PC-DC server Linux guide in progress

[Ryochan7]

There has been a little progress made. So far, only an introduction and the PC side configuration portion have been written. I hope to get the next two parts out more quickly.

Edit: guide has been re-uploaded here: http://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/app ... ochanpart0 Thanks to Ryochan for providing us with the files and guide as his website is now down. -Impulse

[Bob Dobbs]

Would it work from a live Gentoo CD?

[Ryochan7]

It should work so long as the Gentoo Live CD system has a method of restoring configuration files. Otherwise, that would makes things a pain. There shouldn't be any type of performance hit since the necessary processes will be running from memory.

[Impulse]

It's Coming along nicely, Ryochan7.

[Ryochan7]

Part 2 is now up. It is actually pretty short compared to part 1. The next part will cover actually connecting the Dreamcast to the PC-DC server and getting on the Internet.

http://www.ryochan7.com/blog/2009/07/11 ... iguration/

[Bob Dobbs]

Doesn't Linux Gentoo have the ability to save a config file on the HDD like a VMU save?

[Ryochan7]

Almost all live CDs have methods of mounting external media (HDDs, flash drives, etc.) and writing to them. That would still involve more work because you would have to restore configuration files and maybe software installs manually when you boot the live CD. There are some live CD distros that take care of restoring configuration files and software installs automatically; the only one that I can remember that has that feature is Puppy Linux but there are likely others.

Also, I just used my guide to restore my PC-DC server. I had not set one up since doing a fresh install of Ubuntu Jaunty. I will have to make a couple of changes to the previous parts. One major problem is that connecting to the web with Planetweb 2.62 no longer works for me. It didn't work sometimes before but now it doesn't work at all. When Planetweb tries to do user authentication, the usb-serial driver that my serial to usb adapter uses segfaults and brings down ppp with it; Planetweb just hangs at that point. Dream Passport works fine though. Since Planetweb uses a different method of logging in compared to every other piece of Dreamcast software and since Dream Passport works fine, I think that almost every online game should work fine.

Edit: PSO works.

Edit2: I might have found a way to fix the Planetweb issue. Can't try it out until tomorrow.

Edit3: Didn't diagnose the problem properly but Planetweb still doesn't work. User fails to authenticate and Planetweb hangs; ppp never gets launched but the driver issue still exists. Checking the auth.log file helped a little bit. Also, I didn't even know the Gnome log file viewer can monitor a file as it is being written like tail can.

[Ryochan7]

Part 3 is up. I might change it later regarding Planetweb problems. This part of the guide should pretty much be the same if you are using Dream Passport.

http://www.ryochan7.com/blog/2009/07/11 ... onnection/

[Bob Dobbs]

Is it for idiots like me who barely know how to use Linux? I do stress barely, or do I need to take a Linux 101 class first (thus why Windows will unfortunately beat Linux)?

Sorry, my biggest complaint is that Linux makes you know too much UNIX type stuff. I was a DOS guru and knew some UNIX in the late 80's into the early 90's at the latest (I was on an Apple, IBM and MicroStation in that era). That was 20 years ago...seems like 100. Ironically my music career ended then too, but that still seems like only a couple of years ago...what a difference!

[Ryochan7]

The guide does require that you have some knowledge of Linux and various aspects of your choice of distribution. Some things you will need to know are how to install your distribution of choice on your PC, how to install additional software, gaining root access since some commands require it (goes along with installing software), user permissions, knowing how to find device paths for your hardware, and some very basic command-line knowledge. There is so much variation with Linux that it would be too hard to try to talk about these topics in the guide; a lot of distributions have some sort of beginner tutorials that should be read first.

Since the guide tries to be generic, it focuses on command-line utilities when there are GUI applications that can do the same thing. An example would be the mention of the two command-line applications useradd and passwd when the users-admin GUI app that is bundled with Gnome can do the same thing; I do mention users-admin in the guide briefly. However, it can't be assumed that a person has access to users-admin, especially since it is Gnome specific, but any Linux distribution will bundle useradd and passwd so those programs are covered in detail. Really, only part 3 has portions where you will need to use the command-line.