Category: IT

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One of the things about I love most is it’s flexibility. This may astonish some but I am gaming on my Linux system for approximately 15 years by now. Situation for improved a lot lately but it was always possible to keep myself distracted 😉

So one of the games I just love to play is XCOM (UFO series). I don’t think I skipped any part and Terror From The Deep will always have a special place in my heart. Anyway, when XCOM was relaunched and eventually ported to Linux by Feral Interactive in 2014 I thought I couldn’t have been happier. Firaxis Games topped this in 2016 with XCOM2 and Feral Interactive once more got the job for the port.

Sadly with all the expansion sets it takes quite a toll on the required hardware. Huge fan of all sliders on maximum and see how it goes and while my box can mostly keep up I notice that I run out of RAM towards the end of the game fast and my machine starts swapping. I’ve 16GB RAM and this game eats it away like children their candy.

I’ve got additional 4GB of swap installed on slow spinning rust disks (legacy) so I notice the moment it starts swapping like hitting a wall. After another frustrated restart of the game I paused for a moment. I don’t know why this games needs so much RAM and frankly I don’t even care. Maybe I’m spoiled nowadays since stuff tends to “just work”.

So I decided to throw more power at it but RAM is expensive and I usually have enough of it for my daily work (or other games). I did get a decent SSD (Solid State Disk) recently tho so it’s to my rescue:

swapoff -a
fallocate -l 16G /games/swapfile
mkswap /games/swapfile
swapon /games/swapfile

…and that’s it. I stopped my previous slow swap partition(s), created a new swapfile of 16GB size on my SSD, formatted it as swap partition and activated it. Now I tabbed back into my game and enjoyed the rest of the evening. Let it swap. The SSD can keep up with it. Not minding a few more seconds during loading screens 😀 I’m considerung to add the activation sequence to my “gaming mode” script.

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Jason Evangelho | Year 2 on Twitter (Twitter)
“Now THAT is a grub screen! Thank you to @LinuxPaulM for telling me about grub-customizer!”

Now THAT is a lilo screen!

I admit it’s an old . I used to reboot on LAN parties just to show off. Bonus points if you guess it’s year 😉

(Boot progress bar was mapped to the health bar)

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Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition arrives on Linux on November 5th by Liam DaweLiam Dawe (GamingOnLinux)
Feral Interactive have finally confirmed the Linux release date for Shadow of the Tomb Raider after announcing it for Linux back in November last year.
Well bite me, I guess I have to spend some money on this 😀 Curse u Feral 😉

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The unexpected perk of going cordless by elmineelmine (infullflow.net)
During our vacation I gifted Daughter a cordless headphone. She loves listening to audio stories when we’re driving so I took a subscription to Storytel. With a two week trial for free, I thought it would be an excellent way to listen to something new, instead of an entire vacation listening to th...

Gratulations on discovering the joys of cordless headphones, elmine. I’ve no idea how I could life without before. And that’s totally not sarcasm.

I got my first cordless headphone some years ago (and even cheap due to it’s colour – no idea why but that’s just how the algorithm at a certain huge online warehouse ticks). The trick is to look out for the frequency. Mine does 5 – 40.000 Hz and so I can really enjoy music during work for hours in superb quality.

We, coworkers and I, got to this after our office relocated and suddenly we were in the middle of a huge construction site that went on for months. Hard to concentrate with a plate vibrator next door all the time.

And I enjoy it ever since to disconnect from noise of all kinds. Traffic, buzzing and sometimes even from my kids play. Walking free with my favorite audio book or playlist and even without the need to raise the volume beyond good to drown the environment noise is simply great.

Downside is that I’m even more sensitive to noise nowadays. Uncertain if this is from the headphones or the electric car 😂