What most users will like about Piped, however, is not its privacy benefits, but the fact it lets you watch Youtube without advertisements. Piped is not the only software of its kind - after all, Invidious is way more popular - but I find it much better than the alternatives when you want to host a Youtube frontend for yourself and a small group of friends.
]]>That is pretty much what happened to me when I was doing research on Terraform and OpenTofu and trying to apply them to Proxmox in order to get actual tasks done. Both Terraform and OpenTofu are provisioners aimed at automating the deployment of services, machines and containers. There are many “Hello, World” tutorials for them, but they are always focused on popular cloud service providers (such Amazon’s AWS). There are some examples floating around the web with actual use cases that you might check if you want to achieve an actual, real world deployment with them, but usually they are poorly explained and come across as if they are just telling you “If you want to do X, take these steps and don’t ask any questions.” This is sometimes fine, but does not make for a good learning experience.
As a result, I am announcing my article about automated deployments with Proxmox, OpenTofu and cloud-init, published in ADMIN Magazine #84. It is an in-depth tutorial for using OpenTofu to provision a number of web servers, backed by a reverse proxy, on a Proxmox Virtual Environment. In case you are not familiar with Proxmox, suffices to say it is an hypervisor for virtual machines designed to run on your own servers. My tutorial also explains how to use cloud-init to automatically configure the virtual machines in your deployment. Every step of the process is detailed and clearly explained.
I hope this article will be of help for people learning the trade.
]]>Bazzite is designed to provide a “console-like” experience and therefore is intended for use on gaming rigs, home theatre computers, and handheld devices. It is no coincidence Bazzite targets the popular Steam Deck and many of its clones as platforms. I tested Bazzite on old hardware just to check if it was capable of running commercial games (including Windows ones) at an acceptable quality. Don’t forget to check my review on the magazine in order to know what works and what Bazzite needs to improve.
]]>4Get is quite similar to SearXNG, if you happen to be familiar with it. If not, I will tell you it is a web service you (or a trusted party) hosts that is able to relay your search queries to other search engines. The idea is you can perform your searches on your favourite 4Get instance, and this instance will query regular search engines (such as Google or Yandex) on your behalf. The benefit is that the mainstream search engines don’t get to associate your queries with your identity directly. Another big benefit is that, if you are performing a search for which a search engine can’t find an answer, 4Get facilitates getting results from multiple search engines in order to maximize the probabilities of scoring a good answer.
]]>Now, if you are familiar with the modern gaming scene, you will know videogame preservation is an actual industry that moves money. For example, GOG, which used to stand for Great old Games, is a videogame store specialized in repackaging classics and selling them under a form that is playable on recent machines. You can buy their releases for quite a reasonable price, often under ten USD. The question, then, is why would somebody put any effort in archiving an old collection of game CDs and DVDs when you could just repurchase it all for cheap. The answer is simple: most of the time, the release you can buy is not the one you have. This is often the case with translated games - GOG might have the game for sale, but only the English version, so if you want the Spanish version, you are out of luck.
A challenge I faced with this article is that one of the biggest obstacles in the quest of videogame preservation are copy protected CDs. In the good old days of the 90s, it was not uncommon for videogames to be distributed as copy protected CDs which made it harder to create a clean backup. Most of those early-DRM technologies are beaten by this time, but it is hard to talk about the topic on an American Magazine because US law forbids providing instructions for breaking copy protection mechanisms. So, basically, I didn’t touch the subject in my article other than for explaining the situation to the reader.
If you have read my article already, you might be wondering how can advanced copy protection mechanisms be beaten. Since I am not bound to US law I am free to write about the subject in my personal site.
The good news is that following the instructions and examples in my article is highly likely to work for you right away. The overwhelming majority of games released before year 2000 didn’t bother setting copy protection at all, or used basic mechanisms such as activation keys. As long as you are making a legitimate archival copy out of a retail release, the need for an activation key ought to be not a problem - since I expect you will have one with your retail copy. The bad news is that CDs which used protection based on defective sectors or Data Position Measurement (DPM) can’t be reliably copied using Linux tools.
