Planet Slackadelic

KDE 4.8.0 arrives

2012-01-25T18:00:56+00:00

The release schedule could have told you in advance – here we have the first installment in the KDE 4.8 series!

The Slackware KDE 4.8.0 packages are ready for your enjoyment..

A good primer on the how and why of the modularization of KDE, resulting in an abundance of smaller packages compared to the big meta packages of Slackware 13.37, please read my earlier post about KDE 4.7.0.

My packages have been compiled on Slackware-current. There has been an incompatible update to slackware-current recently (the glibc package). If you consider using KDE 4.8.0 on one of Slackware’s earlier (stable) releases, then you have no other option than to compile packages yourself. I have written down the guidelines in another blog post..

Read the accompanying README file for installation and upgrade instructions!

Some of the highlights of these KDE packages:

Being the first release in the KDE 4.8 series means, there will probably be some bugs to iron out. But, I really can not find anything wrong with this point zero release. It sports a new default background “Ariya” to replace “Horos” of the 4.6 and 4.7 releases. It’s nothing but straight-line geometry, giving the desktop a professional look. The desktop feels fast and snappy, partly thanks to the upgraded Qt 4.8.0 which I added as well, but also thanks to the improvements made to kwin, KDE’s window manager. Enabling the “blur” effect should no longer slow down your desktop.
There are a lot of updated dependencies compared to Slackware’s own KDE 4.5.5: PyQt, QScintilla, akonadi, attica, clucene, ebook-tools, hunspell, libdbusmenu-qt, libvncserver, phonon, polkit-qt-1, qt, raptor2, rascal, redland, shared-desktop-ontologies, sip, soprano, strigi, system-config-printer and virtuoso-ose. I really hope Slackware will catch up some day, as it is no fun to maintain so many packages outside of the main Slackware tree.
In comparison with my previous KDE 4.7.4 the number of updated dependencies is still rather big because I wanted to offer the best experience: akonadi, attica, hunspell, libatasmart, libvncserver, phonon, phonon-xine, polkit-qt-1, qt, strigi, udisks, and upower have all been brought to their most recent versions. Note that libktorrent is now located in “deps” instead of “kde” directory because it has become a dependency for more than just ktorrent.
KDE dpendencies that are not part of Slackware 13.37 at all (yet): grantlee, herqq, libatasmart, libbluedevil, libssh, phonon-gstreamer, phonon-xine, sg3_utils, udisks and upower. Note that I added phonon-gstreamer and phonon-xine only after I had already released KDE 4.7.0 packages because people reported that they no longer had sound. These two packages solve that issue.

Also worth mentioning is some stuff which is not completely new, since I added these to previous releases of KDE 4.7 already (but if you are new to KDE 4.8 this will certainly interest you):

You will find some additional useful new applications, which are not part of the KDE core set. They are new, compared to Slackware’s own version of KDE. I already added bluedevil to my 4.6.5 package-set. Bluedevil is the new KDE bluetooth stack with a nice GUI, based on the BlueZ libraries already present in Slackware. And with KDE 4.7.0, I included kplayer, a KDE front-end to MPlayer. With KDE 4.7.2, I added Quanta Plus, which disappeared from KDE4 because that migrated from Qt3 to Qt4. It is now being worked on again, but no longer as a standalone application – instead it is available as a plugin to the Kdevelop Platform. And with KDE 4.7.3, I added a native WICD applet for KDE, called “wicd-kde“. It can replace the GTK based “wicd-client” which is part of the wicd package.
I also added oxygen-gtk2 (renamed from “oxygen-gtk” now that there is also a version supporting GTK3). It is not really an application, but a theme engine. It (optionally) makes GTK2 applications visually blend in with KDE’s own Oxygen theme. There is a README in its documentation directory which explains how to enable it.
Since KDE 4.7.2, I include a “test” directory. This directory contains NetworkManager, plus some other dependencies, that allows me to create a KDE package for “networkmanagement“. Networkmanagement is an applet plus a kcontrol (i.e. a plugin for KDE’s systemsettings). Use the packages in this “test” directory if you want to switch from WICD to NetworkManager as your basic network management service. The applet plus kcontrol make it quite easy to configure your network in KDE (wired, wireless, vpn, dsl and mobile broadband). No new Gnome libraries had to be added for this (NM itself plus its supporting tools have no dependency on the rest of Gnome). I have added NM installation/configuration instructions to the README. Note that I moved from NM 0.8 (which I had in KDE 4.7) to the newer NM 0.9 because that is what KDE currently supports best.

