Author: Matthias

Netbean probs

Some while ago, I start coding a feed reader in J2ME to run on mobile phones. After some searching, it seemed like Netbeans would be the way to go.. They provide a nice UI builder including modeling of the flow between the different screens, tailored towards cell phones. Also, it seems the Sony Ericsson SDK provides nice integration with Netbeans.

My favorite java IDE IntelliJ doesn’t seem to support mobile development at all. (for the record, I wouldn’t use IntelliJ if I had to pay for it myself ;)) The next best thing, Eclipse, seems to be less mature in this area, although they are progressing fast. So Netbeans it became.

To my surprise, I even found a tutorial on the netbeans site which already gave me a bootstrap to my task! 🙂

So, where’s the problem?

Well, I set up netbeans and created a project and all, so I could get to serious work on my 2h train trip. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to write a single line of code! 🙂 As soon as I opened my laptop, the Netbeans IDE seemed to have become very unresponsive! Opening a menu could take 10 seconds, scrolling through the code is impossible. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first, so I rebooted because I thought my laptop was having trouble waking up after having the short nap. However, not improved. I had to give up.
At home, I searched the internet, and indeed, netbeans has problems with my ATI X600 ‘s PowerPlay function! Who would have imagined that. 😉 Especially since this is the only Java app I have trouble with… Anyhow, just disabling the PowerPlay function solves the problem! It’s probably related to my ATI drivers, but since I have a fricking Dell laptop, I’m not allowed to install drivers other than from Dell, so, as you can imagine, Dell never supplies updates to the driver! If anyone knows how to circumvent the checks going on in the driver installer from ATI, please let me know…

wine copy protection

When reading through the WineConf 2006 Summary , I was really excited to read that there finally could potentially be some progress in the area of supporting copy protection schemes.. I quote:

As far as 1.0 goes, […] copy protection would be really nice to get in the tree and Ivan Leo Puoti reiterated that he had patches available. Alexandre responded that there are some critical parts of the design that need to be fleshed out because “the Wine maintainer is a pain in the ass.”

[…]

I overheard a conversation between Ivan and Alexandre about copy protection that basically laid out a roadmap for getting it into Wine. There’s quite a bit of work involved since Alexandre would like to see a services.exe created that can be used to load the Safedisc drivers. In turn, that means there needs to be some communication with it, most likely via RPC, and that will require quite a bit of interface design.

Why do I care? 🙂 I believe it’s one of the main showstoppers for running windows games on linux. Okay, there’s always a lot of work on the DirectX emulation and stuff, but there are a lot of people able to help there. Supporting the ‘dark routines’ or intricacies of windows, which copy protection schemes rely on, seems like a lot more difficult , so less people commit themselves..

I don’t buy many games, but I do own Trackmania Sunrise, which I think is a marvelous game, yet simple in design. I believe it would run pretty well in wine, but right now it’s impossible due to the starforce protection… which I find a real pity! It is even more a pity when you realise the Trackmania Nations edition is even a free game but still has the copy protection applied!
So the day Wine will support Trackmania, I’ll be a happy linux gamer 😉 Please vote! 😉

KDE apps

ehrm, today I got the silly idea to run through all kde apps releases at kde-apps.org released in 2006… There were more than I anticipated! 😉 (around 850)

A few weeks ago, I started to compile a list of linux alternatives for all important windows applications I use in daily routine. Since KDE is my favorite desktop environment, kde-apps.org was a nice source of information. Most of the apps I’ve already heard of, but it was just a matter of writing it down once, in order not to forget and possibly be useful to migrating people.
Since I’m on windows right now, I’ll wait to publish the list until I have verified and tested all apps. Since there are some new ones, their quality still has to be proven. 😉 Also I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to only post these I finally actually use in the end. 🙂 but that would delay the whole thing a lot, since this can only be decided after a lot of testing — dilemma.. 😉

A few years ago, I tried to make a similar list and concluded I just wasn’t ready for linux due to the lack of a lot of GUI tools I’m used to in windows. Today, I’m pleased to see the situation has a lot changed! The only programs left I had trouble to find alternatives for, were TCPview and filemon, 2 monitoring tools for network connections and file access respectively. Still, I found an interesting blog post about network connection monitoring. So I might wanna try something out myself. 😉
As far as file monitoring is concerned, the case seems a bit harder, but not impossible. 😉