for the buck, mostly lacking in
> > the visual departments (only 16 bit and picture always look too dark
> > with the 3Dfx chipset, dunno why).
> 
> I read a couple reviews and comparisons in gaming magazines, and they
> seem to indicate that g400's are "ok" speedwise, but offer better visual
> quality. These were before geforce256, so I d'no how that compares :) I've
> talked to people who have g400's and they say that they run really well on
> linux. If matrox would give the "utah" drive ppl the rest of the
> information, I think that the millenium cards will be pretty hot under
> linux :) I still have time to consider the options, and I will definitly
> do more research.

Well, for the visual quality among the top 3D cards, the Voodoo is
clearly lagging behind, with 16 bit color depth only. Both the G400 and
the nVidia family of 3D cards will look better, with similar quality
between themselves. The G400 cards are at the slower end of the
spectrum, with the TNT2 and Voodoo3 near the top. The TNT2 Ultra is the
established king of consumer 3D cards, but the GeForce 256 is even
better, but its hardware matrix transformation ability isn't used at its
best by games yet. The advantage is that you can disable dynamic level
of detail in Quake3 and stick the level of detail at the maximum all the
time, it doesn't sweat the high level of polygons at all!

> I saw corel :) with it's "insert the cd in windows and click this" install
> and everything... :) I used to use redhat, and I personally feel 4.x was
> their high point. I got frustrated with their scripts and how flaky rpm was
> so I switched to debian. I got into linux in '96 and I always remember it
> being rc?.d and sysv-ish.

I tried once installing Debian on a spare laptop using a CD-ROM from VA
Linux that I got at Supercomputing '99, and no success. It was *very*
cryptic for somebody that doesn't know about the specifics of Debian (I
installed various Unixes and Linuxes, from Solaris and AIX to SUPER-UX
and from Slackware to Red Hat). I don't remember very well, but I
remember that the first part of the installation was okay, but after
booting the minimal system where I was supposed to install the rest of
the packages, I couldn't get to install anything more! It asked me for
paths where the defaults wouldn't work, etc...

It asked me two or three times for the CD-ROM device, which I found very
doubtful (Red Hat doesn't ask at all). But the whole thing had the smell
that it was done the Right Way, even if the corners were more than a
little rough!

> > What *wasn't* nifty with Corel (Debian also?) was network interfaces
> > configuration. All in a single file. With variables, oh, so friendly! I
> > like the "ifup" and "ifdown" scripts in Red Hat a lot, if they weren't
> > already there, I'd do them myself! See, maybe I'm not a beginner and I
> > am rather experienced, but I don't have time to lose on fiddling in
> > files when it could *easily* be faster ("easily" as in "without
> > compromising my control").
> 
> debians got ip-up and ip-down.... I d'no, I never use 'em anyways. I like to
> scrap together my own scripts, it's a nominal amount of effort :)

Yes, I know, but from nominal effort to nominal effort, this get you a
*huge* total amount of work!

For me, the Red Hat kickstart installation feature is very nice, as I
have one kickstart file for the network here. When I get a new machine,
I just start the thing off and let it do all the work for me (that's why
I we use computer for, right?). As for knowing what goes on under the
hood, I had to make that kickstart file, eh? :-)

-- 
Pierre Phaneuf
Ludus Design, http://ludusdesign.com/
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then you win." -- Gandhi