The KDE 4.8.0 packages for Slackware-current are available for download from my “ktown” repository and several mirrors (taper will probably be in sync when I post this, the other mirrors will have to catch up):

http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.8.0/ (the master repository), rsync URI: rsync://alien.slackbook.org/alien/ktown/4.8.0/
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.8.0/ (my fast mirror), rsync URI: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/4.8.0/
http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.8.0/ (willysr’s Indonesian mirror), rsync URI: rsync://repo.ukdw.ac.id/alien-kde/4.8.0/
http://scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.8.0/ (a mirror maintained by Herbert Alexander Faleiros), rsync URI: rsync://rsync.scw.net.br/alien-ktown/4.8.0/

Have fun! Eric

LibreOffice 3.4.5 released, OpenJDK package update.

2012-01-17T23:20:06+00:00

There was a new maintenance release from the Document Foundation. We now have LibreOffice 3.4.5 and I spent the night (or rather, two virtual machines did the work while I slept) to produce packages for Slackware 13.37 and later.

You can find the packages in the usual locations (all of the mirrors below also offer rsync access):

Also I rebuilt my OpenJDK packages (JDK as well as JRE and the browser plugin icedtea-web) to address the issues that had popped up in the comments section of my previous post:

The java web start (javaws, part of the “icedtea-web” package) would not work with just openjre installed – it worked fine with openjdk;
The openjre pakage missed two important configfiles which made it unusable,
The CA certificates file was empty in both JDK and JRE packages

Download locations for the updated packages: http://slackware.com/~alien/openjdk/ with a mirror here: http://alien.slackbook.org/slackware/openjdk/ . Please note that there is an updated (with regard to Slackware’s stock version) of ca-certificates. I needed that to generate a “cacerts” file for the openjdk and openjre package, but for you the upgrade is optional. You’ll see it appear in slackware-current soon enough anyway because the upgrade is well overdue.

Cheers, Eric

ayaz

2012-01-15T12:54:16+00:00

I own a Nokia E72 mobile phone. While I have not owned mobile phones longer than five years, I have in that time span been through two mobile brands. My very first mobile phone, gifted to me by father when I was early on in the University, properly convinced that I didn’t need a mobile phone, was a Sony Ericsson. It was a small mobile phone, the name of which escapes me now. I may still have it, somewhere, in some drawers, lost but not forgotten. I used it until it nearly died out. The engravings on the buttons grew muddled, colour on the handset faded out, the battery dead, replaced and dead again, etc. It would be safe to say, in hindsight, that I used it heavily.

My second mobile phone was another Sony Ericsson. It was the first mobile phone I bought. I was immensely excited the night I bought it, on way from work. The excitement of buying a new gadget is one that doesn’t ever diminish in its intensity, never goes away, no matter how many gadgets you buy. It is there right around the time you decide to buy a new gadget, and lasts well until after you’ve bought it. That was my second Sony Ericsson phone, and would be my last.

After I had made heavy use of it, I slowly moved away from it over to Nokia. I had a mammoth but reliable Nokia E61 lying around, which I was using for testing Symbian applications. Yes, this was roughly the time when I worked on Symbian application development. And that is all I am going to say of it.

My fourth and current mobile phone is a successor to E61: Nokia E72. I loved that phone when I bought it. I still love it in some ways. While E61 could be said to be too, E72 is what you would call a proper smart-phone. It features a lot of things that could help you do all sorts of things on the Internet, besides the usual functions of phone. It also has a full QWERTY keyboard. While I had owned an iPod Touch, I’d not been a big fan of touch screen and touch phones. I strongly believed that I could never be able to reliably use a phone with touch screen as the only form of input. This bias was in part due to my reliance on and affinity for physical QWERTY keyboards on phones.

