I have expanded the operating system support for packaging of bncsutil and StormLib. You can now install both for Debian 7, Centos 6, Cento 7 and Fedora 24+.
For instructions, check the readme in these repositories:
Bncsutil: https://github.com/BNETDocs/bncsutil
StormLib: https://github.com/cen1/StormLib
CenI recently installed Fedora 24 XFCE on my brand new Entroware Apollo, a Linux friendly laptop. Here is a list of problems I encountered during my first week of use. While most of these problems had a solution with a bit of googling, non-tech savvy person would have severe problems solving them.
So basically, everything kinda works now but it was a bumpy road to achieve this. Hopefully I get some feedback on issue #1 in Fedora bug tracker because it's really severe.
CenFinally after years and years of screwing around with building StormLib or BNCSUtil everytime you moved your ghost bots to another server is finally over. As of today, I am hosting both libraries in apt and rpm repositories. In the process I also discovered that StormLib managed to get into Debian Testing (https://packages.debian.org/source/stretch/stormlib) so let's hope it'll be included in the next stable release!
I also pushed CPack generator code into both repositories, so you can build these packages yourself. BNCSUtil was forked and cleaned especially.
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#apt.xpam.pl deb https://apt.xpam.pl/ jessie main |
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wget -qO - https://apt.xpam.pl/xpam.pl-pubkey.asc | sudo apt-key add - |
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sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install stormlib bncsutil |
/etc/yum.repos.d/rpm.xpam.pl.repo add|
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[rpm.xpam.pl] name = rpm.xpam.pl baseurl = https://rpm.xpam.pl |
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dnf config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.xpam.pl |
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rpm --import https://rpm.xpam.pl/rpm-pubkey.asc |
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yum update && yum install stormlib bncsutil |
This was a nice project to spend a few weekends on but there are more plans in 2016 to clean and tidy up the bnet tools we all use and love:
-add CMake and CPack support to our own bots, link against upstream StormLib and release a cleaned up ghost code, ease the setup process via repo installs with full dependency resolution (mysql, boost, storm and bncsutil). Provide precompiled binaries for Windows.
-provide patches to some other popular ghost forks to work with upstream StormLib.
-package PvPGN?
-provide pkgng packages for FreeBSD. This will probably involve writing pkgng generator for CMake's CPack which could be an interesting side project in itself.
CenRecently I decided to move all of our C++/Qt based projects up to the latest version of Qt and C++ toolkits. That means Qt 5, Visual Studio 2015 and all the latest libraries which are needed either for Qt or standalone. There was one caveat tho.. we still need to support Windows XP because a large amount of our player base still uses it. The nightmare begins.
This guide talks about:
-building shared release libraries of OpenSSL with msvc2015 XP target
-build shared release Qt framework with msvc2015 XP target
-build your application with msvc2015 XP target
Building OpenSSL with MSVC 2015 and Windows XP target is an absolute clusterfuck. Forget XP target, even without that it simply WON'T compile with the usual instructions which used to work in the past (ex: http://developer.covenanteyes.com/building-openssl-for-visual-studio/). Thankfully, I found pre-built binaries and a useful batch script at http://www.npcglib.org/~stathis/blog/precompiled-openssl/. The pre-built binaries are ok but they are not built with XP target. They are also built with MT/MD naming which Qt does not really like (Qt insists that you link to libeay32 and ssleay32 and nothing else). Simply renaming them does not really work because .lib tries to include the wrong thing and you end up needing to provide both (no go).
So after a full day of working around the various problems I managed to compile OpenSSL with msvc2015 and XP target. This is a rough procedure so I might have missed something because I recompiled at least 100 times before it worked, but it should at least guide you on the right track:
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PATH=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1A\Bin;$(PATH) INCLUDE=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1A\Include;$(INCLUDE) LIB=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1A\Include;$(LIB) |
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-D_USING_V110_SDK71_ |
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-I"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1A\Include" -I"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1A\Include" |
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nmake -f ms/ntdll-x86.mak |
Setup the environment again: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/windows-issues.html
Then configure Qt, I personally used:
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configure -target xp -release -qmake -opensource -nomake examples -opengl desktop -platform win32-msvc2015 -openssl -I C:\Users\me\git\openssl-1.0.1p-vs2015\include -L C:\Users\me\git\openssl-1.0.1p-vs2015\shared OPENSSL_LIBS="-llibeay32 -lssleay32 -lgdi32" |
where -I and -L flags need to point to OpenSSL include files and the libraries you just built in previous step. We are doing a shared build (I used to like it all static but it turns out shipping Qt libraries bundled in the .exe with every single application update is a complete waste of bandwidth and time, at least 10MB every time).
