zero0w

I see, Texstar is here. Yes, Texstar RPM saves us many trouble in getting some of the most commonly used packages. In fact d4x-2.4.1 crash is fixed in the updated galaxy theme rpm which is also among his mdk 9.1 rpm collections :) .

From my experience, Aumix is a must for the first time since it is muted (at volume 0). As for Kmix, I don't know why, but adjusting it will affect the volume in large amount.... Once the default volume is unmuted in both volume control, you can keep using only one of them thereafter.

The ALSA driver module (snd-emu10k1) should work. However the master volume is muted as default. You need to adjust the volume in BOTH Aumix and Kmix (If you use KDE). The tutorial is for getting MIDI to work. If you don't need to, you can skip it.

I have a question: It seems Texstar's collection of M$ truetype fonts are larger than the collection already in the Corefonts project. Are the extra fonts in Texstar RPMs all freely and legally distributable just as the corefonts project? I don't use Windows at all so I don't want to break the license.

NWN Linux Client Beta 3 is out! 1.29.6758 Beta 3 - Release Notes: * fixes an OpenGL bug * fixes a crash when putting gold in a container * fixes middle mouse button camera control ATI Radeon series display card and Riva TNT/2 should be working now with Beta 3 :).

About supermount: It should work when accessing CD-Rom from Konqueror file-browser. On the leftmost column, click on the <Star> icon (Services). Then click on Devices, you will find your CD-Rom drive(s) there. Click on the CD-Rom device for which you want to supermount. It should work right away - sometimes consecutive clicks will crash Konqueror, however...

I also encounter the freeze problem ndeb mentioned. This is definitely not a good impression for newbie Linux users :( . I used XFS as filesystem. I manually rebooted after the freeze at completing system service selections. Luckily it got me right into X and everything seems fine... (with XFS it does _not_ seem to check or recover the journal entry like ext3...) Still the installer needs fixing. These freezes are simply not acceptable.

Eugenia at OS News suggested you can switch between OSS and ALSA driver at Mandrake Control Center (MCC), here's how I did it for my SB Live: MCC > Hardware > HardDrake List Click the item under the 'Soundcard' entry. The info window will display the module name for the soundcard. You can click on the option: > Runconfig tool > Let me pick any driver If your soundcard has ALSA support, the module name should be there on the list. Click on it, change and save the setting. You should then notice the ALSA module should have started and running in the service/daemon list located by MCC > System > DrakXService list. If ALSA is successfully started, you need to adjust the mixer setting since the default volume level is zero and no sound can be heard. You can adjust the volume & mixer settings in _both_ Aumix and Kmix (for KDE, which is I am using). Hope this can help.

I figure out to access CD-Rom from Konqueror file-browser. On the leftmost column, click on the <Star> icon (Services). Then click on Devices, you will find your CD-Rom drive(s) there. Click on the CD-Rom device for which you want to supermount. It should work right away - sometimes consecutive clicks will crash Konqueror, however...

Ok, I fixed the GTK 1.2+ font problem. I suspect the ext3 filesystem has not been completely debugged yet.... The font settings and data were a mess.... I suspect it's because of data corruption.... Switching to XFS as filesystem, it seems to be more stable for me and the GTK 1.2+ fonts are looking normal (same as Mdk 9) again now. Well it could be just my system not working good with ext3... but 9.0 is ok, and it's been known 2.4.20 kernel has data corruption with ext3....

Also, what happened to the fonts of GTK 1.2+ applications? They seems to be pretty ugly, unlike that of Mdk 9.0 which is pretty good.

The gaim-CVS rpm nightly build depends on GTK+ >= 2.20. Does that mean I need to upgrade to GTK+ 2.2 too? Since MDK 9.1 comes with GTK 2.0...

Just installed Mdk 9.1. I have to admit it takes some time to get used to the anti-aliased fonts. It's okay (or even better) for English fonts, but the Asian fonts became too small and 'slim' when anti-aliased; even though anti-aliased Asian fonts are prettier, it's no point when it became too difficult to read them, say when browsing websites. What do you think?

Download complete. Installing now. :)

XMMS and MPlayer.

I am going to test it on my MDK 9.1 soon :) . Thanks for the heads up.

Downloading now. :)

You may need Kalsatools to setup the output port for your external MIDI device (if you got one). I think you can go over the ALSA user mailing list for help on this. As for /dev/midi, I am not sure. Perhaps /dev/sequencer will work? EDIT: I have checked, both /dev/midi and /dev/sequencer do not work.... anyhow I haven't resorted to use 'cat' to play any midi file yet. I don't do hand programming/hacking MIDI much :P . But I will later since I need to work on a MIDI plugin.

Also some more free font sets here: http://www.identifont.com/free-fonts.html

Well, ALSA has come a long way and it took over 2 years to complete the development from 0.5 to 0.9 series as it arrived 0.9.1 stable status only recently. From what I know, ALSA changed the API a lot in the past so many developers thought it's difficult to catch up to it. Hopefully the development from 0.9.x to 1.0 will be easier with a more stablizing API.

The Timidity approach is a completely software-based synthesizer, so is Fluid Synth. While the awesfx package made use of SB Live/Audigy/AWE soundcards' hardware MIDI synthesizer capability. That's the main difference. With Timidity and Fluid Synth, you can play MIDI via any soundcard that works on Linux, using CPU power to emulate software-based MIDI synthesizer. In other words, the hardware MIDI functions on SB Live/Audigy/AWE simply being left unused. With awesfx (sfxload), it is using the hardware MIDI support provided by ALSA (more strictly, in OSS compatible mode, but let's not get into that). So it should be faster without wasting CPU power on MIDI emulation. All these, however, might be obsolete in the future. Since ALSA 1.0 plans to have Wavetable MIDI function built in as a common layer in the user space, using either software or hardware-based MIDI synthesis. So MIDI interface will be standardized across all Linux audio software and hardware in the future. The remaining difference is whether the MIDI function is software or hardware based, and the performance penalty (and latency) in software-synthesized MIDI.

Could be a LAN game I think.

Ok, here you will find all your needs for NWN Linux Client, and possibly also the support in the future: http://nwnlinux.project404.org/downloads.php

Someone might want to mirror the 1.29 installer, the download speed is pretty slow right now. :(

So it's all about the legal issue. Maybe Bioware should consider both set of update patches for Windows and Linux using different archive format and installer. That will eventually solve the update support problem in the future. Or, if the original Windows update is just a file-replacing installation package then another Update installer can be made to extract the update on Linux.