Yet another Windows related article – this detour from more typical content is expected to be short lived.
Microsoft Security Essentials was never officially supported on 64-bit Windows XP, but version 2 nevertheless installed on it and worked fine. Version 4 (version 3 never existed) refuses to install directly, saying that the version of Windows is unsupported. However, if you install version 2, the version 4 installer will happily run and install version 4 as an upgrade. It will pop up a message every time you log in warning that XP64 is EOL, but otherwise it will work just fine. So the trick is to install version 2 and then upgrade to version 4.
You may be wondering why this is relevant. My findings are that most realtime anti-malware programs thoroughly cripple performance. I used to run ClamWin+ClamSentinel as one of the least bad options, but even this was quite crippling. MSSE, on the other hand, is much more lightweight, and has thus far proved itself to be as effective in tests as most of the alternatives. The overall performance of the system is now much more acceptable.
I don’t tend to write much about Windows because it’s usefulness to me is limited to functioning as a Steam boot loader, and even that usefulness is somewhat diminished with Steam and an increasing number of games being available for Linux. Unfortunately, I recently had to do some testing that needed to be carried out using a Windows application, and I noticed that Chrome reported the above error when attempting to update itself.
The Chrome installer crash with the opaque 0xc0000005 error code on XP64 (Chrome is still supported on XP, even though MS is treating XP as EOL). Googling the problem suggested disabling the sandbox might help, but this isn’t really applicable since the problem occurs with the installer, not once Chrome is running (it runs just fine, it’s updating it that triggers the error).
A quick look at the crash dump revealed that one of the libraries dynamically linked at crash time was the MS Application Verifier, used for debugging programs and sending them fake information on what version of Windows they are running on. Uninstalling the MS Application Verifier cured the problem.
The fact that Steam have decided to only officially support .deb based distributions, and only relatively recent ones at that has been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time. While there are ways around the .deb only official package availability (e.g. alien), the library requirements are somewhat more difficult to reconcile. I have finally managed to get Steam working on EL6 and I figure I’m probably not the only one interested in this, so I thought I’d document it.
Different packages required to do this have been sourced from different locations (e.g. glibc from fuduntu project, steam src.rpm from steam.48.io (not really a source rpm, it just packages the steam binary in a rpm), most of the rest from more recent Fedoras, etc.). I have rebuilt them all and made them available in one place.
You won’t need all of them, but you will need at least the following:
If you have pyliblzma from EPEL installed (required by, e.g. mock), updated xz-lzma-compat package will trigger a python bug that causes a segfault. This will incapacitate some python programs (yum being an important one). If you encounter this issue and you must have pyliblzma for other dependencies, reinstall the original xz package versions after you run steam for the first time. Updated xz only seems to be required when the steam executable downloads updates for itself.
Finally, run steam, log in, and let it update itself.
One of the popular games that is available on Linux is Left 4 Dead 2. I found that on ATI and Nvidia cards it doesn’t work properly in full screen mode (blank screen, impossible to Alt-Tab out), but it does work on Intel GPUs. It works on all GPU types in windowed mode. Unfortunately, it runs in full screen mode by default, so if you run it without adjusting its startup parameters you may have to ssh into the machine and forcefully kill the hl2_linux process. To work around the problem, right click on the game in your library, and go to properties:
Click on the “SET LAUNCH OPTIONS…” button:
You will probably want to specify the default resolution as well as the windowed mode to ensure the game comes up in a sensible mode when you launch it. Add “-windowed -w 1280 -h 720” to the options, which will tell L4D2 to start in windowed mode with 1280×720 resolution. The resolution you select should be lower than your monitor’s resolution.
If you did all that, you should be able to hit the play button and be greeted with something resembling this:
ATI cards using the open source Radeon driver (at least with the version 7.1.0 that ships with EL6) seem to exhibit some rendering corruption, specifically some textures are intermittently invisible. This leads to invisible party members, enemies, and doors, and while it is entertaining for the first few seconds it renders the game completely unplayable. I have not tested the ATI binary driver (ATI themselves recommend the open source driver on Linux for older cards and I am using a HD6450).
Nvidia cards work fine with the closed source binary driver in windowed mode, and performance with a GT630 constantly saturates 1080p resolutions with everything turned up to maximum. I have not tested with the nouveau open source driver.
With Intel GPUs using the open source driver, everything works correctly in both windowed and full screen mode, but the performance is nowhere nearly as good as with the Nvidia card. With all the settings set to maximum, the performance with the Intel HD 4000 graphics (Chromebook Pixel) is roughly the same at 1920×1200 resolution as with the Radeon HD6450, producing approximately 30fps. The only problem with playing it on the Chromebook Pixel is that the whole laptop gets too hot to touch, even with the fan going at full speed. Not only does the aluminium casing get too hot to touch, the plastic keys on the keyboard themselves get painfully hot. But that story is for another article.
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