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[Mad Penguin]

w/e ?

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

To play back audio input from 'line in' to the speakers... easiest way... Install gnome-alsamixer either through synaptic, or in a terminal type:

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sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer
and hit enter.

Now you can find it in the menu Applcations > Sound & Video > GNOME ALSA Mixer... fire it up, and untick the Mute box for Line... and raise its volume.

Steam... Don't know it, but as (I think) it's a Windoze app, it will be getting its sound settings from winecfg so you're going to have to change any setting in there:

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winecfg
Audio tab... I'm guessing you want to enable the Jack Driver.

Skype... again I don't use it, but I'm fairly sure you can select Audio input and output devices in the application itself.

Ok, first, the new home page . . . not sure what its for, but w/e.

What does w/e mean?... "What Ever"??

[Smither]

Uh, thanks. It's worked without any settings changed by recording everything with the one mic, I just wanted to try and separate the keyboard and my voice. I hate to say this, but I used windows for that evening, the driver has a setting to separate all jacks, then set a "default device" for every type of jack (in/out/mic) and then skype and steam have the option of selecting whether they use the default or alt jack. And Jack is just super confusing. @[email protected]

Also, don't you guys use Urban Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=w%2Fe)?
The new home page only seems to display a few new posts, not every, and it doesn't seem to display new topics, so I can't deduce what its for.
And there are a few topics that are 404'ing for me.

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

Can you post the URLs of the topics that are 404(ing) in the Bugs board please... Unless the Bugs board is on of them Can you also state whether they 404 all the time, or just occasionally... Thanks.

[Smither]

The new steam client that's based on safari & chrome, or summin, came out of beta today, and now everyone has it.
For some people it works fine, but for others, it barely even runs in XP.
For me, its almost unbearable with wine, I'm in 7 atm, and its ok, but in linux, its just soo laggy.
I'm starting to wander if its worth risking a regression or two, or even breaking it entirely again, and update wine . . .

Also, hot damn working with audio settings in Linux is confusing, frustrating and an all-round pain in the rear! Dx
I just can't get my head around what everything means, what changes what and how I go about implimenting different configurations.
I think I deduce what a button or slider does, or what a particluar setting changes, but then 10 minutes later its seems to be doing something different, or I need to change something else before I get the new setting to take effect.

Any tips on either problems?

[Mad Penguin]

>Any tips on either problems?

Yes, don't use WINE, it will *always* be MUCH slower than running on Windows, and if you're looking at anything Games related, Windows games won't run nearly as well on *any* Linux hack as they will on Windows itself.

If you want to play games, do yourself a favor and buy a games console.
Personally I use a 360.

A BMW is generally accepted as a better car than a Skoda, but it your prime requirement is to run tyres specifically designed and engineered to run on a Skoda and *not* on a BMW - then drive the Skoda! My preference is to simply use alternative tyres and avoid the Skoda - but the choice is yours (!)

[Smither]

Steam is not a game, it's primarily a publishing client.

You can browse the store, and buy games from the store, many small devlopers use it to publish their games.
The only direct relevance it has to games is it needs to be running to play any steam game.
But most improtant thing about it to me, is that it comes with an IM chat client, which I use a lot.

It ran almost perfectly with the old IE-based UI, but now the new one's official, everything runs very slowly.
It works, its just takes 5 seconds to do anything (change windows, type, send a message, change tabs).

But I think I'm wasting my breath here, I'll go ask the steam forums & the ubuntu wiki for help on these points.

[Mad Penguin]

You're jumping through hoops just to run a chat client?!
What protocol are you using??
(Linux/pidgin supports pretty much every chat protocol going, including MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Facebook, IRC etc etc ... ??)

[Smither]

When I log into Steam, using Steam, I log into everything about my acount, much more than just a chat client.
My games, community details, friends list, game stats and much more all becomes "active", for lack of a better word, when I loggin to enforce all sorts of licensing agreements (one game at a time, one client running at a time, each acount only logged into on one computer at a time, etc) concerning the games.