Over the past couple of months, I was growing a little frustrated with my E72. While it worked as anyone would expect of it, I found that as far as applications that let me run wild on the Internet were concerned, it was severely limited. Sure, there were applications to do anything from using Facebook to Twitter to Foursquare. But I felt stifled. There were browsers but I didn’t feel the urge to browse anything on my mobile, unless it was an absolute emergency. I could post tweets on Twitter, but I didn’t enjoy interacting with others’ tweets. The same could be said of my experiences with Facebook (as far as I can tell, there is no native, official application for Facebook from Facebook for Symbian S60) or Foursquare applications. It just wasn’t fun, or even comfortable.

So for the past couple of months, I had been strictly debating getting an iPhone. iPhone 4S was out by then and it made no sense to get anything below that model. Some friends suggested time and again to go for the iPad instead. Where I was almost convinced that iPhone 4S would be my fifth phone, the recommendations for iPad threw my mind back in a state of confusion. Naturally, I compared the pros and contrasted the cons of both devices. Of course, one is a phone, the other a tablet, but when I compared the iPhone to the iPad, I actually compared it with iPad and my E72. That is, if I were to get an iPad, I would continue to use my E72 for the phone needs. There was a big difference in price as well, with a factory unlocked iPhone 4S coming at an exorbitant 67k PKR locally, while an iPad2 with WiFi cost only 48k PKR.

I still remember clearly the night I was at the club on the courts, playing tennis with my partner. He had finally bought the iPhone 4 a day before, after having looked for the white one for under a week. That night, I came home, and finally made up my mind.

The next afternoon, I was at the Apple Store I regularly buy from, purchasing an iPad2 WiFi with 16GB disk space. I had decided it. As I would find out, it was one of the best decisions I had made in my life in a while.

Those familiar with the different iPad2 models available will know that there’s a WiFi + 3G one available. Apart from having to pay under 10k PKR more, the main reason why I decided against getting the 3G model was the unavailability of 3G in the country. I know that you don’t necessarily have to have 3G to be able to use the connection, because any type of data-plan from your provider, such as GPRS or EDGE, will work. However, as I will explain, iPad is a content consumption device. When I say that it is a content consumption device, I mean it in a massive way. It has been designed for consuming a lot of content, including in the form of video, audio, and text. When I decided to buy it, I imagined myself using the iPad like I do my laptop. And I can’t ever imagine using my laptop over EDGE/GPRS in a way that satisfies me. Similarly, I didn’t think the iPad would shine on an EDGE/GPRS connection.

In the next post, I will explain exactly how the arrival of iPad has changed my life, how it has affected it, how I use it, where and when I use it. I will also list down the wonderful apps I use frequently, and make an argument for iPad being an awesome device for reading books/content in particular.

michielvwessem

2012-01-09T03:04:34+00:00

The following entry was written on the 2nd of July 2011. It’s `rambling’ hotpot of my thoughts and feelings at the time.
I decided to post this today, as it is now a year ago since he passed away.

**I miss him.**

Who? Michael. I know he was “just” Liz’s father, to be honest father-in-law, was a much closer description. I know some might not agree with that term based on the fact that we aren’t married. But after having lived with Liz for eight years, longer then I ever was with J. heck we are as good as married. We even squable like an old married couple at times.

And while there was a lot of things we did not agree upon, there were things we ribbed on .. computers seemed the major part between us. I think given time we would have come to really appreciate each other for what we were, what connected us, rather than what set us apart. And I think especially in the later months, the run up to Christmas, that it was started. And sadly we don’t have the time no more. That was ripped away from us.

This morning I had to think back at that moment, having to answer the phone and telling Liz. I’ll never forget that look in her eyes. They say a person can have an haunted look, and that is what I saw. The sheer utter unbelievabilty of the situation, coupled with the fear that it might acutally be true. I don’t think no question of her ever felt more stabbing then when she asked, pleaded, begged me to tell it was a joke.

