It’s pretty much exactly a decade since I started using Linux, so it seems like a good time to look back at what I used to use before.
Immediately prior to jumping into the FOSS world, I was using Windows 98, but I don’t really want to talk about that because I never really liked it and it hated my hardware, so it was a very brief partnership.
The 7 or 8 years before that though, were computing heaven because I was a devoted Amiga user. Initially I was using an A500, which I added a second floppy drive to (I think the Cumana drive I bought cost me about £80!), as well as a couple of MB of Fast RAM (some of which I hacked into being Chip RAM for better graphics). Eventually the 500 was getting far too restrictive and even my 2-disk boot environment was getting hard to live with, so I got a job in a supermarket to earn some money to buy a shiny new A1200, which was a pretty big leap forward over the 500. After a while I put the much faster 68030 CPU in it (thanks to phase5’s excellent 1230 IV expansion card), a 16MB SIMM and a 120MB 2.5″ hard disk. Later I swapped the 030 card for an 040 card, for even more blazing performance.
Anyway, enough boring hardware reminiscing, on to the fun stuff!
For a while now I’ve wanted to rescue everything on the last Amiga hard disk I owned (a Western Digital 1.2GB monster!), but since my A1200 had something of a small accident (here’s a tip kids, never use the inside of a computer as a footrest) that wasn’t going to be hugely easy. Had I not broken the 1200, things would have been fine - by the time I stopped using the Amiga it had an Ethernet interface and a fair whack of UNIX programs on it like scp.
A few months back I fished the disk out of the remains of the Amiga (now forever consigned to the past, as I took the carcass to the local dump), hooked it up to an external USB-IDE interface and took a raw image of the disk. I then bought Amiga Forever, a distribution of various Amiga Emulators and a pretty much complete set of officially licenced ROMs and system disks (lacking working hardware there was no way I could get dumps of my ROMs or transfer the contents of the PC-incompatible floppy system disks). I briefly dallied with the included emulator for UNIX (the venerable UAE), but it was pretty unstable and on further investigation it turns out that most of the development work these days goes into the Windows fork (WinUAE). This was quite disappointing and I never really looked into it all further.
That was, until last night when I started tidying up all the crap on my desktop and got to the Amiga Forever folder. The pangs of nostalgia grabbed me again and I decided to have another stab at things. This time I used e-UAE, another fork of UAE, maintained by Richard Drummond (any Amiga user will recognise that name). He has been diligently pulling in the improvements from WinUAE, and it really shows. It’s much more stable than vanilla UAE (although I can still provoke it into crashing).
This was a good start, but I was still left with the problem of how to extract the data from the disk image I had. After battling with the uae configs a little, I discovered that there was something wrong - I could only persuade the Amiga to see 1 of the 4 partitions. Fortunately it was the one with all my data on - except my old programming stuff, but the point of this exercise was not to rescue data as I had copied the stuff I really cared about off before I stopped using it. The point was to get *my* Amiga running again, even if the hardware was now just some software.
I conversed with some of the long time Amiga stalwarts I still converse with on IRC and one of them pointed me at some really simple code to extract partitions from an Amiga disk image. This proved to be part of the key to making everything Just Work™. The other part being that Linux can read AFFS formatted partitions.
I quickly mounted them and pointed e-UAE at the mountpoints and bam! off it went. Ok so I had to spend a few minutes hacking out the various hardware hacks I had from the Startup-sequence, but with that done, I was left with a pretty much exact copy of what I used to use 10 years ago.
It’s a very strange experience, leaping back in time like this. You look over your old code, email, pictures and so on and while one part of you thinks “hey I remember this!”, another part things “damn what was I thinking” ;)
As Jamie Zawinski found when he tried to do a similar (but unfortunately for him, much more painful) operation a while back, the best way to keep data from being obsoleted is to keep it on a live computer. Sooner or later all hardware fails, but if you always transfer all of your data from one computer to your new one, you’ll never have a huge gap to cross (this is exactly how speciation works, by the way).
Emulation and FOSS suggest that there is no real reason why my Amiga now can’t live on forever, virtually. That’s hardly the hugest achievement of mankind, but it makes me happy.
I’d like to say thank you to everyone who made the Amiga, everyone who made its community such a fantastic place, and everyone who still works on making it live on.
(As a side note, this all serves to make me think what a natural predecessor to the current Linux ecosystem the Amiga was. It had a powerful shell, a friendly GUI, but most crucially, an active and dedicated community)
I usually have at least 4 terminals visible on my screen at once. Each one is running screen(1), and each screen has probably at least 3 or 4 different things going on in it (usually sshing to servers).
Once you are up to about a dozen or so shells spread across 4 terminals it can get quite interesting to remember where you left the one you are looking for.
