Dungeon Fighter Online Won’t Launch After Re-Installing Windows

You know what I like about keeping my games on another drive?  Most of the time, you don’t have to re-install games to run them.  Steam is a great example, as running steam.exe directly on a fresh installation of Windows will prompt you that Steam isn’t setup and that it will re-launch itself to do so.

Dungeon Fighter Online, however, does something funky.

Linux And Flaky ATL1C Support

Here’s something I thought I’d never see — the day that wired networking in Linux could ever be considered anything less than “it just works.”

I recently purchased a laptop (Toshiba Satellite C655D-S5518 to be precise) and had trouble out of the gate after installing Arch Linux.  The computer would seem to hang whenever the network was involved.  (E.g., running netcfg, networkmanager, or the ip command.)  I assumed that it was wireless support that was causing the headaches, so I ran hwinfo --netcard | grep "Modules\|File" to find the kernel modules related to my networking devices.

Device Modules: "atl1c"
Device File: eth0
Driver Modules: "rtl8192ce"
Device File: wlan0

I blacklisted rtl8192ce but that didn’t solve my problem. 

Using Rsync With Your Web Host

This was one of those “Holy crap this is so frickin’ awesome who needs Viagra this here makes my…” moments for me. If this seems pedestrian to you, keep in mind I haven’t used third-party hosting since around the Y2K debacle, when FTP was the gold standard. Nowadays a lot of web hosts provide SSH access.

FTP is still nice, but rsync presents a much more elegant solution. Unfortunately, rsync is something most Windows users don’t know about. Microsoft includes no equivalent, so you can either attempt to get rsync and cygwin working on your system, or grab a copy of DeltaCopy…which is made by a company that makes a competing product.

But if you’re running Linux you can forget all that nonsense and get to the good stuff.

Copying from the host to your local computer:

rsync -avz -e “ssh -p nnnn” [user]@[domain]:[remote dir] [local dir]

You can then edit files locally using your editor(s) of choice. Heck, you can even run your own web server to test changes if you want. You can even run that web server in a VM if you don’t want the potential pitfalls of having a web server running on you computer.

Copying from your computer to the host:

rsync -avz -e “ssh -p nnnn” [local dir] [user]@[domain]:[remote dir]

The only thing to watch out for is that this is so easy that you become lazy. Syncing an entire directory for changes to just one file will consume way more bandwidth than just specifying that one file. For exampe: after making some small tweaks to a test HTML file I noted I was transferring 89K of data for the sake of updating a 2K file.

Arch Update Notifications Using Cron

One of the great things about Arch is its hands-off approach and KISS approach. Unfortunately, that can also be one of its greatest killjoys.

Update notifications fall victim to this approach. If you’re left to build an Arch system to your own accord, how can the Arch devs know what will work on your system and what won’t? Therefore, instead of worrying about GNOME vs KDE vs Any Other Desktop Environment (that is, if you’re running a GUI at all) and possibly forcing dependencies you don’t want, no package management system will ever be officially supported by Arch outside of pacman.

BUG: Windows 7 Installer Won’t Install From IDE CD/DVD Drive, Asks For CD/DVD Driver.

This is a known bug that I unknowingly escaped twice by installing the RC from a USB drive and upgrading to a SATA DVD drive a mere 4 months before Windows 7′s final release. The USB key thing was just something cool to do, and the DVD drive was replaced because something went wonky with the tray’s track, requiring a bent paper clip at all times.

The best explanation I could find was over on Tom’s Hardware where, after much dickery, someone finally offered up a plausible cause: If your BIOS reports the SATA controller first, the Windows 7 installer won’t load an IDE ATAPI driver for optical drives. This would explain why some people can use an IDE drive and others can not.

But I also noted something weird, and a definite way to tell if you’re about to get boned way before the installer starts loading. First is an obscenely long boot time. If you’ve never installed Windows 7, though, you won’t know what the wait time should be.