I miss his jokes, his love for engineering, something that I only too late discover as a passion for creatism, much perhaps as something that drives me when playing with software or code. The things we loved together; dogs, port, a good chunk of stilton, formula 1. He would just have loved The 2011 canadian race. Full of excitement as it was, he always complained that nothing happened.

I think that is where my anger today residues from. The fact that I had to shoulder that responsibility of telling Liz her father has passed. And while I know this anger is not rationale or fair or justified, I think the awareness of this burden this morning just tipped me over. Add that with other things I have been struggling with (more about that later) lately and today, just tipped over the balance.

Earlier today, I just had to walk out. Despite my always hardened standpoint that one should not walk away from a fight, I think I walked away because I didn’t wat the fight to escalate. We don’t need this. Creating the physical distance between Liz and me allowed us both to be calmer I think. I could feel the anger welling up in me, not rational, nor justified. Just a seething anger that only would have had one purpose. To react and hack around in blindness.

I miss him. My father-in-law. A great man, full of life. Not perfect, but a damn good man nonetheless. Someone with pride, honour and a lust for live. And he left a great hole that can’t be filled.

I think in a moment, I will go outside, it’s earliy and cold. I will bring with me a shotglass of laphroaig and sit there and take .. live in. and think of him and drink to his health.

Michael, you were a truly wonderful man
and I am honoured to have known you.
Wherever you are, know that you will never ever be forgotten.

OpenJDK replacing Oracle’s binaries

2012-01-07T14:37:38+00:00

I already wrote about it in an earlier post, that I was working on packages for OpenJDK. OpenJDK is an open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition. In 2007, Sun delivered to its earlier promise to make Java open source and released the bulk of its code under a GPL license. Since then, high-profile companies like IBM and Apple have done major contributions to the OpenJDK codebase in order to create an industrial-strength alternative to the binary releases of Java SE..

Oracle assimilated Sun in 2010 and obtained the rights to Java SE.

For Linux distros, not much changed because binary releases of the JDK and JRE were still made available for re-distribution. In 2011 however, Oracle decided that new binary releases of its Java SE (the runtime or JRE as well as the SDK) may no longer be included with Linux distros. They retired the “Operating System Distributor License for Java” (DLJ) and decided that distros should compile their own packages using the Open Source codebase of OpenJDK,.which Oracle itself uses as well for their binary builds.

Of course, you as an “individual user of Java SE” still have the legal right to download and use Oracle’s binaries – you’re just not allowed to re-distribute it. Making a Slackware package out of your Oracle-downloaded binaries is simple – use the jdk.SlackBuild or jre.SlackBuild scripts which are part of Slackware and “wrap” those binaries into a convenient package.

While this is a nice solution for the individual, our own Slackware had to stop updating its Java packages. It now has to solve the question of keeping or removing Java from its distribution. Since Oracle’s binaries can no longer be included, Slackware has to follow the advice and build its own Java from source.

This situation now lasts since august 2011 and it is bothering me. So, in November 2011 I made a promise to Pat Volkerding that I would create a set of Slackware packages for the OpenJDK. Unfortunately that took me longer than expected because a lack of time and because (as outlined in my previous post) I wanted to build them in such a way that I could use the SlackBuild scripts on ARMedslack which still lacks a Java package.

I uploaded the results of my efforts last week but Pat has not responded since, so I am making the packages and sources/scriptes available to a wider audience. Please note that I named the resulting packages “openjdk” and “openjre” but the packages that could get included into Slackware eventually may be named differently (like “openjdk-jdk” and “openjdk-jre”). In any case, I invite you to test them and report your findings.

You can get all of it here: http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/openjdk/ with a mirror here: http://alien.slackbook.org/slackware/openjdk/

For ready-made packages (for Slackware-current !) you can check the two directories “pkg64″ (containing 64bit versions) and “pkg” (for the 32bit version of Slackware). If you want to install my pre-built packages, then all you really need are “rhino” which is the JavaScript engine, “icedtea-web” which is the browser plugin, and one of “openjdk” or “openjre” packages, depending of course on whether you need the full Java compiler suite or only the Java Runtime Environment.

