Big mistake.

It’s now 1:35am, and I finally have my solution. The trick is to use the evdev X.org input driver, as for some reason the mouse driver can’t handle all of my buttons. I followed sections 1 and 2 of this howto for the general idea of setting up evdev.

The problem is, none of the howtos I dug up really worked. Things sort of worked, but there seemed to be confusion about the number of buttons (xmodmap reported 9, while xev dumped events from up to #12). Also, the tilt wheel mapping seemed to be reversed. At this point, I began to suspect something was going awry, so I started looking over /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Here’s what I found:

For some reason, X seemed to be adding a new <default mouse> InputDevice with the message “No default mouse found, adding one.” This mouse used the standard mouse input driver, and somehow was jumping in front of my configured mouse settings as the default mouse. Oddly, running xinput list showed that my properly configured evdev device was loaded perfectly (with 20 buttons!), but apparently wasn’t being used as the primary mouse.

I persisted twiddling with X config settings and checking the logs, but for some reason, this default mouse would always be created. At this point I started googling this strange “no default mouse found” message. The only apropos result, and my solution, was in this blog post. It seems that someone decided to write a failsafe hack in 7.2 where if no InputDevice using the mouse driver exists in xorg.conf, the server adds one.

As Zaitcev writes, as apparent from the code, this hack has one exception, in which if some InputDevice invokes the driver void, it assumes that the user (as the code states) “probably wants to run footless”, and no default mouse is instantiated. Thus, the solution:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier    "Configured Mouse"
	Driver        "evdev"
	Option        "CorePointer"
	Option        "Device"        "/dev/input/event2"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "IHATEKLUDGERS"
	Driver      "void"
EndSection

[...]

Section "ServerLayout"
	[...]
	InputDevice    "Configured Mouse"
	InputDevice    "IHATEKLUDGERS"
EndSection

Unbelievable.

Apparently, this will be fixed in 7.3.

What piqued my interest was the fact that it was based on the Quake 3 engine, GPL’d, and would run on Linux. After downloading it and
giving it a spin, I must say I was shocked I had never heard of it before. It is possible that this is because the standalone 1.1.0 version was released less than 4 months ago, though with the quality and polish of this game, I would have expected to be seeing and hearing about it all over. The game looks and feels fantastic, and all of the graphics and user interfaces are very professionally designed. I really love the concepts of the buildings and units as well as the creativity shown in the popular maps, with tons of interesting and well-themed nooks and crannies. Tremulous also has a unique fast-paced mixture of Real Time Strategy and First-Person Shooter gameplay, which makes it fun but also strategically interesting.

What more can I say? I am really enjoying this game. Be careful though… try it out, and you too will soon be addicted!

This morning was spent searching for a suitable PHP toolkit to tinker with. The one I finally arrived at is the SAJAX toolkit, a moderately minimal framework for creating simple callbacks and recievers without having to go through the nitty-gritty of the lower-level XMLHttpRequest APIs. After playing around with it for a while, I really like it. There are some things that are quite confusing to me as a first time user, such as the asynchronous nature of things and the effects on variable scope – but all in all it’s quite a nice system to play with.

I also discovered a quite wonderful little Firefox extension called FireBug. It has to be the most clean and cleverly put together all-purpose debugger I’ve ever seen. It’s very beautifully designed, too. It looks to be extremely useful in debugging javascript, css, and xhtml source in the future. It sure helped me out debugging XMLHttpRequests today!

This afternoon was spent scratching my head at things I mostly don’t understand. I figured as a first test project, I would make a little turn-based story creator… just a simple form where users could input a word to add to a continuing story, where the story would be updated in real-time. Hacking pre-existing examples was fine and dandy, though of course it turned out that this was not as simple as I had thought.

The hardest part to implement was my decision to only allow one word to be added per-person in a row. Storing a persistent session identifier – across the asynchronous submissions – turned out to be a nightmare in persistent variable storage. Try as I might, I could not get global variables to work the way I wanted them to. In the end, I resorted to a file hack out of frustration. Perhaps this is truly the way you are supposed to do it? I suppose I’ll only know by learning and doing more.

My little experiment finally worked, and is quite usable: it runs, though it’s quite boring with nobody else to play with. It’s also quite boring looking. However, it really is a shared workspace, and could probably be bit of fun with a few friends. I’m sure similar games have been done before, but it just occurred to me to be a fun project to do. Hopefully it won’t become a spam hole too quickly.

