[Solved!] EBII hanging on startup (Slack13.0/x64)

Linux support forums for Eschalon: Book II
phaedrus
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Re: Eschalon: Book II hanging on startup (64bit Slackware 13

Post by phaedrus »

phaedrus wrote:Also, my Slackware 13.1 DVD just arrived today, so I'm going to upgrade my system. I've got a spare partition sitting around which I can install a small 32-bit root partition on, so I can try booting up in pure 32-bit mode. This might take a little while to get completely setup, but I think we're out of straws. (I'm also going to try everything with the stock kernels instead of doing my normal immediate custom compile.)
w00t! I just did a quick audit of my partitions, and I'm in much better shape than I thought. I've got enough lying fallow right now that I can do a complete side-by-side install of 32-bit and 64-bit Slack 13.1.

I'm a zealous about partitioning, and I originally setup my machine with an eye towards booting FreeDOS and Slackware side-by-side. Between a switch to using tmpfs wherever I could and using qemu instead for FreeDOS, I can scrounge a root, /var and /usr partition of adequate size. This can also be mounted on my 64-bit main install and act as my chroot jail.

No one can ever tell me that chopping my drive up like a madman is a bad idea now.
Tyranthraxus
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Re: Eschalon: Book II hanging on startup (64bit Slackware 13

Post by Tyranthraxus »

phaedrus wrote:

Ok, the kernel is custom compiled, but it's a straightforward config (just the stuff needed, nothing not, and yes, I've been tracking and compiling kernels for 10 years, so the preceding statement might[*] not be idiotic arrogance).

[*] for definitions of 'might' meaning 'has an extremely small chance to'
I get you.
Mind you, even after all these years, I still forget which one the "any" key is. :?
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SpottedShroom
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Re: Eschalon: Book II hanging on startup (64bit Slackware 13

Post by SpottedShroom »

phaedrus wrote: I'm a zealous about partitioning, and I originally setup my machine with an eye towards booting FreeDOS and Slackware side-by-side. Between a switch to using tmpfs wherever I could and using qemu instead for FreeDOS, I can scrounge a root, /var and /usr partition of adequate size. This can also be mounted on my 64-bit main install and act as my chroot jail.

No one can ever tell me that chopping my drive up like a madman is a bad idea now.
I really hope you've heard of LVM...
phaedrus
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Re: Eschalon: Book II hanging on startup (64bit Slackware 13

Post by phaedrus »

SpottedShroom wrote:
phaedrus wrote: I'm a zealous about partitioning, and I originally setup my machine with an eye towards booting FreeDOS and Slackware side-by-side. Between a switch to using tmpfs wherever I could and using qemu instead for FreeDOS, I can scrounge a root, /var and /usr partition of adequate size. This can also be mounted on my 64-bit main install and act as my chroot jail.

No one can ever tell me that chopping my drive up like a madman is a bad idea now.
I really hope you've heard of LVM...
Yes. Of course I've heard of LVM (I remember the original release announcement). It's overkill for a personal computer. These rejiggering the partitions episodes happen maybe every other year. Doing backups or other dances to work around the limitations of normal partitions isn't that big a deal at that frequency.

If you manage a datacenter and this comes up all the time, it's a great technology.
phaedrus
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Re: Eschalon: Book II hanging on startup (64bit Slackware 13

Post by phaedrus »

Ok, I installed 32-bit Slackware 13.1, booted it up with the stock kernel, and same results. I haven't run strace and gdb on it yet, and the X error changed:
X Error of failed request: BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)
Major opcode of failed request: 18 (X_ChangeProperty)
Atom id in failed request: 0x0
Serial number of failed request: 50
Current serial number in output stream: 50
But other than that, it's the same blank launch window. :(

No one else is seeing similar symptoms?
phaedrus
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Re: Eschalon: Book II hanging on startup (64bit Slackware 13

Post by phaedrus »

I burned myself a copy of the Ubuntu 10.04 (the one I was grousing about elsewhere was given to a friend). Since I have a real swap partition, the performance wasn't completely horrible, just bad.

EBII ran. Or rather, it crawled, but it worked. Ubuntu loaded using the Nouveau driver and ate half my RAM with it's swap-on-ramdisk silliness.

The main reason I did this was to check the X.org versions. Ubuntu reports:
X.Org X Server 1.7.6
And Slackware 13.1 reports:
X.Org X Server 1.7.7
:?
phaedrus
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Re: Eschalon: Book II hanging on startup (64bit Slackware 13

Post by phaedrus »

EDIT: UPDATE: This is wrong. The xhost + wasn't the special sauce after all. So, don't do it. Running firefox (and presumably a number of other X applications might also work) before running EBII is the secret. The "BadAtom" error is likely happening because the atom does not exist. What I think is happening is that firefox creates it when it finds the atom missing. I'll see if I can figure out which Atom is causing the problem. Still, I have work-around.

