When adjusting performance settings of Windows games run in Linux with WINE it would be very handy to see the actual fps (frames per second) on the screen like FRAPS for Windows does. WINEDEBUG=fps can do that on the command line. But it can’t be seen if the application is running in full screen.

A combination of osd_cat and a short bash function does the trick.

sudo apt-get install xosd-bin

then add the following line to your .bashrc

winefps () { WINEDEBUG=fps wine "$1" 2>&1 | tee /dev/stderr | grep --line-buffered "^trace:fps:" | osd_cat -c white -s 1 -l2; }

and finally run

. ~/.bashrc

I use the WINEPREFIX a lot, so my command to start e. g. ExampleGame.exe would be

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/ExampleGame/ winefps ExampleGame.exe

which is equivalent to

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/ExampleGame/ WINEDEBUG=fps wine ExampleGame.exe 2>&1 | tee /dev/stderr | grep --line-buffered "^trace:fps:" | osd_cat -c white -s 1 -l2

and displays your current fps on screen. osd_cat options like colour can of course be adjusted. See man osd_cat.

I updated to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal the other day and was pleased so far how things went. All my essential applications were functional and ran smooth. But wait, smooth? Having those eagle eyes of mine I realized a hickup in graphics display here and there. Especially during movies I find that unacceptable. First I figured Intel drivers for my x4500MHD or the newer Xorg stack. But the solution turned out to be Compiz.

Unlike Maverick I had to switch off sync to vblank for opengl and general in natty via compizconfig-settings-manager and also adjust refresh rate to 60 Hz. After that everything was smooth again!

gconftool-2 --set --type=string /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/sop/command 'sopcast-player "%s"'
gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/sop/enabled true
gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/sop/need-terminal false

…and you’re done!

For those who are not satisfied with running their nice Ralink 802.11n USB device only at G speed, here’s what I did. Since kernel 2.6.35 upwards driver version 2.4.0.1 doesn’t compile anymore due to some function renaming. usb_buffer_alloc() was renamed to usb_alloc_coherent()
and usb_buffer_free() was renamed to usb_free_coherent(). I’m actually running 2.6.38 on Lucid and what I had to do was to replace those functions (3 each) in include/os/rt_linux.h and os/linux/rt_usb_util.c.

After that the driver compiles flawlessly, installs and works!

Version 0.3.3 of the great SopCast Player has been released the other day along with sp-auth 3.2.6. A PPA for Ubuntu Karmic Koala is also available. Simply

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jason-scheunemann/ppa

to add the repository.

sudo apt-get install sopcast-player

installs all the necessary software.

Information about how to open Sop links from Firefox can be found in the wiki.

SopCast Player

As of Karmic Koala Ubuntu introduces a new and simplified way to add repositories. From the command line you would just add

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa

to register for example the Xorg-Edgers repository with APT and acquire the public key if required in one step.

I usually make use of a couple of third party repositories like Medibuntu, Xorg-Edgers, SMPlayer and XBMC SVN. Beeing a heavy user of Guake terminal this is just a very convenient and fast way to work with repositories.

SopCast Player won’t work in Karmic Koala. That’s because the lack of libstdc++5 which can however easily be installed from the Jaunty repositories http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/libstdc++5.

I recently discovered that I wouldn’t have sound over the internal speakers of my nx8220 after waking up from suspend in Karmic Koala Beta. This seems to be a known regression in the Kernel and I wasn’t in the mood of trying to fix it the hard way. What I found out though is that

sudo alsa force-reload

brings sound back.