Since screen can have a status line which lists its screens, and it is possible to change their names, I figured it ought to be possible to have ssh set the title of a screen when it connects to a remote machine. This would make things a lot easier to find, as well as being a cute hack.
It turns out that it is indeed possible…. to a degree.
ssh lets you specify a command to be run on the local machine after a connection is established, which is the ideal place to do this kind of thing. Sadly it doesn’t help you out by setting any useful environment variables (such as the machine you just ssh’d to). You’re probably thinking “but you know which one it is, you just ssh’d there!” and while that is true, it’s not very easy to handle programatically. Mainly because it means parsing the arguments to ssh, which is no fun at all.
So, rather than do that, I am making the blanket assumption that the final word on ssh’s command line is the host you are sshing to. If that is not true (e.g. you are doing “ssh someserver rm /etc/foo”) you will get whatever the last word actually is, sucks to be you.
Also, if you use ProxyCommand, you really don’t want the second ssh to do this, because it will confuse the first one and you’ll never establish a connection, so detecting the type of output ssh is connected to is necessary.
Thanks to the many, many people I’ve consulted in the process of figuring this out. It doesn’t seem like anyone has done this before (at least I can’t find an example on google. There are some very similar things though), so after running out of ideas myself I started polling the community and got enough nuggets of inspiration back to produce a workable solution.
You will need to make sure screen is configured to show a status line (otherwise you won’t see the screen names, except in a C-A-” or similar). Then drop this into ~/.ssh/config:
(yes, that is hacky and disgusting. I am tempted to look at patching ssh to provide the hostname to the spawned LocalCommand shell, but right now the above config seems to be the best way of doing this).
I came across a python script called vepp, which aims to be a simple way of transcoding files for portable media devices. Why not also use it for very unportable media devices such as the PS3? :)
Initially I’ve just added a target for fairly high bitrate 720p H.264/AVC, 1080 and MPG-SP targets still to come.
If you want to track my development version, you can do so via Launchpad. You will need to use bzr thus: bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~cmsj/+junk/ps3tools
You’ll need a capable version of ffmpeg, as discussed previously. Output files will be written to the current directory (I’m looking at adapting the current behaviour to be able to automatically direct the output to either attached media that is PS3 compatible (CF/SD/MS/USB) or sending it straight to a directory you are sharing via UPnP (far more useful than ferrying things about with SD cards!)
It would be nice to be able to push content to the PS3 from a LAN, but I have no idea how they could do it sanely. Maybe I can push files via Bluetooth.
Of course, if the rumours are true, this is going to all be immaterial shortly…
I’ve yet to complete this, because I stopped my attempts last night when I reached an unusual situation.
Specifically, I was doing the partitioning manually, but the two visible disks had no partition tables. Not wanting to trash the PS3 disk I didn’t let it create the tables, so had to abort.
After consulting with the very helpful Colin Watson, it turns out that the disk Ubuntu sees as sda is not the whole PS3 disk, it’s the Other OS partition virtualised to look like a whole disk. It is therefore fine to create a partition table and proceed with the install, which I will do tonight.
(I’m not sure yet what sdb is, it smells like the PS3s internal flash and again I’m not sure if it’s wise to mess with it)
UPDATE: The disks that Linux sees are virtualised by the PS3 (they’re actually just partitions made to look like whole disks), so it is fine to make the partition tables (or indeed let the installer do automatic partitioning). The bug where the installer hangs at 15% is due to the low RAM in the PS3. Stop some services (cupsys and hplip are good candidates) and remove some things from your session (update-manager and gnome-cups-icon, for example). Removing applets from the panel is not a bad idea either, and don’t run anything else while you are installing. Of course you could plug in a disk of some kind and set up swap, but this bug makes that quite hard at the moment.
Games on the PS3 are displayed as a little icon, but it can be animated and some games take advantage of that. Strangely, the PS3 does not even attempt to automatically thumbnail or live-preview the movies stored on it (another thing Sony could easily fix if they choose to. The Cell can decode literally dozens of movies simultaneously).
However, the lazyweb rides to the rescue with the news that the PS3 can generate animated thumbnails, but you have to do it yourself. I like that I can do this, but I think it should do it by default and I can choose to override it if I don’t like what it auto-captured.
Basically the trick is to pause the video at the point you want the thumbnail animation to start, then hit Triangle and choose “Change Icon”. The next 15 seconds of video are rendered to a little thumbnail in not very much time.
This is it running on my ps3:
Full instructions and the author’s video are here.
