Sorry, it's gunna be another "laxative" rant, this time on OpenGL

I’m sure all-y’all Linux heads out there in reader-land have read an oh-my-goodness-this-is-hard story about someone’s struggle to get accelerated OpenGL working with this or that video card. Well, here’s the other side of the coin.

Last night I had to do a fair bit of sitting in an office, waiting for things to happen, and I had to do it in front of an MS-Windows 2000 machine. So naturally I began improving it.

After a little of the usual cleaning up, my attention turned to the video, which was set to run at 85Hz on an LCD screen. D’oh? I wound it back down to 60Hz, which looked fine, no extra flicker ’n’ all, then installed the Really Slick Screen Savers from a copy of TheOpenCD. They didn’t so much run as limp. So I tried some other 3D stuff. The short story is that despite (eventually) having the latest drivers installed, and everything switched on, and everything saying that OpenGL was in Hog Heaven, it was not. No amount of tweaking would enabled it. There were no errors in any logs, it just plain didn’t work.

While running around and tweaking a couple of dozen workstations, I concluded that roughly a quarter of them were in this state (and no, the brand of video chip didn’t seem to matter).

Suddenly, Linux doesn’t seem so hard after all. You’ll routinely get far better than 75% success at hardware-accelerated OpenGL “out of the box” and if not you have log files and such to tell you what needs fixing, not just bland assurances that all is well and you should return to your seat, sir, the lemon-scented napkins will be here shortly.

Comments

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

Search This Blog