You will also find packages for apache-ant, xalan and xerces. These are only needed if you want to re-compile OpenJDK yourself. If you want to build your own packages instead of using (or after installing) mine, then follow the instructions in the sources/README.txt file. If you are not running Slackware-current but one of the stable releases, then compiling from source will be your only option.

For you wannabe-compilers, I will repeat part of that README text here. OpenJDK will not compile successfully on Slackware unless you make some modifications to the gcc and seamonkey packages. You can either recompile those using the modified SlackBuild scripts and sources which I also provided in the openjdk sources tree, but you can also choose the less intrusive alternative by running (as root !) two small shell scripts that add the missing functionality to your system: create_gcj_jvm.sh and fix_seamonkey_pkgconfig.sh. These two scripts should work on every Slackware release.

After running the two shell scripts (or after rebuilding gcc and seamonkey) you are ready to (build and) install apache-ant, xalan, xerces and rhino, logout and log back in again to set the ANT_HOME environment variable, and proceed with building OpenJDK and icedtea-web. Good luck!

Any questions or feedback about these scripts and packages? Please post them here and I will follow up.

Cheers, Eric

Happy New Year 2012

2012-01-02T00:31:38+00:00

I assume all of you had a safe year-ending? With all the fireworks, a finger or an eye is easily lost… I also assume that you are full of good intentions for the new year. I wish you all a prosperous and happy 2012, and I hope we will see a new shining release of Slackware Linux in the course of this new year!

Let me tell you some about what I have been doing in the past days. Thinking about the future of course – not much of that will interest you. More to the point, I have been thinking what needs to be done for Slackware to gain a little more ground.

There has not been a lot of movement in slackware-current for the past months and while that is pretty frustrating, we will have to respect Patrick Volkerding for giving his personal life a bit more priority now. In the meantime, I will keep myself busy with some of the “subsystems” in Slackware – KDE 4.8 is around the corner and I will certainly build packages for that.

There is also the urgent issue of dealing with JDK and JRE. As you may remember, Oracle decided that new binary releases of its own Java SE (the runtime or JRE as well as the SDK) may no longer be included with Linux distros. They retired the “Operating System Distributor License for Java” (DLJ) and decided that distros should compile their own packages using the Open Source codebase of OpenJDK,.which Oracle itself uses as well for their binary builds. Slackware has not seen an update to its Java packages since that announcement. I have been busy in the past weeks preparing a set of Slackware OpenJDK packages. That was not trivial, since OpenJDK requires several additional packages in order to be compiled from source. It also required changes to Slackware’s gcc-java and seamonkey packages since I wanted OpenJDK to be “bootstrapped” against GCC’s java compiler. I could have chosen the easy way and compile it using a binary Java package downloaded from Oracle (which is acceptable as long as I do not re-distribute the downloaded binaries) but I had my reasons for not doing that – see below. I have now a working OpenJDK installed on my Slackware-current laptop, including a web-browser plugin for Java. That looks promising and I have uploaded all my work to the Slackware server so that Pat V. can have a look at it and ultimately add it to Slackware.

I had a goal in mind when I decided to take the hard way and compile OpenJDK using the (not fully compliant) GCC Java compiler It is the only way that we may finally be able to create a Java package for ARMedslack! The ARM port of Slackware currently has no Java support at all and I intend to change that.

You may ask, where this interest in Slackware ARM comes from. You have not read my recent posts perhaps?

It’s quite simple really. Because I think this platform is ready for prime time. The first powerful ARM based laptops have finally shown up. They are currently mostly running Android – think of the ASUS Transformer (powered by a Tegra 2 – essentially the chip which also powers a lot of the new Android tablets). You can barely fail to notice that all the big distros (Arch Linux, Gentoo, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu) are working hard on a port to these new ARM platforms. I believe that Slackware should be part of that effort.

