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Linux 3.17 Kernel Released With Xbox One Controller Support
An anonymous reader writes The Linux 3.17 kernel was officially released today. Linux 3.17 presents a number of new features that include working open-source AMD Hawaii GPU support, an Xbox One controller driver, free-fall support for Toshiba laptops, numerous ARM updates, and other changes.
Why does a driver for a game controller need to be incorporated into the kernel?
Why do we even have a Linux kernel these days?
It's late 2014, for crying out loud. It's almost 2015! We shouldn't have to deal with a Linux kernel. We should just have to install systemd and then we can have a working system.
The Linux kernel needs to go. It needs to be replaced with systemd.
No games to play???
http://store.steampowered.com/...
998 games and counting
including...
Xcom Enemy Unknown
Wasteland 2
Portal 2
Counter Strike
Left 4 Dead 2
DOTA 2
TF2
Garys Mod
Half Life 2
Civ 5
Borderlands 2
Witcher 2
System Shock 2
Killing Floor
How many games does a platform have to have so it doesnt have "no games to play" ?
...I thought Freefall was a tech built into the hard drive?
(I have a Toshiba laptop with a Toshiba HDD in it, the selling point for me was not in fact the freefall sensor but to be frank, any drop that chips a corner off the laptop case, for me, usually ends up shattering LCDs and glass platters anyway - I can only hope that the platters in the newer drives are made from tougher glass or even back to the aluminium alloy that sensible people build hard drives with (like my 8GB Travelstar that still works after 11 years and holy shit I don't want to just bin it because I have a memory chip in my phone that has twice the capacity in a package the size of my pinky nail)).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
it's an OS-agnostic tech built in to the hard drive - the accelerometer is a basic switch that parks the head and deactivates the spindle motor if it detects excessive vibration or acceleration like during a freefall drop off a desk. You know if it's triggered when your OS complains about a delayed write failure (for some reason Windows 7 lacks the ability to send a "spinup" command to the controller), at which point you have to do a cold restart and everything's fine apart from the data that you just lost if you didn't already save it. It makes no guarantee for data integrity, it only guarantees the mitigation of risk of terminal headcrash during an impact event. Some manufacturers (Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Western Digital) use variations on the theme, all platform-independent, though some OEMs such as Apple/Dell (are EuroPowerbooks still built at Dell's plant in Ireland?), Lenovo and Acer prefer to use their own accelerometers and control all aspects of physical protection through the controller interface via a custom BIOS.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Linus missed an opportunity to "adjust" the kernel version numbering scheme. This should have been released as Linux kernel 11.0.
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I cant find details of just what the kernel change was but it seems like the hardware feature is a feature to detect that the laptop is undergoing a sudden shock and shut off the hard disk (move the heads out of the way) to prevent damage to the platters.
turn in your Geek card on your way out, you missed the ONE game that should have been the top of that list: Kerbal Space Program. :)
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
World of... oh what was the name of that game... it's on the tip of my tongue....
Goo?
I have World of Goo on nearly everything I own!
(Wii, Phone, Linux machine, and every my work Mac and work Windows machine)
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
A Slashdot first!
not even that, it was announced on Phoronix two weeks ago. Slashdot is behind the curve - as usual. Record here shows a commit to the kernel source tree on the 13th August.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
How many games does a platform have to have so it doesn't have "no games to play" ?
The PS3 was (and sometimes still is) widely ridiculed in gaming circles for having "no games", despite a launch lineup of 6-23 games (6JP/14US/23EU) and a current library of 796 retail games.
As no similar critiques were lobbed against the Xb360 (1,125) or Wii (1,222), we can conclude that the number of games necessary is somewhere in the range of 800-1100, most likely 1000.
However, your link only shows 702 games for me. Also, the above counts are of retail releases, which excludes a lot of the small indie stuff that makes up most of that list. And so we can conclude that Linux has "no games", and will continue to have "no games" for quite some time.
That 'ps3 has no games' thing is a meme. It's from the early days of the first generation "fat" ps3 back in 2008 or so.
How long before Chromebooks get this support? It'd be great with my Steam/Chrubuntu setup.
If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be respected, sit down and shut up.
There's another way of thinking about it. When people say there are "no games" for a system, they mean no games that they care about. If you had a system that only had the 200 top selling titles on it and nothing else, the feeling among the general population wouldn't really be that there were no games for it.
