If you play Freespace 2 Open with the Freespace 1 Port, and you have version 3.0.3 and want to convert to 3.0.4, you are supposed to run a batch file to run bspatch and make the new VP file. You can do this on Linux if you have Wine (I imagine more or less any version would work, but I don't know) installed, with the following shell script.

It is considered axiomatic among gamers that a game that's good when it's new is always good - if it doesn't have staying power, it just wasn't that amazing in the first place. There's a few games that, years after their release, we're still playing - games like Tetris, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the original Quake, or for that matter Asteroids. Each genre has at least one game that fits this description. In the space flight simulator category there are really three games which stand out significantly: Tie Fighter, which was really the first truly-3D spaceflight sim with believable capital ships; Wing Commander, various versions of which (especially Privateer) are still being played avidly; and Descent: Freespace along with Freespace 2, two titles from Volition that years later are still the benchmark for such games. The list would also not be complete without Elite, which is arguably the game that really defined the genre to begin with.

I bought both Freespace and Freespace 2 not long after they came out, and recently while looking for games to play on Linux I decided to try to run FS2 under Wine. This didn't work, but then someplace in the back of my mind I dimly remembered that Volition had long ago open-sourced Freespace 2. Back then, I didn't have a Linux system worth playing games on, and I was dual-booting Windows anyway, so it didn't matter. But today, I run only Linux (aside from virtual machines - which aside from VMware Workstation, don't support 3d graphics yet) and so the Linux port had become relevant.

As discussed in a previous article, KVM is a kernel-accelerated virtualization package for Linux that utilizes AMD or Intel VT to reduce the cost of virtualization. It is based in part on qemu, a long-lived processor emulation package which also has a non-VT virtualizing engine, kqemu. One of the benefits of using qemu as a codebase is that qemu already has emulation for various pieces of hardware, including network cards. qemu can use a variety of methods for providing networking, including slirp, tunneling, and various others.

To me, the most interesting type of networking is VDE, or "virtual distributed ethernet". This is most similar to the type of networking performed by VMware. vde provides virtual switches (or hubs) and lets you connect them together at will. This document will not explain how to configure a complicated setup; it explains only how to set up a single TUN/TAP interface and utilize it. I will also briefly cover IP Masquerading, which is necessary for your system to access the outside world if it doesn't have a real, routable IP address.

KVM is a kernel-level virtualization technology/application that provides a complete PC virtual machine under Linux when you have a processor supporting VT. AMD and Intel both have processors which provide hardware support for virtualization to decrease the cost of translating all privileged instructions. In a recent study, vmware showed performance losses of 46% when functioning as a webserver. This is not out of line with expectations; the primary purpose of vmware is to consolidate little-used servers into a single machine.

This is a fairly niche application, but at my place of employment I have an Epson Perfection 3170 Photo Scanner. I'm not even using the photo (negative/slide) scanning capabilities, I'm just using it as an ordinary scanner. It is however very fast and unprecedentedly quiet. I wanted to use this scanner under Linux (Epson provides Windows 95+ drivers and MacOS 9+ drivers, but no Linux drivers) sometimes, and on the Mac sometimes.