At Supanova yesterday I bought a copy of Race Driver: GRID for $70. It’s a new release game and I saw it on specialthe other day for$90, so it was a decent enough saving to warrant the purchase. It’s by Codemasters, the same guys that put out Colin McRae: DIRT last year. Until GRID came along I would have said that DIRT was my favourite racing game.

There’s a few things I really like about this game and they’re to do with the design rather than the technical capabilities, though don’t get me wrong, this game looks fantastic and is lots of fun to play.

The first is that you enter in your full name at the beginning, and if you’ve got a common name like Matthew (or Aaron, Andrew, Mark… they’re all listed) then it uses it when “the game” talks to you. For example, my pit crew call me Matthew when they’re giving me updates through out the race, and my business manager, who looks after the sponsors and advises me on what to do off the track does the same.

Also, because you entered your full name when they’re listing your results it doesn’t look weird seeing nicknames and fake full names mixed in together. That’s a minor annoyance I have with other racing games. I know, I’m pedantic.

You get to choose your sponsors (from a list of those that have offered you a deal) and where they’re placed on your car. Different sponsors offer different incentives, for example they might only pay up if you place higher than third or if you finish the race. The major sponsor pays double because they’re plastered on your bonnet. Part of the game, I’m presuming, is juggling the sponsorships in order to reap the maximum rewards per race.

You choose the team name as well as the team colours. I’ve got blue, grey and white which are our company colours and my teams called “TFG Racing.” You can also choose the paint pattern too so if you wanted flames you could have them, or if you want stripes you could have them instead. When you buy new cars the paint colours and patterns are automatically applied.

You’re not inundated with stupid or redundant choices, which I know some games have given you in the past. You could choose the brand of muffler upgrade you applied, though they were all exactly the same performance wise. In GRID you have a limited number of colours and paint patterns, though there’s about 100 options in each. Choice from a range that’s broad enough to contain something you like.

Now… back to the racing!

The below post managed to sit in my drafts queue without me noticing. I thought I published this but obviously I didn’t. Note: this happened before the recent Sun Ray Server Software re-install.

I took a few minutes this evening to investigate why the hard disk that has all our movies on it wasn’t working anymore. We had 288 movies on the drive and it suddenly stopped working a few weeks ago. It turns out that the problem was… drum roll - the drive wasn’t being mounted in /etc/fstab.

I have no idea why it wasn’t there or how it might have fallen off but I think it might have happened around the time I installed a new terrabyte disk a few months back. I must have rebooted the system and not entered it in the /etc/fstab file so it didn’t mount on reboot.

Almost 300 movies - saved!

Which company manufacturers the most vehicle tyres annually? Bridgestone, Pirelli, Dunlop…? Why it’s the Lego Group of course! Learn more interesting facts.

Project History

I installed Sun Ray Server Software 4.0 on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop machine today. The computer, duke, was running Ubuntu 6.10 and SRSS 3.1 before I started. Both of these platforms are somewhat out of date now so it was a good opportunity to refresh our home computing set up. Also, the newer version of SRSS ships with an updated firmware which is uploaded to the Sun Rays upon boot making it even more appealing.

duke is used as our solitary server at home with both Maggie and I connecting via Sun Ray terminals on our desks. We’ve had this configuration for a fairly long time now and it’s worked really well. The SRSS software is a bit heavy for our needs I think, but the hardware we’re using can handle it.

duke also serves media content via Samba to XBMC running on the Xbox, so I didn’t want to have it out of commission for too long or we’d have not music, movies and television shows to entertain ourselves with.

Having done this kind of thing before, the plan was:

• Research the current state of SRSS and Ubuntu
• Backup the root partition (/home is stored on another partition and can be ignored)
• Install Ubuntu
• Install SRSS
• Get sound and Flash support working
• Take another system image
• Rejoice!

Research

I checked the usual haunts and found that some mailing list posts indicating that people had managed to wrangle SRSS 4 on top of Ubuntu 8.04. I had high expectations that I’d be able to do the same thing. I checked a few of the wiki articles but the Ubuntu one hasn’t been updated to cover SRSS 4 and the Debian one was riddled with Ubuntu notes, so that was going to serve as my base document.

Backup

I downloaded the SRSS software, the Ubuntu install ISO and the latest SysRescueCD. I wanted to backup the current working operating system incase 5PM rolled around and Maggie needed to use her Sun Ray.

Thankfully duke has five disks, one of which is dedicated to data backup. I booted the SysRescueCD, mounted the target partition and used Partimage to save /dev/sda1 (my root partition) as a single image. Partimage is an open source equivalent to Ghost and I’ve used it a lot in the past to take full-system backups before performing major operating system upgrades on our work servers. It works a treat and is fairly fast because it doesn’t copy empty space. My root partition is only about 4GB full so it took a minute and we were done.