When linux has ports of the vast majority of the top selling PC titles, then people will stop saying there are no games for it, irrespective of the size of the long tail of guff no one cares about and creative/interesting indie games that the general population haven't heard of.
Personally I see more value in the creative/interesting indie games. Unfortunately if they're not in the public consciousness, their mean contribution drops off a cliff in terms of Linux adoption/perception as a gaming platform.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
His point is still valid.
System Shock 2? You are serious giving it as an example of how good non-windows gaming is? Release dates from wikipedia
August 11, 1999 (Win)
June 18, 2013 (OS X)
April 1, 2014 (Linux)
15 years late exactly - as OP claimed and you tried to disprove.
Most of the other things you mentioned are also quite old. Maybe preparing a list of 10 really good games from 2013-2014 would be better than hundreds of games from 2-15 years ago. Or maybe even better - take 20 best selling games of last 2 years and see how many of them are available under linux natively.
I'm thinking not, the 3.14 kernel patch fixed a security issue which also broke Win16 support. They've backported it as well so downloading older kernels to try and fix Win16 support under Wine won't work. There is no word on any attempts to fix the issue in the kernel. All I can suggest is to try and get your paws on a Win9x image and install it in Virtualbox (as I've done, though I had to install it as a DOS exec because APM platforms do weird things to modern processors - like cause them to wall it - and run a CPU idler which frees clock cycles from the VM back to the host. It's a crazy situation, but solvable). I'd offer you a copy of my MS-DOS 6.22-based Win95OSR2 image but Microsoft would have a fit...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I'm actually playing through Witcher2 at the moment on Mint, and it is f00king awesome so far.
commit 12 July: http://kernel.suse.com/cgit/ke...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You can also try and install DOS + Win 3.1 under VirtualBox or under DOSBOX.
This too, but you'll still need CPUIdle or similar or you'll end up with a completely locked system. APM *does not* play nice.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The drive is not spun down, only the head is parked.
You know if it's triggered when your OS complains about a delayed write failure (for some reason Windows 7 lacks the ability to send a "spinup" command to the controller), at which point you have to do a cold restart and everything's fine apart from the data that you just lost if you didn't already save it.
That is not my experience with HP 3D DriveGuard. Usually when free fall is detected, the head is parked, the HDD LED changes color, and I/O for that disk is blocked. After a couple of seconds, normal operation is restored.
working open-source AMD Hawaii GPU support
I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking that's much more front-page-worthy than Xbox 'One' controller support.
Phoronix reports performance to be generally satisfactory (which, given the context, is pretty damn good).
At least 10 of the top 20 most played games on Steam have native Linux versions, so they are hardly irrelevant. DOTA2, CS:GO, and TF2 alone have peaks of more than 1.1 million active (in-game) players combined. Some of the rest, like Skyrim, can be run well with Wine, other than lower frame rate compared to Windows.
The issue may be how to install the game, and how to acquire it? .iso under /mnt .. except for the graphical output which stays empty outside of menus. Maybe it'll work with a different graphics card and/or by upgrading the distro. BUT, I'd be spending money to buy new hardware without knowing if the game will work or not afterwards.
Sometimes you can run a Windows game on Wine, but you can't install it. And then maybe you need to crack the game before running it on Wine. And to try the game out, you might need warez downloads anyway.
e.g. to run the first Serious Sam (over 10-year-old at that point) I had to boot into Windows to install it. Then it runs fine under Windows. Then it runs on linux when mounting the
That some new games (e.g. Starcraft II) do work under Wine is a weak argument (e.g. Blizzard is known to test games under Wine)
It's sad. Just a few days ago I stumbled upon a site about old win16 (Windows 1.0 and 2.0!) which has links to a collection of Windows 3.1 games too.
In particular I found out about a "lost" microsoft game : when Windows 3.1 came out, Reversi was left out but they actually made an updated version of it that looks like a Windows 3.1 game!
http://members.chello.at/theod...
The worst/best thing about it is that it's actually useful to have that game around. I have a gnome 3 version of Reversi (Iagno 3.8.2) which always end up locking itself with 100% CPU at one point. And Win16 Reversi is challenging on "beginner".
Rather than old Windows I think I would try to run old Linux in a VM, such as debian squeeze (got extended to five years of support)