… gosh, I always forget what I do to my font configs on my machines.

KDE: Enable Antialiasing/Subpixel hinting RGB/Style Medium
Fontconfig system wide: Replace Helvetica with something readable in .fonts.conf
Link 10-autohint.conf and 10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf

To be never forgotten again for my fonts to look gorgeous.

Log into the game, then input the following.

/console groundEffectDensity 256
/console groundEffectDist 200
/console detailDoodadAlpha 100
/console horizonfarclip 2112
/console farclip 999
/console characterAmbient

Not something I’d recommend when raiding, but it makes your visuals (horizon, amount of plants and ground detail etc.) look so much better. What it does is pretty much push the settings in your Video Settings to numbers you can’t set via the sliders.
To revert it - simply use the sliders again.

15000 people dead and 40000 still missing after the earthquake… It gets worse every day. Think about China all you want - I am with the families missing their children, children that have lost their parents and anyone else there.

Since I gave in and switched from Sidux to the new Kubuntu 8.04 - simply because Sidux just was too bleeding edge for my work rig, too many kernel switches and the new 2.6.25 totally borking my Cisco VPN Client - I had to install Lotus Notes 8.01 … Again. And it was horror again. So just for future reference I should write down what made it work.

Stuff you need to install/do on a stock Kubuntu:

# sudo apt-get install libstdc++5 libgnomecanvas2-0 \
  libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 \
  libgnomevfs2-0 libgnome2-0 libgnomeui-0
# cp <notesinstalldatadirectory>/deploy/install.xml /root
# sudo mkdir -p /etc/lotus/notes
# sudo touch /etc/lotus/notes/notesrc

Launch Installer, install away. Should work. At least did the job for me.

about:config
layout.css.dpi
set to either 72 or 96

Beyond me how that could slip through Q&A.

And why o why is there still no decent Antialiasing enabled by default?
System Settings/Appearance/Fonts, enable Antialiasing, Subpixel-Hinting RGB, Hinting Style slight.

Yes, I wanted to quit World of Warcraft. Yes, I tried. But somehow I keep coming back. What got my interest back (or so I say to myself) is the release of Codeweaver’s Crossover Games. Granted, i played WoW on Linux with vanilla Wine in the past. It worked, but it had it’s hiccups. Sound was suboptimal at best, it stuttered and forgot to play sounds. Graphics were ok, but still a bit behind the Windows version. Enter Crossover Games…

Now, when I stopped playing on Linux was like a year ago and I didn’t follow Wine’s progress anymore really - so I guess most of the stuff was fixed in the vanilla Wine, too. What made my Crossover Game’s experience so nice is… Well, it just works. I decided to go for a user install of Crossover and then just chose the option to install World of Warcraft. Popped in my CDs, followed by The Burning Crusade CDs, patched to 2.4.1 and then… Heck, it just worked. Graphics are crispy, sound is awesome, that stuff just works.
What still amazes me is that WoW on Linux with a full blown loaded KDE desktop takes up just about 500-600MB of RAM, while under Windows Vista your machine is choking with anything below 2 Gigabytes of RAM. Talk about efficiency. It loads up blazingly fast, it shuts down blazingly fast and FPS never drop under 60 on my not-so-cool machine. So to close my praise of Crossover Games - I bought it. 37€ isn’t cheap, but that’s with updates for a whole year and Codeweavers are the financial backer of the Wine project - so I know that the money will do good for Wine as a whole. Sure could have configured and optimized vanilla Wine, but hey… support where support is due.

Oh… And if you are playing World of Warcraft under Linux - drop Blizzard a note that you do. While they do not officially support playing their game under Linux, I think they should take note of people that do.

Oh yeah, I even did some stuff in the game. Introducing Leshock after all, eh? I rolled a Tauren Shaman on the German server Sen’Jin - I know I will regret having started on a German speaking server again… But somehow I am masochist after all. Let’s see how many idiots are around, this time.
Two screenshots of me doing stuff - I know my UI is still messed up like hell, but I didn’t feel like doing all the polish. Got the most important addons going except for Pitbull, so I am at least set for my casual play these days. Which is what I plan to do - take it casually to 70, then check what I can do in my limited playtime.