Install Ubuntu

The Ubuntu installation is ridiculously easy. I was careful when installing to only mount (and not to format) /dev/sda2 as /home but other than that it was “click, click, click, done.”

As a good measure I enabled the universe and multiverse repositories, installed some useful packages like vim and openssh-server and then took another full system backup. If my SRSS install was botched for some reason I’d have a clean Ubuntu install from which to work back up from.

Installing SRSS

This was going to be the tricky part… or so I thought. I read through the installation wiki entry a few times before I started, just to familiarize myself with the process. I remember spending a few days installing and reinstalling SRSS in the past, and it was all because I was skim reading the instructions. Needless to say, I learnt my lesson.

Under Ubuntu you tend to do everything using sudo but I found it’s easiest to first become root, via:

mlambie@duke:~$ sudo su

I installed the necessary packages:

root@duke:~# aptitude install java-package sun-java5-jdk slapd libldap-2.4-2 ldap-utils \
dhcp3-server nscd gawk iputils-ping pdksh unzip alien liburi-perl libgdbm3 libx11-6 \
libfreetype6 libsasl2-2 libxt6 zlib1g gdm devscripts xkb-data-legacy apache2 \
tomcat5.5 libapache2-mod-jk atftpd

Unzipped and scp’d the SRSS software to my home directory, then used alien to convert the rpm packages to debs. alien gave me warnings about the scripts not being converted and I ignored them.

root@duke:~/srss_4.0# find . -name *.rpm | xargs alien -d

Remove the /usr/X11RC6/bin references in the sunwutu package and rebuild it:

root@duke:~/srss_4.0# SUNWUTU="`echo sunwutu_*`";
root@duke:~/srss_4.0# echo 'mv usr/X11R6/bin usr/; rmdir usr/X11R6' \
| deb-reversion -k bash "${SUNWUTU}" move Xnewt to /usr/bin && rm "${SUNWUTU}"

Then install all these newly generated debs:

root@duke:~/srss_4.0# dpkg -i sunw*deb

Install Java for SRSS (even though we installed Java via aptitude earlier). Patch a bunch of files (SUNWut, SUNWutref, SUNWkio), copy the zsunray-init file and update-rc.d and install Xkbinstall. It’s all in the wiki.

Backup the dhcpd.conf file because we’re gonna recreate it. Make some symlinks:

root@duke:~/srss_4.0# cd /usr/lib
root@duke:/usr/lib# ln -s libldap-2.4.so.2 libldap-2.3.so.0
root@duke:/usr/lib# ln -s liblber-2.4.so.2 liblber-2.3.so.0
root@duke:/usr/lib# /opt/SUNWut/lib/utctl.d/features/utcompatlinksctl enable
root@duke:/usr/lib# ldconfig
root@duke:/usr/lib# ln -s /etc/X11/rgb.txt /usr/lib/X11/rgb.txt
root@duke:/usr/lib# ln -s /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB
root@duke:/usr/lib# mkdir /var/dt
root@duke:/usr/lib# ln -s /opt/SUNWut/lib/libutdev.so.1 /usr/lib
root@duke:/usr/lib# ldconfig

Now you’re ready to configure utadm:

root@duke:~/srss_4.0# /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm

This can be a bit confusing if you’ve not done it before, but the key is to ensure you don’t screw up your existing network configuration.

Sound and Flash

Flash used to work in previous versions but the colours were not right. Reds and blues would appear where they weren’t meant to be and everyone looked like a Smurf. That’s been fixed now too.

Follow the instructions on the wiki, install the kernel modules and install esound and you’ll get tunes out the speakers. This sets an AUDIODEV variable which routes sound to esd.

I read two links about Flash on Sun Ray on Ubuntu. I compiled the libflashsupport.so object and installed the flashplugin-nonfree package. YouTube then played Flash with audio and I was delighted.

Finishing Up

All that was left to do was to gloat and take a final system image. I then added a few more users (Maggie and Jacob) and ensured they had the right UIDs and it was all done.

I also had to go into my keyboard preferences via System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts to correct an issue with the left shift key being incorrectly mapped. I deleted all the bindings under the Desktop swivel and found that solved it.

Check out the ad and then tell me if you think the world is getting too uptight? I thought it was funny and well done. You expect the New Yorker to be a tough guy and the humour comes from him breaking that stereotype.

As for the concerns parents have over having to explain same-sex relationships to their children… I say “welcome to parenting.” You’ll have lots of potentially difficult conversations but remember it’s your ego and skewed adult perspective that makes them difficult. The child is full of innocence and wonder and isn’t asking you about Billy’s two daddys to embarrass you, so get over yourself.