Next in the queue, I’d like to create some way of displaying how many people are viewing the space currently – to bring the aspect of presence much further into the foreground. After all, as one teacher once said to me: you’re not just writing for yourself: you’re writing for your readers!

Looks like they’re well aware of the problem… but really, a very similar has issue occurred before, only a few months ago.

I suppose that’s what you get for running beta distributions…

Well, I do have one announcement, and that is that I’ve finally found a PHP gallery app that fit my criteria, and that app is the excellent ZenPhoto. It’s just complex enough for my tastes, while being lightweight and having some neat ajaxy admin features. Not much to show yet, though it’s looking very good. I’m busy theming and tweaking things to fit the dark look of chromakode.com, though there are a few buggy things going on in the CSS that I haven’t figured out yet. Here’s a little preview, if you’d like to see what I’m talking about. There’s some old pictures up there for testing, though other than that it’s pretty bare. I’d love to hear any comments on the design, though (bugs aside).

After several unsuccessful attempts to revert to an older version, I resigned back to normal Metacity until I had the time to look deeper into the problem and find what changes were needed. Long story short, after coming back to it today, I stumbled upon the excellent compiz.net forums, and subsequently RacerII’s howto. RacerII points to another forum member reggaemanu’s (mostly undocumented) repository over at xgl.compiz.info, which contains patched Xgl and Mesa packages. I tried them out today, and they work like a charm!

Here’s the sources.list line:

deb http://xgl.compiz.info/ dapper main

Update: since the time of my originally posting this howto, the “community” version of compiz (with their patches and enhancement) has made huge strives in both polish and stability. These two versions have diverted so much that that they should be considered as two distinct options. I highly recommend the community version for it’s cool features and extra eye candy. Both with added community patches and without, Compiz remains a showcase for some of the best and coolest user interface exploration in the Linux desktop world, and a great toy for those who enjoy the bleeding-edge.
For compiz-vanilla (”official” cvs compiz):

sudo apt-get install compiz-vanilla xserver-xgl libgl1-mesa xserver-xorg libglitz-glx1 compiz-vanilla-gnome

For compiz with community enhancements:

sudo apt-get install compiz-core compiz-plugins cgwd cgwd-themes xserver-xgl libgl1-mesa xserver-xorg libglitz-glx1

For either choice, you will want to create an ~/.Xsession file with the following contents, and tailor it to your needs. Uncomment the lines (bolded) suiting your setup.

#!/bin/sh

# Start up Xgl, compiz, and GNOME

# Run Xgl server on :1, on top of normal X

# For an ATI Card:

# Xgl :1 -fullscreen -ac -accel xv -accel glx:pbuffer &

# For an Nvidia Card:

# Xgl :1 -fullscreen -ac -accel xv:fdo -accel glx:pbuffer &

# Tell subsequent X programs to access the Xgl server at :1

DISPLAY=:1

# For compiz-vanilla, g-w-d will be our window manager.

# gnome-window-decorator &

# For community compiz, cgwd will be our window manager.

# cgwd &

# Start compiz-vanilla

#compiz gconf &

# Start community version

#compiz dbus csm &

# Start GNOME

exec gnome-session

To start GNOME with compiz, simply make sure your session in your login manager is set to “Default System Session.”

Awesome! It’s great to be back in compiz-land again, and it looks like a few other things have been smoothed and fixed since I’ve last seen it. For one, video looks like it’s working without mplayer hackery, though on my widescreen laptop it has aspect distortion. On the other hand, 3D is still broken at least on my setup, bringing down the whole X session and sometimes hard-freezing gdm when I try it. Resizing is slower than I remembered it, though other things like notification bubbles are running faster.

One fun puzzler which I realized while playing around today: on my 16:10 widescreen desktop, Compiz still displays the illusion of having all sides of the “cube” workspace rotator equal in size. In other words, all sides (including top and bottom) of the “cube” all fit perfectly into my screen. Logically, this should be impossible. With the widths of the faces all sharing the same longer length, the top of the cube would have to be square – it couldn’t possibly be rectangular like my screen is. My guess is that Compiz accomplishes this illusion with some clever scaling when the change would be hardest to spot. While rotated so that the top of the cube is only slightly visible, the top appears square. When the view is rotated to the very top of the cube however, the face fits the rectangular screen. It’s very funny; I had never thought about it before.

This illusion should hold for the more common 4:3 aspect as well, though it is probably more marked on a widescreen display. Try it out and see for yourself!