What are the solutions then? After some testing, it seems to me that the soundest solution is running Alcohol 120%, a proprietary program for Windows which is capable of creating an image from your CDs and DVDs, including the data protection components. Alcohol 120% uses a non-standard format for its images which stores information that cannot be kept on regular images, such as ISO files or BIN/CUE pairs. This allows these non-standard images to contain things such as data position measurements. Alcohol 120% also has the capability of mounting the images under a virtual drive capable of emulating the CD to perfection, including its DPM quirks, therefore making it possible to use the game image just as if it was the original CD.
The Open Source project cdemu can be used under Linux to mount Alcohol 120% images. In theory, this would allow Linux users to mount the image as a virtual drive and then run the game from the CD using Wine or a similar technology. My experience with Wine is nefarious when it comes to running software from CDs, virtual or otherwise, so feel free to try, but don’t set your expectations high.
CloneCD used to be a popular option for copying game CDs back when I was young. It is a nice alternative to Alcohol 120%, and the interface is less cluttered, but my tests show it is not as capable of breaking the most recent forms of CD copy protection.
My article was written from the point of view of a Linux user, and in fact I find Linux a very good platform for running old videogames. However, what can you do if you have a copy of some old game and want to run it on a modern Windows system? My advice then would be to check what the industry is doing.
One of the problems old games face is that they are not compatible with anything resembling a modern DirectX. Chances are you are trying to play a game designed for an old Voodoo card, for example. Trying to launch such program under Windows 10 is bound to fail. The way GOG and other actors of the videogame scene are solving this issue is by including a wrapper with the game, which allows the videogame to interact properly with a modern graphics stack. dgVooDoo2 is a popular solution. GOG is also using nGlide with success.
Both dgVooDoo2 and nGlide work under Wine, so it is in fact possible to use these wrappers to play old Windows games under Linux using native-like performance, which is something you can easily try by installing a GOG release which uses an nGlide wrapper on a Linux distribution using a game launcher such as Lutris.
Commercial distributors of old videogames are also using CD emulation wrappers such as ogg-winmm in order to be able to execute the games without the need for an actual CD.
If you find the subject interesting, I encourage you to grab a copy of Linux Magazine. In that article, I explore ways to run old games using a number of compatibility layers, some of which are so powerful you could run an old game as-is without modifying it at all.
]]>This is the second time one of my articles is re-released via a secondary publication from Linux News Media. I must confess I am deeply flattered.
]]>This server is the one I used for my digital birthday party back in 2022. It now has a proper TLS certificate (via Let’s Encrypt) and a real Internet solvable hostname.
This private game server can be reached at terraforming.operationalsecurity.es. You can use it without registration.
]]>The first one is a review of the thirty bees ecommerce solution, and it has been published on Linux Magazine #284. What sets this article apart is that it features a tutorial for installing and running a thirty bees web store on an OpenBSD server, alongside the review proper. I wrote this tutorial after evaluating thirty bees for replacing the framework which hosts my current web store. Eventually I decided the migration was not the effort, but I think thirty bees is worth checking if you are starting a new project.
The second article is a quick tutorial for using Sake, an automation tool that strikes as a lightweight version of Ansible. Upon closer inspection, it is obvious Sake isn’t an Ansible drop-in replacement at all (nor it intends to be). Nevertheless, Sake is quite useful for running concurrent tasks across multiple servers at once. It can’t do nothing you can replicate with a mound worth of shell scripts, but Sake comes in a tight manageable package, so it is worth keeping an eye on it. The article has been published on ADMIN #91.
]]>The return of these services is not the only newsworthy event. My roguelike game server has also gone through some changes. In particular, I have updated my port of Rogue 5 to ElwinR’s most recent development branch. As usual, my hosted version has the ISRUN bug corrected. My instance of Brogue has also been updated to the last release. Rapid Brogue has been retired from my server, because the last iteration of regular Brogue comes with an user-selectable game mode which allows players to experience Rapid Brogue from a standard Brogue release!
As usual, my code is available from my CVS repository.
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