Shit They Didn’t tell You About DRI

Extra-short post, stemming from my general annoyance at the difficulty with which I enabled DRI on my latest laptop. You see, there are MANY factors that all come into play, many of which are described in detail at the DRI wiki.. I, however, had to spend an annoyingly long time reading to get it working. Here’s a quick step-by-step for getting it working on a clean (with X) Arch install:

1. Install drivers! Package names for X drivers are formatted as such: xf86-<class>-<driver>. For an Intel video driver, for example, it’d be xf86-video-intel. That should grab DRI packages for that driver as well. For Intel, that’d be intel-dri. In case you forgot or something, you’ll want to install it with pacman -Syu <package> as root.
2. Break out the text editor! Run your editor of choice (nano, vi, gedit, mousepad, etc.) as root, then paste the following in:
   Section “DRI”
   Mode 0666
   EndSection
3. Save that file as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-dri.conf, then quit your editor.
4. Run gpasswd -a <user> video, where <user> is your username, as root.
5. Reboot!
6. Start X!
7. Play Minecraft or similar, revel in the rendering!
8. Profit?

Hope you enjoyed it, and I hope it got you working… leave feedback in the comments!

Updating in Ubuntu Tutorial

So, this is a quick tutorial, made at the request of the wonderful Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast, (A technology geek podcast with an eeever so slight Macintosh bias) on how to update apps in Ubuntu 9.10.

Step 1: Open a Terminal.

Step 2: Type “sudo update-manager” without the quotes.

Step 3: Type your password when it asks you.

Step 4a: If a window opens and checks for updates, you’re good. Install the updates.

Step 4b: If no window opens and you get an “update-manager: command not found. Use sudo apt-get install update-manager to install it.” error, install it.

Step 4c: If NEITHER happens, comment on this post and I’ll add more detail. However, this should be enough to get it working.

APT in Ubuntu Tutorial

This is a tutorial for the NosillaCast on how to use APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) from the command line in Ubuntu Linux.

To add a PPA in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala:

1.) Open a Terminal
2.) Type: “sudo add-apt-repository Insert-PPA-Here”, replacing “Insert-PPA-Here” with the URL of the PPA. (EG. ppa:ppa/section)

To add any other repository:

1.) Open a Terminal,

2.) Type: “sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list”

3.) Paste the APT line of the repo at the end of the document. (EG. deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian karmic non-free)

4.) Save and quit

My new APT line is highlighted.

If it requires a key, add the one provided on the site (usually it doesn’t)

1.) Open a Terminal

2.) Get the key from the site. (EG. wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc)

3.) Add it with: “sudo apt-key add Key-Path”, replacing “Key-Path” with the path to the key. (EG. sun_vbox.asc)

Adding the key

To install a package:

1.) Open a Terminal

2.) Update the package listing: “sudo apt-get update”

The command only. The results can be seen in the next image.

2.) Type: “sudo apt-get install Package-Name”, replacing “Package-Name” with the name of the package. (EG. virtualbox-3.1)

3.) Tell it “Yes!”

4.) Wait, have a cup of coffee

5.) Run your app!

Installing VirtualBox