Phytotron's stupid computer blog

[Z-Man]

Well, if 6 ms truly is the monitor's response time, then I'd assume the blur is mostly due to what you describe. The only way to avoid that is to use a monitor with pulsating/scanning backlight, preferably one supporting 120Hz refresh... but those are only available as TN.

There is a chance that the input lag will get better once the monitor is attached digitally.
Wider turns would be due to the keyboard, possibly just the mechanics. Maybe you can't press the keys as quickly as you used to now.
An in-game source of lag could be the swap setting (in system setup/grapics/tweaks), its best set to Finish. Slightly too optimistically, it defaults to Flush in some configurations. That could also explain the jittery camera, if the more liberal swap settings are used and are a problem, internally measured framerates can be wildly inconsistent, and they're what is used to drive all simulations.

[Phytotron]

It doesn't matter now, but since you are more likely to switch to a monitor with HDMI in than a PC with only DVI out in the future (guessing here), I'd go for an HDMI cable. The DVI cable would be useless then. Of course, you'll need to make sure you get the appropriate adapter.

I'm more likely to sell off all this and get an iMac the next time I switch, heh. And the monitor came with a DVI cable; was just wondering if there would be any reason to use an HDMI one instead.

Well, if 6 ms truly is the monitor's response time, then I'd assume the blur is mostly due to what [Jonathan] describe[s]. The only way to avoid that is to use a monitor with pulsating/scanning backlight, preferably one supporting 120Hz refresh... but those are only available as TN.

Yeah, and I'm willing to sacrifice that for the advantages of IPS over TN. And in most games I've checked out the blur isn't as big a deal; same with videos. Evident, but not crippling. Arma is just a different case, being nothing but straight lines. Remember, even when I was using a CRT I never played with the floor on because the grid lines made it difficult for me to pick out the cycle walls. Same thing with dir_wall textures with vertical or horizontal lines. Or even the fact that I don't like having the same color as other cycles.

And mind you, with even the TN screen I had for a little while, I was, and continue to be with this monitor, bothered by the blurring of text when I scroll a web page. Dislike it with television, too.

Which is all also to say, just to be clear, that I don't mean to suggest I think there's something wrong with the monitor. Part of it is my own tolerances. Like, I don't understand how people don't notice compression and dithering (or lack thereof, I guess) in digital video. "Don't you see that? Look, right there." "No, my mongo and expensive HDTV is awesome; I'm beating the Joneses!" "You're deluded; that looks like shit." Or how they don't hear wishy-washy cymbals in compressed music.

Wider turns would be due to the keyboard, possibly just the mechanics. Maybe you can't press the keys as quickly as you used to now.

If anything, this keyboard seems to have lower/faster action than the Mac keyboards I had been using (not the newer laptop-like ones); at worst, it's no worse than the Mac keyboard. (That was actually something I had been complaining about with those Mac keyboards. I was even looking to replace it with something with better action just prior to the eMac going kaput.) I used to be able to make turns at right about a 0.1 delay. I don't feel like the keys are any slower; the turns just get registered late, as though there's a buffer on them. So, they should result in a square more like the one on the left, but I'm getting the one on the right, possibly a bit worse:

toins.png (10.74 KiB) Viewed 3866 times

Whatever the cause, there's some latency somewhere along the line. I'm also late with my timing everywhere; like I said, I seem to be behind all the action. I am eager to see if the digital connection makes any difference. Composite cables from a gaming console into an LCD television introduce latency because of the conversion from analog to digital, and then the upscaling. (Obviously, the latter isn't relevant here.) So perhaps the digital connection will help.

An in-game source of lag could be the swap setting (in system setup/grapics/tweaks), its best set to Finish.

Yeah, I've had it set to Finish from the get-go (can't remember if it defaulted to that.) THe jitter isn't ever-present, though it used to be. Agh, I dunno.

[Phytotron]

Ran across this about the Elementary OS release process: elementary Can't Afford a Bug Bomb

It's related to some of the frustrations I've been complaining about throughout my own process moving to Linux, as well as what I described in that "Faildows" thread: the, ehm, "shabbiness" of Linux; and more generally, in getting to the point that programming and design are distinct things, and that what's good for a programmer and/or "power user" may not necessarily be good for design. (I'd venture to say that may be the case more often than not, but I'm really not familiar enough, especially with programming.)

It also made me think a bit of nux's call for a faster development cycle.

[Phytotron]

Finally got that HDMI-to-DVI adapter and am pleased to report that the lagom white saturation test now looks as it should—I can see the bottom row. The gamma is still a bit off, and since I can't seem to create a calibrated ICC profile in stupid Linux, I may be stuck there. And speaking of stuck, still have that single stuck red pixel. No improvement on the input lag or whatever it is, either, not that I really expected there would be. It does seem to be something Arma-specific. I'm not noticing it with other games, not that I've tried many, and fewer that are as quick-twitch as Arma, such as those cool Kenta Cho games. As an aside, I was happy to find an old Mac classic in the Ubuntu Software Center: Maelstrom. I spent too many hours playing that back in the day, came on an old Mac free/shareware disc I had. Another oldish favorite, Kiki the Nano bot, is there, too, but it doesn't work right—there's graphics tearing, and it won't go to a true fullscreen mode, just maximizes the window.