So I doubt a chat client would be able to log into my acount just to access my friends list and groups. But then I've never really thought about it, I just heard about wine and saw it as a way to use Steam chat in linux. If its possible, I'm all ears.
Though, its a problem if . . . whatever chat client I've been using can only log into one acount at a time, as Steam acounts have nothing to do with email other than a way to verify acounts and purcases and I tend to be signed into my Skype, Steam and Yahoo acounts at the same time most of the time.

I'll have a try when I'm not busy with pratice exams.

EDIT: I've searched around, and there is no standalone Steam chat client, nor does any major chat client support it. I think its like trying to get a client to talk to facebook chat. :/

And now, wine updated this morning, and now Steam crashes my Gnome session, or whatever the phrase is. I run Steam.exe, a windows saying "Connecting to Steam account Smith5er . . ." as usual, then once that finishes, the screen flicks to the login page, and all my windows have gone when I login again. :/

Time to reinstall an older version of wine . . .

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

According to this site:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE3Mw (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE3Mw) (and the links)
there WILL be a Steam Client for Linux... they have found code in the OSX launcher which specifically looks for Linux and then tells Steam which libraries to load if Linux is found... this is the CLIENT launcher not the server software.

This is just ONE piece of Linux specific code they have found in Steam... other include what appears to be the FULL Linux client source code on Steams own servers, complete with calls for GNU/Linux libraries.

Make sure you check the links in this article... specially the one to a forum... someone has posted the links to the 4 steam files (on Steams server) that contain the compilable source code... it compiles and apparently works, but nobody has managed to get it to connect so far... but then only a few 'chosen' accounts were allowed to connect whilst the 'Steam OSX Client' was in beta.

So you may be in luck soon... who knows, but it looks likely

BTW, Pidgin works with the Facebook Chat protocols

[kirrus]

It's not the first time there have been rumours or code found to indicate a possible linux steam client. It really comes down to whether they can get enough publishers to provide games for linux to be worth it. It is kind-of a chicken-and-egg suituation, especially since the linux market comparatively is quite small...

Eve online used to be supported under linux (via WINE). I think Microsoft paid them off to cut that off though

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

This "appears" to be more than just code snippets though, the FULL source code has been found, I agree that this doesn't definitely mean it will be released, but it would be a lot of trouble for them to go to for nothing, so it would seem at least 'slightly' promising.

[Smither]

Oh god yes, just as I finished ranting about having to use win7 when half my stuff is kept on my linux partition, this comes up.

Guys, you've made this night a good one for me.

[Smither]

My windows partition is full with only a few megabytes left and I'm in the process of deleting lots of files, and moving even more to my home folder for future use, to free up some space. At the moment I'm copying my 32GB user folder and it initially told me that this would take 2 hours. That's gone down to 20 minutes now, but it still says it's going at 23.4MB/s.

Knowing I have a 2.8GHz processor, I can't help but imagine it could go a lot faster. Now, I know that that's not how modern desktop computers work (for starters, the HDD can only read and write so fast), but I do know that I have a lot of processes that aren't essential for file moving running (like Firefox to write this) and I know that it is possible to have a computer almost solely doing one task, but I'm curious how far this can theoretically be taken in Linux and how far it can be practically taken without requiring more time and patience than simply waiting for the file to be copied in a Gnome session.

Any thoughts?

[Mad Penguin]

Ok, do you mean 'how fast "can" Linux copy files?' ... ??

How 'bout this;

[email protected]:~$ ssh [email protected]
Last login: Sat May 29 12:56:02 2010
Linux watchman 2.6.18-028stab068.3 #1 SMP Tue Feb 16 20:21:42 MSK 2010 x86_64
No mail.
[email protected]:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/bigfile bs=1M count=4096
4096+0 records in
4096+0 records out
4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 12.6104 s, 341 MB/s
[email protected]:~#

Bit unlucky actually as the system is a little busy .. when it's idle it gets up to ~ 700Mb/sec ...