Then build the Qt with: jom
Do not use nmake because jom is much faster!
After Qt builds, add it as a Kit in Qt Creator. You need to specify path to qmake.exe which is in qt-everywhere-opensource-src-5.X.X\qtbase\bin.
Now to your actual project. Add this to your qmake (.pro) file:
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DEFINES += _ATL_XP_TARGETING DEFINES += PSAPI_VERSION=1 QMAKE_LFLAGS_WINDOWS = /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS,5.01 |
Second one? Because reasons: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2009/08/27/windows-sdk-v7-0-v7-0a-incompatibility-workaround.aspx
Add all Qt DLL libraries in the same folder as your .exe (from qtbase/lib), depending on the modules, it is usually at least:
QtCore.dll, QtGui.dll, QtNetwork.dll, QtWidgets.dll…
Also do not forget to include "platforms/qwindows.dll" in the same folder as your .exe. You also need to provide ssleay32.dll and libeay32.dll the same way. You might also need to provide msvc C++ redistributable dll files but I usually just instruct users to install the full C++ redistributable package from Microsoft.
And there you have it, Qt 5 with OpenSSL built with MSVC 2015 and with Windows XP support. An absolute mess if you are starting from zero and don't know all the little annoyances but once you do it's a relief.
CenGoogling around, I could not find a single mention whether Rode NT-USB microphone supports Linux or not. After some semi-encouraging words from Rode support I decided to go ahead and buy it anyway. I am happy to announce that it works out of the box and so far I did not encounter any problems on Fedora 23. The microphone is properly detected in Pavucontrol and Open Broadcaster. I am a complete amateur but to me the sound is crisp clear with zero background noise. The comparison with my old Siberia V2 headphone microphone or my in-built laptop one is night and day. These two would produce a lot of noise as soon as increasing the volume over 100% (at 100% they would be way too silent) and it was a complete disaster. NT-USB can go much louder and has no background noise even sitting 40cm from my loud laptop fan.
CenThis is an interesting little experiment I did when I was searching for a FreeBSD SVG logo to put on a poster. As you might know, SVG format is for vector images, allowing for infinite scaling without pixelation, which is exactly what you need, if you are going to print something on a big quality poster. Either that or you need originals in huge sizes for downscaling.
What caught my eye when I opened the image with Firefox was the lack of detail inside the devil ball which should be visible. This sent me on a little crusade to find out which browsers and image programs are actually capable of rendering it correctly.
For (assumingly) correct reference render we will take the logo from the freebsd.org:
Firefox render is very basic, lacks most of the highlights and internal details.
Chrome takes some artistic freedoms and completely screws up in the process. The elements are there but layered improperly plus the horns are now black. Obvious transparency and overlay issues.
Internet Explorer manages to produce the worst render of all programs.
Opera follows Chrome since they use the same underlying engine.
Safari also falls into the Webkit family with Chrome and Opera.
Svg-edit is an online JavaScript based tool.
ImageMagick is very close but it has an extra bright ring going through the middle which apparently shouldn't be there.
Inkscape is the only tool in this test that produced a proper render.
Gimp is also very close but has the same imperfection as ImageMagick.
IrfanView uses an external plugin to render SVGs that is not free. If we ignore the overlay text for a moment, the image suffers from Chrome-like problems except it's of absolute terrible quality.
And there you have it, the piss poor state of SVG rendering as of July 2015.
If you want to resize an SVG image and produce a high resolution PNG, the easiest method is to use ImageMagick from command line:
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convert -density 600 Freebsd_logo.svg Freebsd_logo.png |
Density is specified in dpi by default. You determine the dpi based on the size of the print you actually want to produce.
CenIf you own an Asus N71jq or a similar laptop model from 5 years ago you probably tried to update your Catalys drivers to something more recent. Official Asus support page only provides an ancient version from 2010. If you try to use the official and latest AMD drivers you will end up with a black screen during the installation process.
After a lot of digging on Google I found out that this is a widespread problem and the last driver from AMD that still work turns out to be 13.4, which is not ideal, but still better than what Asus provides. Sometimes after that apparently the back lighting of the screen is broken. Source.