EDIT: UPDATE 2: Yep. It's a non-existent atom, possibly a few, probably one or all of the NETWM atoms, as using a more modern WM works (so firefox and window maker both create the atoms EBII is looking for). The lesson? Use something at least slightly more feature-rich than twm. Slackware 13.1 32-bit works fine out of the box, unless you do something really silly.

If there is a bug here, it is in the BlitzMax backend code, which should either ignore the non-existent atoms, or it should create the atoms and move on. Again, only silly people who do stuff like run twm in the 21st century are going to run into this problem, so I wouldn't even be annoyed if the BlitzMax guys ignored it as a 'wontfix' bug.

ORIGINAL (WRONG) POST: Solved! It's a different problem on Slackware 13.1 32 bit than on the 64 bit with chroot jail. It's an Xwindows permissions problem. I'm not sure what permission precisely, but getting out the big hammer seemed to work:

Code: Select all

$ xhost +
This says, allow everyone! From anywhere! Don't do this unless you know what your doing! It opens up your X port all the way, and is not suggested for normal use. If I cannot get a finer grained command, I'm going to create a script which will lock down my X port (6000) with iptables before running this command and starting EBII.

I'll post any further findings here, whether it is a finer grained xhost command or the iptables script. This may be a little while. I'm hopping a plane on Sunday and will be out of town for the week.

Also, sound doesn't work, but Slackware doesn't ship with OpenAL (pretty simple download-compile-install though, I've done it for other games in the past). Also, I've got a funny audio setup (which the stock kernel doesn't handle correctly), but that's a recompile away. Otherwise, it seems to be running plenty fast. So, 13.0 is missing the correct libraries and 32 bit 13.1 has X locked down a bit too much. chroot jailing the 32-bit environment may or may not work for EBII, it certainly doesn't work with 13.0/64bit w/13.1/32bit chroot (tried and failed). We'll see what happens when I update my main system after I get back from my trip.

(Also, twm is ridiculous. No, I didn't bother setting up my normal X windows stuff, since I'm primarily going to be using the 64 bit install.)
Last edited by phaedrus on June 11th, 2010, 11:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Slammer64
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Re: [Solved!] EBII hanging on startup (Slack13.0/x64)

Post by Slammer64 »

Out of curiosity, have you tried chown'ing the Eschalon executable to say root:games and then adding your username into the games group? It might solve your problem with X and having to xhost+.
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SpottedShroom
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Re: Eschalon: Book II hanging on startup (64bit Slackware 13

Post by SpottedShroom »

phaedrus wrote:It's a non-existent atom, possibly a few, probably one or all of the NETWM atoms, as using a more modern WM works (so firefox and window maker both create the atoms EBII is looking for). The lesson? Use something at least slightly more feature-rich than twm. Slackware 13.1 32-bit works fine out of the box, unless you do something really silly.
Good catch! I think it would have taken me ages to figure that out.

But yeah, TWM is a pretty ridiculous window manager, especially since FVWM manages to do more with a smaller memory footprint. Might I ask what attracted you to TWM?
phaedrus
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Re: Eschalon: Book II hanging on startup (64bit Slackware 13

Post by phaedrus »

SpottedShroom wrote:Good catch! I think it would have taken me ages to figure that out.
Thanks! (I've done just enough XLib programming to be able to figure it out eventually, but not enough to be able to read the error message and realize what is going on right away. :) )
But yeah, TWM is a pretty ridiculous window manager, especially since FVWM manages to do more with a smaller memory footprint. Might I ask what attracted you to TWM?
I was messing around. If something has been maintained continuously for 20+ years, there's got to be some reason for it. I hadn't ever actually used TWM before. In this case, I think it's because it's a feature minimal baseline, so I'll probably switch it out for FVWM.

Right now, the only thing I use the 32 bit install for is EBII, so I haven't gone and setup my normal WM--Enlightenment 16, which Slackware doesn't ship with. This is actually good, because I'd recompile it myself anyway.
Tyranthraxus
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Re: [Solved!] EBII hanging on startup (Slack13.0/x64)

Post by Tyranthraxus »

phaedrus, masterful piece of detective work there.
Think I`d be ploughing through reference books for most of the rest of the year, and still not consider that outcome.
Really does look like BlitzMax appears to be compiling in some very specific stuff, assuming that it's necessary, when in fact those features just happened to be on the specific computer at compilation.
Hopefully, Basilisk will pick a stable standard distro for compilation in the future, to give the best chance of compatibility across the range, just hope we get a revamped Book 2 before Book 3, I am really disliking this Ubuntu variant.
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