(no subject)

[ewx]

I got Wine running Starcraft with decent interactive performance. I spent a long time trying to work around the direct graphics access problem by some fairly bizarre means, but this was really a bit of a red herring: the reason that the mouse and keyboard didn't work as root was because DGA was available as root but that wine's support for it had a bug which prevented the mouse and keyboard working at all. Having found someone's patch for this latter problem under a rock, it didn't take long before it was all running relatively smoothly.

Tomorrow I try to get Brood War working too, and if that doesn't take too long see about getting network play working too.

The first attempt at "bizarre means" was to try to use Linux's capabilities support to allow Wine access to /dev/mem (which is what DGA needs). (File permissions aren't enough, you need CAP_SYS_RAWIO too.) Unfortunately the actual support for this feature is poorly documented and has bits missing that I had to bodge up, and in the end I couldn't make it behave like I wanted even then. I did't think this was a "bizarre means" when I started but I've revised this opinion.

The second attempt was to use a setuid helper and and LD_PRELOADed wrapper for open() to smuggle in a root-opened file descriptor onto /dev/mem. People who've previously noticed my fondness for LD_PRELOAD might reasonably wonder why I only tried this second. This worked fine but since it brought up the mouse/keyboard problem again was what made me realize that the problem was nothing to do with root and all to do with DGA. (So trying to fix the wrong problem can be helpful after all, if it leads you to the right problem.)

Comments

[sweh.livejournal.com]

It's posts like this that make me realise how far I'm falling behind the curve at this job.

10 years ago I would have been doing this sort of hacking myself. Today I'm lucky if I ever delve beyond shell/perl scripts.

I'm living on 15 years of experience at Unix administration and algorithm design. One day that won't be enough.

*sigh*

[emperor]

I found the patching executible wouldn't run (well, it runs, and black-screens at me) under the wine in debian/stable.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That's a pain; rebooting from time to time just to install the latest patch wouldn't be too much hardship, but keeping a Windows install working could be much more effort.

Wine

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

If your experimentation ever extends as far as getting MS-Word and the Encyclopaedia Britannica to work in Wine, let me know how! (I did have a try some time ago, but concluded it was more effort than it was worth (and probably required more Unix sysadminning knowledge than I had).)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I'm moderately fearful of being unemployable by the time I'm forty (but only moderately, or I'm sure I'd be doing somewhat more about it).

There have, actually, only been two techies in their forties in my department the whole time (four years) I've been there. I take comfort in the fact the department hasn't existed for much longer than that (nor the field much longer either), and the stayers in the department are all aging at, funnily enough, exactly the same rate as me (and I'm not the oldest of them).

Re: Wine

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Britannica never used to work well for me in Wine but I just tried it again and it got much further than usual, the obviously critical error being:

Failure: could not open hash table CDX:\DOCTABLE/DATABASE.HT

...despite the relevant file being available in at least two ways; but I have no idea what CDX: is.

I'd rather figure out how the article files are packed, though, to be entirely free of their interface.