Finding 13.4 drivers is a challenge. Guru3D used to have all versions listed on their websites, but AMD blocked external linking some time ago, so all links are a dead end. You also can't find 13.4 in AMD driver archives. So after scouring the internet, I finally found a working version. I am attaching it to this post for your leisure.
CenUnless you have great internet bandwidth you probably don't want to leech and seed your 100 torrents during the day. You usually want them to seed during the night and then pause in the morning. Let's do this on our FreeNAS box.
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setenv EDITOR /usr/bin/ee |
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crontab -e |
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0 1 * * * /usr/local/bin/transmission-remote localhost:9091 --auth=YOUR_TRANSMISSION_USER:YOUR_TRANSMISSION_PASSWORD -tall --start 0 7 * * * /usr/local/bin/transmission-remote localhost:9091 --auth=YOUR_TRANSMISSION_USER:YOUR_TRANSMISSION_PASSWORD -tall --stop |
Update in 2023: in TrueNAS 13 (perhaps even earlier versions), transmission-remote is no longer preinstalled inside the jail, you need to install it first:
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pkg install transmission-utils |
CenThis post will talk about how I built my own FreeNAS box, including a short review of the components used. I will also try to mention all the problems and pitfalls that I can remember.
This motherboard is the perfect choice for a NAS box. It has a low power Atom processor, passively cooled, micro ITX and most importantly.. 12 freaking SATA ports. Which means you won't even need an add-on card for the build. It also comes with 2 Ethernet ports and a dedicate IPMI.
The bad:
Bough on amazon.de for 301€
This case is pretty much perfect for a NAS box. It has eight 3.5" hot swap bays and additional 4 internal 2.5" bays. You also don't need to worry about providing 12 SATA power cables because it has a circuit with 2 molex input connectors which power all 8 hot-swap bays.. no Y splitters needed.
The good:
The bad:
Bought from local online shop for 182€
We need a SFX power supply for our case and there are not that many on the market to choose from. This is a very silent 300W power supply which is more than enough for everything we need. It just happened to be in my local online shop, the price was good and it matched the case so I went with it.
The good:
The bad:
Bought from local online shop for 60€
The only reason I went with this is because it was on ASrock memory QVL list and one of the only 8GB sticks from a somewhat reputable manufacturer. I got only one due to budget constraints but there are 3 slots left to upgrade at any time.
Bought from local online shop for 90€
I bough 4 of these, mainly because they are from HGST which I had a great experience with so far and the fact that they are 7200 RPM NAS drives. Online reviews also hinted that they beat WD Reds and Seagate NAS drives so I went with them.
The good:
The bad:
Bough from local online shop for 480€
I bough this fan controller mainly because it fits in the PCI slot while most other controllers fit into the front of the case. The reason why I even got this is because I could not control the fans from BIOS at all so they were spinning at full speed all the time. But on the end it did not really matter much because the 4 disks are so loud that you don't even care about the fan noise. Looking from that perspective it was probably a failed purchase. Other than that it works ok and it comes with a molex splitter so you are not losing any connectors from your power supply.
Bough from amazon.de for 15€
If you want to put the USB stick with FreeNAS inside the case you need to buy a USB header to female (normally 2x female) adapter. By default, the ASrock motherboard has 2 USBs active at the back and one at the front header, so only one of the female connectors on the adapter will actually work. If you can't see the USB stick as bootable option in the BIOS, this might be the problem. Simply put the USB stick in the other slot.
Roughly 1200€
Fan controller was not used in this guide.
One thing I am not 100% sure is how to access the BIOS through IPMI to set the boot options (so we don't have to plug in the monitor and keyboard). The management software on the motherboard should have a default IP out of the box but I am not sure how you get to know the IP without checking it out in the BIOS. Tips welcome.
Other than that, the Megarac Management Platform that ASrock provides is very nice. It allows you to see the console output and power ON/OFF the server from your workstation.
Once FreeNAS boots it will output the web UI IP in the console. The other way you can figure out the IP is to open your router and check the DHCP table.
I ended up with creating a raidz2 zpool which turns out to be roughly 8TB of empty space. The reason I chose raidz2 is because when a disk dies I can comfortably send it to repair or buy a new one. This can take a few weeks so running in degraded state in case of raidz1 is probably not the smartest thing to do.
There are a few things that can be extended and improved in the future. I still have place for four 3.5" drives and since the single drive sizes are already at 6TB I will probably just create a new zpool when I need it. I also have four 2.5" bays still available inside the case so I could potentially buy SSDs when they become even cheaper and have greater capacities. 24GB of RAM can also be added.
