I have searched for a 3D game on Linux and found this nice flight simulation. In Gentoos portage tree there is only an old version avaiable, so I wrote an ebuild for the new version. It compiles fine on my computer wth 64bit Gentoo – Linux.

The Power of my graphics board (nVidia Corporation Quadro FX 360M) seems to be enough for this simulation. The control is not easy, but with some time, you can fly around, like in a real aircraft.

What is FlightGear?
The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

HowTo install on Gentoo:

Download [download#37] file which include the ebuilds

cd /usr/locale/portage
tar -xzpvf ~/flightgear-2.0.0.tar.gz

Then you have to unmask the ebuilds in /etc/portage/package.keywords :
=games-simulation/flightgear-2.0.0 **
=dev-games/simgear-2.0.0 **
=dev-libs/boost-1.37.0-r1 **
=dev-util/boost-build-1.37.0 **
=media-libs/freeglut-2.6.0  **

now you can ’emerge =games-simulation/flightgear-2.0.0′

Have fun

Xexplorer

UPDATE 04.03.2010:

Now it´s in portage, with two different lines. First of all I found out that freeglut 2.6 is needed for flightgear, so I put it in the ebuild. And the second is a patch witch is needed if you don´t use freeglut 2.6. So I think my choice is the better way.

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Posted in 3d, fun, gentoo, linux | 3 Comments »

One year ago I provided a gentoo ebuild for mplayer which included support for quad-buffered stereo, enabling mplayer to display stereoscopic movies like the great movie Avatar3D I watched in cinema today. To learn more about the movie look here and here. Sadly the patch I referenced there does not apply over newer mplayer versions. So I had to modify the original patch from Stuart Levy to work again with newer mplayer versions. You may download the updated patch from here:

[download#35]

New version available!

The patch should work at least with nvidia quadro boards, probably with some others. It can be used with CRT and generic shutter glasses or HMDs like the Vusix VR920. Some stereoscopic sample movies for trying it out can be found on www.3d.wep.dk.

For Gentoo users I also modified the mplayer ebuild from portage to include the patch. The modified ebuild is available here:

[download#36]

New version available!

The older ebuild is still available on mygnu.de.

To use the ebuild it just copy it to /usr/local/portage/media-video/mplayer and copy the the patch to the “/usr/local/portage/media-video/mplayer/files” directory.  You probably have to create these directories. Then run

ebuild /usr/local/portage/media-video/mplayer/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20091026-r1.ebuild digest

Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf.

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then just re-emerge mplayer.

Now start mplayer with -vo gl2:stereo and enjoy the experience in the 3rd dimension again.

Jürgen

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Posted in 3d, gentoo, linux, multimedia | 9 Comments »

After I have tested the nvidia-drivers-185.18.08 beta I searched the web for a new one and I found it yesterday on nvnews.net. This version seems to run well on my Dell M4300. For all using Gentoo I  made an ebuild:[download#20]

# mkdir /usr/local/portage/
# cd /usr/local/portage/
# tar -xpvf nv-portage.tar

Be sure that PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage” is in your /etc/make.conf, then you can emerge it:
# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~amd64″ emerge =nvidia-drivers-180.60 -1

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Posted in drivers, gentoo, graphics, linux | 2 Comments »

Because of the problem with a good, fast and working nvidia driver, I’ve tested the actual beta driver from Nvidia. After installing it on my system (Dell M4300, with zen-sources 2.6.29-r3 running fine on it) everything seems to be fine. But there was the first fault. The character set in the Terminal swaps. The next serious error was restarting the X-Server or crashing the whole system while surfing with Epiphany. So I downgraded my system to nvidia-drivers-180.29 again as mentioned here. It seems Nvidia has to do some work on it, still we have another working release. Stay tuned, we will test it and tell you our experience with any new driver we found from Nvidia.

LG Thorsten

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Posted in 3d, drivers, linux | No Comments »

I’m proud to present a new version of SIV, the stereoscopic jps viewer for Linux I published first in SIV – a stereoscopic jps viewer for Linux. SIV is  capable of displaying jps stereo images in different stereo modes. I tried it in fullscreen/windowed mode with anaglyphic and quad buffered stereo mode. Different output devices I tested were my Vuzix VR920 and relevator shutter glasses  on Nvidia Quadro FX 350M and FX 3400. It should also work with an Ati FireGL, but I never tried this. The new version fixes some segfaults, that occured when needed libraries were missing. Furthermore I added a slideshow mode and the possibility to specify a default distance and therefore the possibility to set a default zoom factor. The coolest feature I added to the viewer is the headtracking support for the Vuzix VR920 HMD. For this you will need (in addition to the device 😉 ) the headtracking driver, I published in VR920 headtracking driver for Linux. You may watch  a video (demo_siv_headtracking_vr920) of me using the viewer with enabled headtracking to view some photos of NASA’s Apollo missions  downloadable from nvidia forums.