So, first of all, I am eagerly waiting for the Raspberry Pi devices to become available for sale. A computer for 35 dollars, that is something nobody should be able to resist. I want one of those and install ARMedslack on it. Stuart Winter is willing to port ARMedslack to this new device (hopefully the kernel is the only package which needs to be crafted specifically for the new ARM CPU). And second, I already bought another ARM based computer: the TrimSlice Pro. The TrimSlice is of an entirely different league than the low-spec Raspberry Pi. It runs on the same Nvidia Tegra-2 chip I already mentioned earlier. The Tegra 2 has a dual-core ARM CPU running at 1 GHz and a GeForce GPU which should be capable of 1080p full-screen HD video payback.The TrimSlice also has 1 GB of RAM and comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux on a 32 GB SSD harddisk… now that screams to be replaced with Slackware. This device should be fast enough to be used for compilation of ARM packages. Stuart is working on a kernel for this device, but there are some complications. The TrimSlice uses a USB to SATA bridge to connect the SSD. That causes USB disconnects with the ARMedslack kernel when large amounts of data are written. Stuart will undoubtedly find a fix for that in the end.

And while Stuart works on the ARMedslack packages I have been considering what would be a second port to ARM. The crux is that ARMedslack supports a wide range of ARM computers (which is linked to the history of the port) and therefore does not profit from the new CPU’s which also have hardware floating point units (FPU). I want to try and start a port to “ARM hard float” architecture which should give it a big speed boost compared to ARMedslack. Of course, this means that the new port will not run on older devices like the SheevaPlug, or ARM based NAS/mediaplayer boxes which typically run cusom Debian distributions. I spent part of my holiday to write a script which cross-compiles a basic toolchain (kernel, binutils, glibc, gcc, bash and other necessary stuff) which can be used to compile the rest of Slackware. I now have a small root filesystem (containing a “armv7hl-slackware-linux-gnueabi” target) ready for testing on the TrimSlice. If only there is enough time left… my short X-Mas holiday is nearing its end, and with it the room to experiment.

Eric

ayaz

2011-12-31T20:20:14+00:00

There is little at least, if not a lot, to be gained from having an optimistic outlook towards life. I’ll be honest when I say I haven’t ever believed that entirely in my life. But from being pessimistic and negative for the most part, I’ve come to realise painfully the absence of optimism and how much it has the potential to scar you emotionally. It would also be wrong to say that it doesn’t hurt to be optimistic. Disappointment from something you had strong hopes for, can hurt you in a very real way. But, that is a price you can usually afford to pay.

Lying in bed, trying to think of what if anything phenomenal I accomplished throughout the year that is no more I am forced to draw nothing. I can’t remember anything significant I did. That doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything worthwhile or significant to any extent. I just can’t remember. It’s probably due to the cracking headache I’m having. I don’t know.

The year passed by so quick, it’s hard to say where it went. I’m not the kind of person, as much as I try to be otherwise, who makes clear, real goals and lives by them. That doesn’t mean I’ve no goals. I do. I’m just not obsessed with the whole goal-setting thing. Although a lot of times I think that things around me simply unfold themselves, and I naturally flow through them.

Work wise, this was the year where I tackled many different projects, of varying complexities and sizes. I learned a lot of new things. Of import were my exercises in finding ways to deploy both Django and web.py Python frameworks on IIS on Windows. I went on to write a guide to deploying web.py on IIS which got accepted into the official cookbook documentation for the web.py project.

Insofar as tech gadgets are concerned, I was lucky enough to upgrade to the high-end Apple’s MacBook Pros, especially since my previous MacBook had developed several faults. Very late in the year I made what was perhaps the best decision in terms of buying anything when I bought the iPad2. It would be an understatement to say that it has had an impact on my life. The iPad has had a phenomenal impact on my life. If it is any testament to that statement, I’m writing this post on the Elements app on the iPad and will publish it using the WordPress app. I’m so glad I made the decision to buy it after much deliberation.

This year saw a lot by way of reading. I bought more books in paperback and committed myself to reading more. Not only that, I also forced myself to reading, daily, two dozen different interesting feeds. With the coming of the iPad, my reading saw an exponential increase, not only in the form of ebooks but many online feeds and content sources. A man must read, in order to survive. I believe strongly in that.

On the personal side, there were certain events that shook my life. It didn’t affect anyone’s but my own life, but they had a huge impact on me, and not sadly in positive ways. My emotional self took a battering. I also played a small part in helping save a friend’s life from half way across the globe. Thankfully, this year saw family bonds getting a little stronger, which I am very grateful for.

