I tried out Elementary OS. Hmmm - interesting. Borrows quite a few of OS X's ideas, and even improves some. ... But i couldnt play mp3 , or even install the codec, and after a few minutes the dock icons disappeared, so i gave up.

I like the look of the shotwell image viewer. 'yum install shotwell' wanted to update my whole kde/qt system, so went looking for the source. It's a Gnome thing, and the source is in a tar.xz format! Well, fmd , never seen this compression before. Just what we f-ing need. So trying to find/get the source for this (lzma utils) and it turns out it's alpha still. (lzma-4.42.0alpha6.tar.gz). Desktop Linux/Gnome are so pathetic. :( 

Has anyone really given Elementary a go ? 

Is it possible to run a Quake dedicated server in the background or as a service?

[I don't want the terminal open.]

I'm using Ubuntu and trying to make a Fitz 666 compatible dedicated server for Linux. 

fte has some code to register itself and run as a windows service. I doubt anyone really cares.

linux has all sorts of shell scripts that you can use to create a service.
look in /etc/rc.d for sysvinit, but seeing as every distro is being stupid and using systemd instead... good luck with that.
probably you'll want to restart the server every few days, with some small script that just restarts it each time (or if it crashes due to qc bugs or whatever, or if someone keeps trying to exploit it - restarting really helps with finding the correct memory offset to overwrite). 

https://github.com/neogeographica/gameserver_scripts might be useful for some ideas about what to do. It's certainly not a plug-and-play solution, and I've probably done some things wrong, but I used that setup for a long time to run QW and Q3 servers for a LAN gaming group. 

Interesting. I'm not hosting a public server or anything like that, but I re-purposed a Windows 8 machine and want it locally running for a bit so I can mentally double check to make sure it has all the features it needs (rcon, etc.)

And see how it handles
1) sleep
2) cpu
3) logs

And that sort of thing.

I saw code in FTE that on Sys_Error, FTE will start another server process on Windows and then quit.

I assume this isn't possible on Linux. 

@johhny - yeah that'll be helpful. 

Note that init scripts and "daemon" management are two of the things that vary a lot between Linux varieties. The stuff in that repo is particular to Debian.

I experimented a while back with an EC2 instance running "Amazon Linux" which is based on Red Hat, and I spent some time seeing what would be required to use that. Not only changes for Red Hat, but also how to find & use the external IP in the scripts, how to set up the EC2 instance's virtual hardware correctly, installing compiler tools to build mvdsv, etc. I dropped that before getting completely happy with it but I still have notes I can share if you want 'em. 

I'd be interested in that. So you've used EC2 before, right? And you ran a game server on it too (didn't know you could do that)?

Is E2 as cost-effective as they claim? 

Amazon bills me 41 cents a month for the storage.

Running the instance has additional costs. I was using a "compute-optimized" image in order to get enhanced networking. A c3.large instance is currently priced at about 10 cents an hour. I think if you pay up-front for larger stretches of time, it's cheaper. There are also data transfer costs that look like 1 cent per GB in, and no charge on outbound until you hit 10 TB / month. See http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

My notes are not quite as extensive as I remembered :-) but here they is: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11690738/temp/ec2%20quake.txt 

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/16/inside-metal-how-apple-plans-to-unlock-the-secret-graphics-performance-the-a7-chip 

... and not all is about Music :0 

This goes into my Save File.

Just perfect. 

haha. It all started so well... But some tough work now. What a pile of crap some linux software is. But Mint 17 seems pretty good i guess.

Anyone got El Capitan running smoothly ? There seem a lot of bug reports. 

In before spirit freaks. 

Most troubles with installing or running software in my work are from Mac users. 

spirit freaks. 

Haven't had many issues, many things are smoother than before. One issue I had, but it might not be related to El Capitan at all, was that yesterday my Time Machine volume got corrupted and I lost all my backups. Other than that, it has been smooth so far. 

El Capitan has had no issues for me. It is actually noticeably faster in many ways and in some things quite a bit faster and I'd like to seem more upgrades like El Capitan. It seems to be almost exclusively a performance upgrade version.

[I'm not fond of a couple of minor UI changes for searching and I hate that they've changed the green "zoom" button to be forced full screen, but that's minor.] 

Time Machine volume got corrupted and I lost all my backups.
Ummm... That's not good !
But i'll give it a go sometime. 

Does it support ext filesystems or at least ntfs out of the box by now? 

Steven, the corruption is probably not related to El Capitan at all. It happened a couple of weeks after upgrading.

Spirit, I think it has read only support for NTFS, not sure about write. Ext, not that I am aware. 

Really - i can't open a jpeg file in the gimp , and then save it. Save only works for their native format xcf ( i have to export). Wtf!?
.... GThumb can't have more that 1 instance open. Firefox is constantly f-ing up. Why can't the idiot devs of these projects stop breaking them ?

The project i forked from, idiot dev removed all permanent sort functionality, and a heap of other stuff, kidding himself he's the Steve Jobs of C++ coding, wile he's just another C code monkey on steroids with a stupid idea he can make *any* design decision. The new GUI/button-menus don't even post/unpost properly, and he doesnt care.

@Kristian - oh, ok.
I downloaded ElCap and have made a sparseimage with CCC for system roll-out. No real bugs yet, and looks ok... but i hardly do testing, as still use my Lion system for personal use.

@Sp - File system support is a very tricky thing.
Readonly is probably the best to expect for any modern FS i reckon. They're all so complicated and we don't want to break anything. Hell - The Linux BTRFS isn't even terribly stable in linux, after heaps of loving dev. Recently i had to switch from Reiserfs (the best imho) to Ext3 cause installers don't support it anymore. 

yeah, they made it stupid. you have to 'file->export' now, you can't just save and change the extension. :\ 

i know that it's a common complaint 'they changed it, now it sucks' but i feel sometimes those kinds of things are legitimate. it's just adding extra clicks.