Anyway, while I was at it I also got an HDMI cable to go from the computer to the boob tube. Annoyingly, the tv does that overscan cropping thing, and there doesn't seem to be a setting anywhere to correct that, as a lot of models do have. In fact, the manual indicates that attaching a computer through HDMI "is not assumed." But, no big deal. Workaround is to just use a pop-out window or VLC to manually resize the video window so its edges are just outside the cropped area. I also have to log out and back in using the Cairo/GLX-Dock interface, which gets rid of the Unity top panel so that I have room to move the video window's title bar up beyond the cropped area. And have to restart when I want to go back to the monitor because it won't be recognized otherwise, which I don't get. Also, the sound settings control panel is different whether I access it through Unity or GLX/Cairo-Dock, and in the latter it won't give the HDMI option. Wutdafook. So, a little bit of a hassle, but describing it sounds like more work than it is. The worst part is the crick I get in my neck trying to look at the tv screen from the computer as I set everything up.

[Phytotron]

Alright, I just want to measure this a fifth time before I cut, just to make sure I get it right.

I went and got a new external hard drive, which I'm going to format as HFS+ non-journaled, for which Linux has built-in read/write support. My plan now is to leave the two now-external Mac drives alone as backup backups. So, I'm going to first copy the data that I want from each of those onto the Power Mac. I then want to copy all that data onto the new drive to use with Linux.

Jonathan's initial recommendation was to change the ownership of all those files rather than just changing the read and write permissions. The default Ubuntu UID and GID is 1000. So, confirm whether this would be correct procedure:

1) Reformat new drive as HFS+ non-journaled using Disk Utility.
2) Copy old Mac files onto Power Mac.
3) Let's say I put them all in one folder called "Old Mac Stuff."
4) While still on the Power Mac, I load up the terminal and enter the following command:

Code: Select all

sudo chown -R 1000:1000 [drag and drop "Old Mac Stuff" here]

5) Copy "Old Mac Stuff" onto new drive. (Probably in pieces, to break up the copying time over USB 2.0.)
6) Should now have read&write access to all those files, from Linux.


Question: What happens if I decide at a later point to use a different Linux distro and it uses a different UID/GID?

[epsy]

Sounds about right but I think you would be better off doing the chown'ing while on linux, especially if you have read/write ability.

As for your last question, it is a convention to start "actual" users UIDs at 1000, so you should be alright. If it doesn't, well, you can just chown it again, really.

[Phytotron]

Sounds about right but I think you would be better off doing the chown'ing while on linux, especially if you have read/write ability.

Can you explain why? Jonathan indicated earlier it'd be best to use a Mac as a go-between.

As for that end bit, are you referring to the read/write of the files themselves (permissions) or the disk?

[Jonathan]

I agree with epsy here. Chowning is easier on a machine that 'knows' the target UID/GID. It's also one of the safer things you can do on a different platform, unlike copying files that may have resource forks and whatnot, which Linux would probably trample out of ignorance. But it isn't very important. You might as well do it on the Mac, although as you've found out you need to find the right target UID/GID first.

He means writability of an HFS+ mount, not write permissions.

[Phytotron]

OK, I'll do that. I assume the command is the same, and that Linux's Terminal will accept a drag-and-drop, too?


So, another thing. As my inquiries about the chown-ing might have implied, I went back to square one, at least with the iMac data. I deleted all the stuff that I had chmod-ed and then re-copied it to the Power Mac to then put on the common drive and do the chown thing.

I'm unable to do the same with the eMac data, however, since I foolishly chmod-ed the original data rather than copies. Since I'm going to do the chown thing, I'm wondering if there's good reason to reset all the permissions for that data back to normal. (We're just talking media here—documents, music, pictures, video—no applications or anything from the Library folder.) From what I (barely) understand, "normal" would be 755 for directories and 664 for files. If there is good reason to do that, what would be the proper command to get it all in one swell foop? Googling "chmod 755 664" gives a bunch of different answers, many of which I can't even quite decipher what's actually part of the command and what's not, and I don't want to make the same mistake I made last time.

[Jonathan]

'Normal' is actually 755/644. But you won't gain much from it, assuming there is nobody sharing the system whom you don't trust, but who would still be able to access/change the files due to liberal permissions, and is a different user and doesn't have physical access to the drive. In that case you'd probably opt for 700/600, too. That's the thing: you can largely set permissions however you want them. It's just unfortunate that "X is allowed to execute this file" gets conflated with "this file is inherently executable", and it is also the same bit that allows you to index directories.

[Phytotron]

It's just unfortunate that "X is allowed to execute this file" gets conflated with "this file is inherently executable", and it is also the same bit that allows you to index directories.

We fixed that after my bungle, though, right?

[Jonathan]

Yeah, except for the executables which should be fixable on a case-by-case basis if needed.

[Phytotron]

Wait, what do you mean? What executables, for example?

[Jonathan]

The OS X apps coming from the eMac. Not sure if there were any, but I throw these things out for completeness anyway.

Page break ahead!

[Phytotron]

Ah, yeah, I didn't chmod any actual applications, only the Home folder. However, that did include the Library, and contrary to my previous statement, there were actually a few things I saved from there and which I'll be wanting to use in both Linux and a future Mac. Specifically, bookmark files (although I also backed up those to HTML for Linux), MAME data (ROMs, NVRAM, screenshots), Stella data (ROMs and screenshots). As you may be aware, the ROMs are in zip (MAME) and bin (Stella) files. I'm not even sure if you can transfer NVRAM, regardless, but I wanted to save my high scores. Also, the entire Armagetron Advanced folder in Application Support. You think there will be a problem using any of that?


By the way, as I was doing all this I was reminded of a particular behavior with the mouse scrollwheel: On the Mac, using a Gigaware mouse, there's the normal line-by-line scrolling, but if you do a full/quick scroll it'll jump ahead quicker. In Linux, and I think Windows, there's isn't this behavior, just the line-by-line scrolling. Know what I mean? Is this attributable to the mouse or the OS? I assume the latter. If so, is there a term for that? And whatever it is, anyone know if and how one can get that behavior in Linux?