Best (CD Bootable?) Linux Distro for Dominions?

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by SelfishGene:
This is a bit OT, but how do you like Knoppix? It should be arriving tomorrow. Im getting it to kill an evil Linux partition Fdisk refuses to handle.

Well, as a long-time UNIX programmer, I'm somewhat dismayed by the "User Friendly" desktop display Knoppix has. It screws things up both for the UNIX/Linux people -and- the Windows people it targets. (No easy/visible way to change the screen resolution via GUI, and no mention of what the command line configuration program would be.) The GUI is dumbed down overly much, even compared to Gnome (and I would hope, stock KDE).

That said - it did do an admirable job of detecting and automatically working with video cards, USB devices (albeit my USB mouse was very slow & jerky), onboard ethernet, router, etc. Quite painless to be back Online after booting.


For my own purposes, though, I went ahead and downloaded RH's Fedora iso's overnight and will look at doing a proper Linux install on a newly empty partition. Hopefully it won't trash the other partitions on that drive.

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by PhilD:
But I'm not sure how you'd go about getting Knoppix to write your game data to a real partition... does it do it transparently?

I found it necessary to first copy the entire Dominions 2 install CD to a hard drive, then booted Knoppix. First thing to do at that point is to mount a partition and make it read/write instead of readonly.

I then went from bash into csh, set the HOME environmental to where I wanted to place the install, and ran the unix_install script from the directory I'd copied the CD contents to. (This was necessary because my sole CD drive on the machine is my burner - with 2 CD drives, you could boot from Knoppix and still install from CD.)

After this, you have Dominions installed on your hard disk, but would need to mount & toggle the readwrite status on that partition each time you booted Knoppix, so Dominions2 can write out the data files.

Happily, come the Inquisition, I mean, when the new patch arrives, this won't be necessary anymore.

[Gandalf Parker]

Personally I prefer to use WinXP to play from. And I prefer Linux (in a completely non-GUI mode) to host from. I think the new switches for things like AI setting, preexec, and if they can get the "create game and quit" mode to work we will have all the command-line switches to make a really good web-based management for multiple games. Game settings selection, maps selection, sign-up, start game, and upload/download turns.

I will wait until thats all working before I start asking the devs for better export of data so the games webpage can reflect game progression.

[ywl]

Originally posted by Johan K:
This bug has been fixed in the next patch. So hopefully you'll soon be able to mix OSes and still get correct battle replays.

Just curious. What's the source of the bug?

[Johan K]

The source of the bug has been discussed in another thread. It's called battle inconsistency.... something. Anyway it was a compiler inconsistency.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by ywl:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Johan K:
This bug has been fixed in the next patch. So hopefully you'll soon be able to mix OSes and still get correct battle replays.

Just curious. What's the source of the bug?

---

It was something about the windows compiler not doing math formulas in quite the same order as generic open OS compilers.

[PhilD]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:

quote:

---

Originally posted by ywl:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Johan K:
This bug has been fixed in the next patch. So hopefully you'll soon be able to mix OSes and still get correct battle replays.

Just curious. What's the source of the bug?

---

It was something about the windows compiler not doing math formulas in quite the same order as generic open OS compilers.

---

More precisely, I believe, it was the Windows compiler doing things correctly, but differently than other compilers, with code that is somewhat ambiguous.

Not everything is Microsoft's fault, after all.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by PhilD:
It was something about the windows compiler not doing math formulas in quite the same order as generic open OS compilers.

More precisely, I believe, it was the Windows compiler doing things correctly, but differently than other compilers, with code that is somewhat ambiguous.

Not everything is Microsoft's fault, after all.

I agree. I use Windows most of the time and consider it great for some things. I didnt say it did it wrong, I just said it did it differently than the multi-OS compilers did.

[ March 25, 2004, 22:12: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
It was something about the windows compiler not doing math formulas in quite the same order as generic open OS compilers.

Which is of course why (in C/C++ especially) explicit grouping (via parenthesises) is your friend. Makes it easier for the human programmer to know exactly what the code is going to do, and makes it harder for evil compilers to find wriggle room to twist the programmer's intent.

[alexti]

Originally posted by Cainehill:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
It was something about the windows compiler not doing math formulas in quite the same order as generic open OS compilers.

Which is of course why (in C/C++ especially) explicit grouping (via parenthesises) is your friend. Makes it easier for the human programmer to know exactly what the code is going to do, and makes it harder for evil compilers to find wriggle room to twist the programmer's intent.

---

I'm curious. Is it possible to fix Johan's problem with just grouping by parenthesises? How would you rewrite the expression for that?