Putting Linux lessons to some use

Over the last couple months I’ve been watching tutorials and reading to get up to speed on my linux basics, we’re mostly a red-hat linux house and I want to be more of an asset. Prior to the last 2-3 months I’ve never used a linux machine or even jumped into my terminal very often.
At this point though(2 months into this very light journey into linux) I don’t feel like I have had enough hands-on practice and you know what they say, if you don’t use it, you lose it!
Are there any projects I could work on to really help put it all together for me? Some challenging beginning projects that I could build up from would be awesome.
Please point me to some links or let me know if you need more information from me to give you a better idea of what my goals are. :slight_smile:

I recently installed Fedora 21 hoping to do more of my development projects on that instead of Windows. While I can probably do more of my application development on Fedora I ran into a problem trying to work on my current game project. Apparently the Mesa video driver does not support direct draw surface compression on my video card, ATI Radeon 4100 Mobility, and that’s a pretty big problem for me. I tried, albeit not too hard, to get FGLRX installed unsuccessfully. If you have an ATI card perhaps you could challenge yourself to get that working and then kindly fill me in on the details :slight_smile:

I wish I could help you out with that but I don’t have an ATI card : /

I have no idea about that, but it seems this is a Microsoft thing:

Are you sure it should be compatible with Linux? Have you searched about the equivalent in OpenGL?

@YAFU: It’s compatible with OpenGL yes, it’s S3 Texture Compression that I’ve also heard referred to as Direct Draw Surface. Not sure the relation though, S3 Texture Compression was developed by the now defunct S3 Graphics and is supported, in hardware, by all the major graphics cards. The usefulness of this compression is that it doesn’t need to be decompressed when loaded into memory so it offers a rather large memory savings over other options such as png or jpg.

My game makes use of DXT1/DXT5 and ATI2N (DXT5) compressed textures.

http://wiki.lastbullet.net/index.php?title=Direct_Draw_Surface

Is this issue related?
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzNTg
http://www.codemadness.nl/blog/driconf-enabling-s3-texture-compression-on-linux.html

Do you know whether proprietary drivers (Catalyst) are compatible with what you’re looking for? The problem with AMD/ATI is that they drop support on their cards very fast. Even they do not maintain the legacy driver. Nvidia at least continues maintaining the legacy driver with minor modifications to remain compatible with recent versions of Linux.

The Windows catalyst drivers support my card along with S3TC although I can’t say for sure the proprietary FGLRX catalyst drivers for linux do, probably though. At any rate you’re right in that AMD has apparently stopped developing proprietary drivers for linux so what’s currently available hasn’t been updated for some time and that’s presumably why I’m having trouble getting them to work.

Those links are interesting, I didn’t know S3TC support couldn’t be distributed with the Mesa drivers due to a patent issue, what a kick in the face. I guess it’s nice that there’s an external Mesa library that adds S3TC support, I’ll have to read more about it, but sounds as though it’s technically illegal to build and install it? Just says that the user assumes legal liability.

In this case I do not know much about the legal issues.
AMD stopped developing proprietary drivers for linux for cards they leave without support. In fact, they drop the support for cards often are not very old. And not only in Linux.
I searched and this is the latest/legacy supported Catalyst/fglrx driver for your card:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/legacy?product=Legacy2&os=Linux%20x86_64

This is the problem with AMD:

Description:
Automated installer and Display Drivers for Xorg 6.9 to Xserver 1.12 and Kernel version up to 3.4

They do not even care about making Legacy driver support for xserver/xorg new versions. I have seen that nvidia does it.

What are your goals? :slight_smile:

For an overall understanding of a Linux system for me the best thing was to install, configure and work with Arch Linux. It’s a system that’s supposed to be built up from the ground by the user and has a community that is very helpful and knowledgeable, but it expects you to try to educate yourself first and have a willingness to learn. It has one of the best wikis on the net IMO, also very helpful for users of other distros.

It might be a too complex task for a Linux beginner to use it as an everyday system, but setting up Arch Linux in a virtual machine like Virtualbox could be a fun experiment, if you like to read, tinker and learn. I did so before I switched to Arch for real and learned so much.

For more specific Linux tips more info from you would be helpful.

Thanks Sanne! That sounds like something really challenging but beneficial as well. I’ll go ahead and download it and make a virtual box of it later.
Last night I was thinking of learning some white hat / ethical hacking skills :slight_smile: No reason I can’t do both though :wink:

Ultimately though what I’m going for is working on a project, something similar to your first suggestion so that I can practice a plethora of commands and options.

Have fun, Rigby40! :slight_smile:

Other things that come to mind for getting to know your way around Linux would be, for example, compiling your own Blender, and/or writing small scripts for your everyday system use in bash or maybe python.

Thanks Sanne :slight_smile:

I’ve already made a few very very simple shell scripts but I’d love to tackle something a bit juicier so to speak. Will try your suggestions. If you have any others, let me know here or via pm!