With regards to tennis, this was a great year for me. My game improved by leaps and bounds and I played some of the best tennis of my life. I have been more and more in love with tennis every passing day. Sometimes I think that that is the only true love left in my life.

All in all, I can’t say that the year was bad for me, nor would I want to say it was great. It was a balanced mix of both good and bad. Regardless, I’m thankful for everything and everything. I’ve been blessed beyond what I care to realise. You only need look at someone less fortunate than yourself to realise what you have been given. I do that almost everyday. And I feel bad about those severely less fortunate in particular. Yet I’m also guilty of forcing myself in a bubble at times that hides away the outside from me. I should always realise. I should always be grateful.

My best wishes to each and everyone of you. Please stay safe and be well! A very happy new year to you.

Thank you!

ayaz

2011-12-29T14:41:14+00:00

I’m what you can safely call a hardcore gamer. My stretch with gaming goes a long way, starting from a measly Atari computer dad bought me from abroad, migrating to PC gaming, and eventually shifting to the world of consoles leaving behind PC gaming forever. I have owned a little less than half a dozen gaming consoles, played on others at friends’ places. The most games I’ve ever played on a single console would have to be Sony’s PlayStation. It was the first PlayStation that came out. The sheer amount of games I played on it and clocked is just sheer. I couldn’t remember how many even if I forced myself to.

When younger brother sold our PlayStation 2 to buy an acoustic guitar to further his interest in music, my gaming world came to an abrupt halt. For a while after that, I didn’t really play games. It was well after I had started earning that I finally decided to revive my former, dormant self, and went out to buy the XBOX 360. To date, it is the console I have been happily playing games away. And I love it.

A week or so ago, I updated the firmware on the XBOX to the latest one available and got my hands to half a dozen games. Some that I’d care to name are: Batman Arkham City, Gears Of Wars 3, Skyrim, and Fifa 2012. Of particular interest to me was Batman Arkham City. It was one game I had been eagerly anticipating and looking forward to playing.

Half an hour into the game, I instantly fell in love with it. Everything about it. The gameplay in particular reminded me that of Assassin’s Creed 2, another game I thoroughly enjoyed playing. I was also very happy to learn that the game featured a very long story line. I saw myself having fun for a while with this game.

Until something hideous happened. It went on like this. I had the game installed on the hard-disk, so as to be able to preserve the lens on the XBOX. When I first ran the game, I decided to store saved game progress on the hard-disk as well. It all went fine. Until I had to take my XBOX over to a friend’s house for a game night. There we had to remove Batman from the hard-disk to make room for another game. I suspected deleting the game might also remove the saved progress on the disk, but on the assurances of friends, I took the bullet. The next day when I sat about playing Batman at home, I was taken aback to find that my saved progress on the game was gone. Zilch. Poof. There was nothing, as though there had never been anything. I felt incredibly sad. I blamed losing saved progress on the process on the deletion of the game from the disk–though, logically such a blame didn’t make sense.

Dejectedly, I sat about playing the game from the start, this time making sure to save progress on the memory card. I played over a couple of days, reached where I had left off, and moved ahed, happy with my progress.

This morning when I ran the game, I felt the exact same horror I did last week. The saved progress was gone again. It was nowhere to be found on the memory card. I searched everywhere, to no avail. I didn’t know what happened that could have caused it this time around. I yanked out the memory card and slid it into the second memory bay. Nothing. It was gone, without a trace. I felt betrayed. I let the game linger on the start screen, contemplating whether I should start over again. I couldn’t make up my mind.

And then on a whim, I ran a search on google to see if I could find any information on this erratic behaviour. Voila, I did. Many others on XBOX had reported similar issues as well as their resentment over them. This is the search I ran.

As far as I bothered to sift through piles of posts on forums and articles over the web, I couldn’t find any resolution for the problem. If anything it helped me come to a temporary decision: to hold off on playing the game again until a workable solution is found. Holding off isn’t something easy to do. It is such an awesome game, and I so much want to play it through the end. Oh well, off to play Skyrim!