EDIT: I respond to the ‘EA wrote the PS3 Orange Box port’ comments here.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile. It’s old news by now I’m sure, Phoronix first posted their story here on May 7th. But regardless…

I’m not sure what else I can add that the Phoronix article didn’t cover. However it seems some people are dismissing this as just a baseless rumor and no one seems optimistic about the possibility of it actually happening. So I’ll list the three main points here.

1. Valve puts up a job posting asking for a “Senior Software Engineer”, with one of the responsibilities being to “Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform”.

2. An upcoming game, Postal III is slated to have Windows, Mac and Linux ports. This game is designed using the Valve Source Engine. This is probably one of the strongest points, how are they going to make a Mac and Linux port without OpenGL? Clearly something is afoot. ;)

3. The Orange Box was released on the Playstation 3, a system that isn’t known to have any viable Direct3D/DirectX API implementations, on the contrary, it uses an OpenGL ES derivative and some other libraries standardized by the Khronos Group. It also uses Nvidia’s Cg shader language, which is also cross-platform (yes, works on ATI too). This means that either Valve already ported their game engine to OpenGL, or they are using an emulation layer such as Wine. Transgaming has been known to license their Cedega (Wine derivative) backend to console game developers, they did so for The Sims on the PS2 and some others too I believe. This by the way is not mentioned on the Phoronix article, and I’m not aware of any other site that has mentioned this (which is what makes my article unique I suppose).

Bonus! :)

4. Steam represents a unique opportunity for Valve, you see many who use Linux are often known to be more technically skilled than the average user, it is possible that game companies have known for a long time that there were many potential customers on Linux, but that they figured piracy would lower sales down too far, unlike on Windows where there is a huge majority of clueless users who may not even know how to pirate something, most Linux users are adept enough to do far more. This concern if it exists, is all but completely eliminated with Steam. Valve could also make a lot of money selling download statistics and usage data to other companies.

Phoronix also suggests that the UT3 Linux client delay could be related to this given that Epic has recently started offering their games through Steam. The implication seems to be that maybe Epic wishes to launch the Linux client through Steam, if this were the case, then Ryan Gordon would definitely be correct when he said “If I told you what the specific problem is, you wouldn’t believe me” during an interview at LinuxHardware.org. Can you imagine?:

“Yeah, it’s being delayed because of Steam”
“oh.. ok… .. wait.. — WHAT?”

In any case, we’ll have to wait patiently for more news. Personally I think the three first points are probably the strongest indications that this may happen. At the very least, it seems there is already, or will be an officially-maintained OpenGL backend for the Source Engine. Whether this translates into a Linux/Mac port remains to be seen. I mention the Mac too now because if they do a Linux port, it is doubtful they will not also release a Mac version, it is essentially as simple as a recompile to take a unix/posix/opengl/sdl application between Linux and Mac. Anyways, until next time. ;)

The other day a coworker of mine was trying to test if he could access an RDP server on our network, we started by pinging it to see if it was live. My computer is a laptop that runs Linux, but we happened to have a Windows XP machine nearby which I was setting up for someone else. So we used that to test if RDP itself worked. It occurred to me that RDP is used pretty often by people on our network, and that it might be handy to be able to access RDP servers from my laptop in case I ever needed to. After a bit of googling I found rdesktop: http://www.rdesktop.org/

I recall finding this once before, but back then I didn’t feel I needed it. In any case, on most Linux distributions, installing a new application is as simple as one command:

apt-get install rdesktop
yum install rdesktop

…or in my case:

emerge rdesktop

Which compiled/installed the package for me. Emerge is a Gentoo Linux utility, not all distributions require compiling, the two other commands I listed before are on Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat/Fedora respectively, and install binary packages as opposed to compiling.

After that, I simply typed “rdesktop n.n.n.n” where “n.n.n.n” is the IP address of the server we were test-connecting to earlier, and it worked fine. Of course I didn’t have the password for that machine.

Today, Koopa gave me an address so I could try it out a bit more extensively, I connected to it, logged in, and began playing around. It seemed to work fairly reliably, I was able to open several applications and check various server logs, I even opened up IE and browsed around just for the sake of testing. The last thing I did, which I considered the ultimate test, was to see if I could copy text from the RDP session and paste it into my local Linux machine. The first time I tried it didn’t work, but I believe this was just because of Linux’s sometimes random clipboard behavior, I tried it later and it worked great.

All in all I have to say that this is a great solution for anyone who works at a primarily Windows company, but wants to run Linux on their desktop. I’m sure many of you already are aware about Samba which will let you use windows file and printer shares. And if you need to access Exchange/AD stuff, there is the Ximiam Evolution email client which is comparable to Outlook in it’s features and compatibility with microsoft protocols.

As a bonus, a bit of googling reveals that there is also an RDP server for Linux which I have to say surprised me, especially given that the protocol was designed specifically for Windows and integrates a bit more deeply with the Windows system than say… VNC. The server is named Xrdp, and it is available here. As the screenshots show, it seems to work pretty well, despite having an ugly login screen. I think that the login screen is likely a result of some strange details in the RDP protocol, my guess is that the screen that is normally presented to windows users via RDP isn’t exactly the same one they see when logging on locally, and even if it is, it’s likely deeply integrated with the RDP protocol, so they probably had no choice but to write one from scratch for Xrdp directly on top of X11, which isn’t a bad thing, it doesn’t affect functionality.

If I ever have some time I might try setting up a Linux server at home that uses Xrdp, and I’ll make a more detailed post about it. For now, I’m signing off. Later everyone, and happy remote-computing. :)