Just for the record and for those who might be interested… My current Config.wtf:

SET SoundOutputSystem “1″
SET SoundBufferSize “232″
SET gxApi “opengl”
SET ffxDeath “0″
SET gxMultisampleQuality “0.000000″
SET gxFixLag “0″
SET fullAlpha “1″
SET lodDist “100.000000″
SET SmallCull “0.010000″
SET DistCull “500.000000″
SET farclip “777″
SET particleDensity “1.000000″
SET unitDrawDist “300.000000″
SET gxCursor “0″
SET weatherDensity “3″
SET pixelShaders “1″
SET ffxGlow “0″
SET locale “enGB”
SET coresDetected “2″
SET hwDetect “0″
SET gxColorBits “24″
SET gxDepthBits “24″
SET gxResolution “1600×1200″
SET gxRefresh “50″
SET videoOptionsVersion “1″
SET textureFilteringMode “3″
SET movie “0″
SET expansionMovie “0″
SET Gamma “1.000000″
SET readTOS “1″
SET readEULA “1″
SET readTerminationWithoutNotice “1″
SET readScanning “-1″
SET showToolsUI “1″
SET Sound_VoiceChatInputDriverName “System Default”
SET Sound_VoiceChatOutputDriverName “System Default”
SET Sound_OutputDriverName “USB Audio”
SET realmList “eu.logon.worldofwarcraft.com”
SET patchlist “eu.version.worldofwarcraft.com”
SET shadowLevel “0″
SET specular “1″
SET groundEffectDensity “64″
SET groundEffectDist “140″
SET cameraPitchMoveSpeed “90″
SET cameraPitchSmoothSpeed “45″
SET realmName “Sen’jin”
SET uiScale “1″
SET profanityFilter “0″
SET ChatMusicVolume “0.30000001192093″
SET ChatSoundVolume “0.40000000596046″
SET ChatAmbienceVolume “0.30000001192093″
SET Sound_EnableErrorSpeech “0″
SET Sound_MasterVolume “1″
SET Sound_SFXVolume “1″
SET Sound_MusicVolume “0.40000000596046″
SET Sound_AmbienceVolume “0.60000002384186″
SET gameTip “19″
SET OutboundChatVolume “1″
SET InboundChatVolume “1″
SET VoiceActivationSensitivity “0.40000003576279″
SET questFadingDisable “1″
SET fctCombatState “1″
SET fctDodgeParryMiss “1″
SET fctDamageReduction “1″
SET fctRepChanges “1″
SET fctReactives “1″
SET fctFriendlyHealers “1″
SET fctLowManaHealth “1″
SET fctEnergyGains “1″
SET fctHonorGains “1″
SET fctAuras “1″
SET showNewbieTips “0″
SET checkAddonVersion “0″
SET scriptErrors “1″
SET cameraDistanceMaxFactor “2″
SET autoQuestWatch “0″
SET readContest “-1″
SET CombatDamage “0″
SET CombatHealing “0″
SET Sound_OutputDriverIndex “2″


… my Sidux has bash-completion enabled for all apt-commands.

apt-get install amarok<tab> simply rocks instead of using apt-cache search everytime.

Note to self: Intel’s HDA chip on my P35 motherboard sucks and doesn’t support hardware mixing. Debian’s libasound2 sucks too since the plug:dmix is broken for w/e reason.

Solution: Reactived my trusty old Creative Audigy2. Sweet piece of hardware and does hardware mixing.

Decided to compile a new version libtorrent and rtorrent since well… I was bored and the new version got DHT support, which is awesome.
7 hours later I realized I forgot to put the proper CXXFLAGS in place … AGAIN! It’s a known bug when compiling with GCC 4.xx, all goes well until you first fire up the client. Once it starts communicating with outside nodes it will bail out with Unread data won't fit PCBs read buffer
So after two distcleans off the Slug goes again. As much as I love my little NSLU2 - that box really is a Slug. So if you ever want to compile the bittorrent client of awesomeness on your box, remember to
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -mcpu=xscale -mtune=xscale"
before the initial ./configure’s. Will save you lots of time.

… at least when using Sidux.
I was quite annoyed yesterday because my KDE fonts looked simply crispy and marvellous, yet the ones in Pidgin and Iceweasel/Firefox (pretty much the only GTK apps I use) looked like shit. gtk-qt-engine does a good job keeping my fonts the same, but there was simply no anti-aliasing going on in GTK apps which I seriously hate. I am used to AA. I want it everywhere!
Diving into /etc/fonts it was pretty obvious that I was missing one thing there….

ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

This turns on the Auto-Hinter systemwide - something which you do for your KDE fonts in Control Center, but usually can’t do without installing a crap ton of GNOME dependencies for GTK apps. This does it. And boy does it make a difference.