Usage changes:

New commandline options are:

• -s                                         Enable slideshow mode
• -t                                         delay Delay for slideshow mode,
  defaults to 10 sec
• -d                                         distance (values between 0.0 and
  1.0 are senseful)

These new options control the new headtracking support:

• –vr920                             enable headtracking support for the vuzix vr920 hmd
• -m                                        non default multicast ip
• -p                                         non default multicast port

For detailed information on the -m and -p options see the article about the headtracking driver : VR920 headtracking driver for Linux. They have the corresponding meaning. If you want to try out the headtracking, enable the headtracking support with the –vr920 option. You may want to specify the distance to the image with the -d option. Values between 0.25 and 0.5 seem to have a nice effect when using the headtracking. When headtracking is active you may press Z to set the zero view so that with your current head position you will see the center of the image. If you want to manipulate the view manually press 2 to enable the trackball manipulator and use i.e. the right moue button and up or down movements (with the mouse) to control the distance (zoom in or out). Afterwards press 1 to activate headtracking again.

For more usage documentation see: SIV – a stereoscopic jps viewer for Linux

Download:      

I decided to publish the viewer under the creative common noncommercial license. Make sure you have the OpenSceneGraph library installed before trying to compile or run the viewer. You may download the full source (Eclipse Project) from here: [download#9] or an x86_64 binary from here:  [download#10]. More binary formats may be available in the future. Fore the x86_64 binary you’ll need OpenSceneGraph-2.8.

Binaries for most linux distributions can be downloaded from www.openscenegraph.org.  Instructions on how to build OpenSceneGraph on gentoo can be found on PlopByte.

Building from source:

For building from source unpack the zip and cd to siv/Release and run make.

Footnote:

If you like the viewer, feel free to link to www.mygnu.de. To request commercial licenses contact us at info(at)mygnu.de. Well, if you just want to support our work on MyGNU.de use the donate button 😉

best regards and enjoy the 3rd dimension

Jürgen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Posted in 3d, drivers, graphics, linux | 6 Comments »

Today I upgraded my Gentoo systems to nvidia-drivers-180.41.  I had bad news to report the last two times I upgraded nvidia-drivers in nvidia-drivers-180.37 causing strange segfaults and CTRL-C and CTRL-Z not working after nvidia-driver upgrade and high CPU usage.

Well, since I had bad news before I also want to tell you about the good news. I did not experience any problems yet with nvidia-drivers-180.41. I run Gentoo with kernel 2.6.28-zen4 #1 SMP PREEMPT on x86_64 and tried with Quadro FX3400 and Quadro FX350M. Even tuxonice works on my  Dell Precision M65 with the driver. In the past I sometimes had problems with suspending and some nvidia-driver versions.

Well, not everyone is as lucky as I am. Some cards seem not to be recognized anymore by the driver. You can read about this problem on 180.41 — no more support for 6600?

I’m quite happy to have a new working driver after the last two upgrade attempts.

Edit: Sadly I was wrong in this post. nvidia-drivers-180.41 also causes segfaults as well as 180.44 does. These segfaults occur during heavy CPU/MEM usage. (In my case running 6 instances of mencoder simultaneously on 4 cores). After downgrading again to 180.29 everything returned to normality.

Jürgen

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Posted in 3d, drivers, gentoo, graphics, linux | 1 Comment »

Today, while performing a large world upgrade on my gento x86_64 system, I noticed almost every build segfaulting (internal compiler error…). In the meanwhile I was encoding several videos (xvid) with avidemux. thus I had a somewhat high memory usage. Some of the avidemux processes also segfaulted. I noticed these segfaults also yesterday, but thought something was wrong with my video files. After many segfaults the system then ran completely out of memory and I had to reboot.

Because of my last experience with nvidias drivers (see: CTRL-C and CTRL-Z not working after nvidia-driver upgrade and high CPU usage) the nvidia-driver was my first supective. So I masked off nvidia-drivers-180.37 and downgraded to 180.29 again. Afterwads the segfaults didn’t occur anymore.

NVIDIA should really do better testing with their drivers before releasing.  Errors like this are normally extremely hard to track down, since nobody would suspect the graphics driver to be the reason for this. Well, in this case intuition saved me a lot of time…

regards

Jürgen

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Posted in 3d, drivers, gentoo, graphics, linux | No Comments »