Bonus points to anyone who figures out how to replace the thumbnail of one movie with another. The reason? Movie Trailers make great thumbnails because these days they usually flash the locations and characters at you rapidly
I don’t even remotely have space at the moment for a large TV (even a flatscreen one), also they are still a little expensive (I figure if it’s worth doing, it’s worth getting a 40″ Sony which does 1080p, but that’s 1200 quid at the moment).
I really really didn’t want to buy a small TV because they are overpriced (compared to higher resolution monitors) and the thing wouldn’t be useful to me when I eventually get a proper TV.
Instead I went with the dirt cheap Dell SE198WFP 19″ widescreen monitor. It’s an inch smaller than the E207WFP I use for my PC, and consequently only supports slightly smaller resolutions (1440×900 being its maximum). However, it does have some features which make it particularly well suited to the PS3.
First off, it supports HDCP (the DRM system being used in the HDtv world), so I should be able to play back protected content without the PS3 refusing to trust me or downscaling it to an annoyingly low resolution.
900 rows of pixels means the maximum resolution falls somewhere between 720p and 1080i/1080p, however, the monitor supports both. This was especially surprising to me as I had expected to be “limited” to 720p (many/most PS3 games at the moment don’t go higher than 720p anyway, and it’s still a massive leap over standard definition TV). I need to do some more exhaustive comparisons, but I think I will be going with 720p rather than 1080i (it doesn’t seem to support 1080p) because it’s an uninterlaced mode, so there is absolutely no flickering. Either way the monitor is scaling the image - the question is, which direction is better? scaling 720 rows up to 900, or scaling 1080 rows down to 900. Time will tell (as will this blog!)
For anyone wondering how I managed to connect a monitor which only has DVI and VGA inputs to the PS3 which only has HDMI, component and composite outputs - fear not, HDMI is actually a combination of DVI signals, audio and probably some other gumpf), so it is entirely possible to convert the HDMI output of the PS3 to DVI. That means no analogue signal/conversion at all, so the picture quality is superb and the cables to do it can be obtained easily and cheaply online (don’t splash out on a stupidly expensive gold cable, it’s a digital signal so cable quality matters a lot less. Just avoid the inexplicably cheap ones on ebay from the far east, they look very dodgy!).
If you’re looking to put a PS3 in a bedroom and don’t really care for a TV, I would thoroughly recommend this monitor, especially since you’ll still have the VGA port free for other things.
I’m sure you won’t care, but it also just happens to fit exactly into the only appropriate place for it on my desk!
The title says it all really. I’ve banged on about games a bit and now it’s time to do something involving curiosity!
So I know how to, should i want to for any reason, this is how you can make videos that are playable on a PS3 (only tested on firmware 1.80). Note that it doesn’t transcode to H.264, but instead uses a lesser MPEG4 profile of some kind (mpeg4 appears to be entirely too complicated to figure out!).
This mostly comes from here, but the gist is that you grab a specific version of ffmpeg from SVN and compile it against a variety of media libraries from multiverse. This makes me think ubuntu should have a bleeding edge version of ffmpeg in multiverse that links against the libraries there - if licences allow for it.
For what it’s worth, this is the command line I’ve been using with it (note that it will strip surround audio down to 2 channel stereo. That’s all i have, so I haven’t bothered to figure out anything better).
This is a PSP game which has been ported to the PS3 and had its graphics restored to the original arcade levels.
It’s a Tekken game, what do you want, poetry? You fight people in the traditional rounds system. When you beat one, you fight another and it gets a bit harder. That’s it.
There are a couple of slightly different fight modes, but nowhere near what it should be to be considered a full and complete game.
It’s a small download for about 6 quid and it’s fast, Tekken fun. I can’t argue with that. That is until Soul Caliber comes out in a few months. That most certainly ought to be worth a full game.
This is a fantastic little game ported and improved from an original Flash version.
You play a tiny micro-organism living in some kind of watery world. You swim about by tilting the ps3 controller in the direction you want to move, which is usually towards some food (ie smaller micro-organisms). As you eat more food, you grow and develop new features and can dive to deeper levels. When you hit the bottom you change into a different kind of micro-organism and start again, facing different challenges and growing in different ways. This happens a few times and then the game starts all over.
It’s accompanied by an excellent ambient soundtrack which is largely controlled by what you are doing (very much like the fantastic Rez), and it has a distinctive yet calming visual style.
It’s simple, relaxing and fun; It’s not very hard and it doesn’t take very long to complete. Perfect for under £4 and a few minutes of downloading.
One of the games I picked up with the PS3 was Motorstorm, which is a dirt racing game with nitrous boosting. You’ve probably played games like it. It’s good fun though, and very easy on the eye. Online play is great, even if it does make me look bad almost every race!
I asked for this one from the second hand shelf (which most games shops seem to offer) - it’s very good fun, but I’m not sure it’s worth paying full whack for.
