Just a two minute snap of a Field Op in the public beta of ET:QW. Creating a deployable Rail Howitzer, launching artillery at a Cyclops walker, and knifing some poor sod. Yes, the graphics aren’t as shiny as some recent games… Two words can counteract that, View Distance! The entire level is being rendered, not just a sphere of influence.

Just a two minute snap of a Field Op in the public beta of ET:QW. Creating a deployable Rail Howitzer, launching artillery at a Cyclops walker, and knifing some poor sod. Yes, the graphics aren’t as shiny as some recent games… Two words can counteract that, View Distance! The entire level is being rendered, not just a sphere of influence.

The request was from The World and I Online, “… an interdisciplinary resource that encompasses a broad range of articles by scholars and experts in their fields. [...] Over 500,000 students and teachers across America and abroad enjoy the top-quality materials that WorldandISchool.com provides.”

I have agreed, with terms very similar to the original Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License v2.0. I just thought I’d share that with you all :)

technorati tags:flickr, photography, license, reuse, permission, egypt, pyramid

Contrary to my initial belief, the issue does not lie in joydev, but in the usbhid module instead. I’ll summarise the steps I took to remedy this here, just in case anyone finds it of use (comment if you do.)

First off, I needed the source of the current Feisty Linux Kernel with patches applied. I grabbed this with:

sudo apt-get linux-source

Then I grabbed the patch file that was submitted by Paul Zaremba on the Ubuntu bug tracking system:

wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/7330986/ems_usbii.diff

I then untarred the Linux Kernel source:

cd /usr/src
sudo tar jxvf linux-source-2.6.20.tar.bz2

Applied Paul Zaremba’s patch:

sudo patch -p1 linux-source-2.6.20/drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c < ~/ems_usbii.diff

I then compiled that relevant module with:

cd /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.20
sudo make oldconfig
sudo make prepare
sudo make CONFIG_USB_HID=m M=drivers/usb/input

Lastly, I need to replace the stock usbhid module with the patched version. I reckon there is a more elegant way of performing this. I couldn’t remove the existing module, and insmod the new module to test, because I use a USB keyboard. I assumed that removing the USB Human Interface Device Kernel module would leave my keyboard stone-dead. So instead, I backed up the existing stock module, overwrote it, and rebuilt module dependancies (just for good measure).

sudo cp /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/usb/input/usbhid.ko ~/usbhid.ko_original
sudo cp drivers/usb/input/usbhid.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/usb/input/usbhid.ko
sudo depmod -qa

One reboot later, and my EMS USB II device is working fine! Now to get back to improving my Frets On Fire scores!

Note: The commands here were transcribed from memory, so they may not be exact. I’ll verify them when I’m next at my GNU/Linux workstation.