The PCI-E 8x slot is unused at the moment. I could throw a GPU in there and have the box work as a HTPC machine although the noise from the hard drives would not be welcome anywhere near TV. The slot could also be used for additional USB 3.0 headers, so the front panel would actually be usable.
With all this expandability in mind, I am probably good for 5+ years in terms of storage.
CenMost of the time you don't want to write your own installer for distributing software. You use an off-the-shelf installation program that packages it all up for you instead.
But if you feel adventurous or need your installer to perform some very specific tasks you probably want to write your own. This post will shows you a few gotchas you might encounter along the way with Qt and WINAPI.
Qt resource system and it's .qrc files are perfect candidates for an installer. They allow you to package all the needed assets of your program into a single executable. If a .qrc file becomes too big however you might run into build errors like:
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FatalError C1060:"compiler is out of heap space" |
After hours of Googling for a solution it came down to this and this. Let me just say that increasing your Windows swap file and all the other solutions probably won't work. The easiest thing to do is to create another .qrc file and move some of the existing data files into it. If that one becomes too big you can simply create more of them.
This error can also appear if your project has too many header file inclusions. The .qrc files are being compiled into giant binary structs so it's the same problem in its core.
This is an example code for copying an internal file to the filesystem:
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QFile c(":\\somefile"); //internal file in .qrc c.copy("path_in_filesystem"); |
But first we need to check whether a file already exists and remove it (think reinstall or install repair). This is needed because the copy() function has no "overwrite" parameter (which is stupid but that's Qt's fault):
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QFile p("somepath/somefile"); if (p.exists()) { if (!p.remove()) { //could not remove file, permission denied } } |
This will fail because there is a small gotcha with the Qt resource system: all internal files are read-only! If you just copy an internal file to the filesystem it will keep it's read-only attribute and doing anything but reading the file will fail with Permission denied. Without knowing this simple and obvious fact you will lose hours trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
Setting write permissions after copy solves this problem, for example:
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p.setPermissions(QFile::ReadOther|QFile::WriteOther); |
Another gotcha with permissions is Windows UAC. Writing to Program Files needs admin permissions so your installer must be executed as administrator or request these privileges by default. Running it as a regular user will end up in a bunch of Permission denied errors.
The question then is, how to make your installer request admin privileges when executed. One way is to play with custom manifests and trying to integrate that with qmake… and probably fail on the end. Thankfully there is a simple solution by adding the following lines to qmake:
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win32 { CONFIG += embed_manifest_exe QMAKE_LFLAGS_WINDOWS += /MANIFESTUAC:level=\'requireAdministrator\' } |
Make sure you enable UAC on your workstation computer so you can experience the same thing as your users. If you have it disabled you won't actually notice anything being wrong.
A proper installer should correctly register the program in the Add/Remove Programs and provide an uninstaller.
It basically has to write some registry entries. A great reference on required and optional entries can be found here. But there is a catch.. there is always a catch. The first one is that you probably can't use the QSettings class because it does not support additional CRegKey.Open() flags such as KEY_WOW64_64KEY. Your 32bit program should probably write to 64bit registry because that's what you see when you run regedit from the system. If you don't know the difference you might lose hours upon hours of trying to figure out why your registry is not changing while your WINAPI calls are working perfectly.
The gotcha is that the registry paths you need to write are different if your application is 32bit or 64bit.
For 32bit it is
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Software\\Wow6432Node\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall\\YourProduct |
And for 64bit it is
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Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall\\YourProduct |
To determine whether we are running under WOW64 or not there is the following code lurking on the internets:
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BOOL IsWow64() { typedef BOOL (WINAPI *LPFN_ISWOW64PROCESS) (HANDLE, PBOOL); LPFN_ISWOW64PROCESS fnIsWow64Process; BOOL bIsWow64 = FALSE; //IsWow64Process is not available on all supported versions of Windows. //Use GetModuleHandle to get a handle to the DLL that contains the function //and GetProcAddress to get a pointer to the function if available. fnIsWow64Process = (LPFN_ISWOW64PROCESS) GetProcAddress( GetModuleHandle(TEXT("kernel32")),"IsWow64Process"); if(NULL != fnIsWow64Process) { if (!fnIsWow64Process(GetCurrentProcess(),&bIsWow64)) { //handle error } } return bIsWow64; } |
I have not yet tested whether CRegKey would open the correct version by default and also write to the correct place without setting any additional flags. Specifically, I am not sure whether Wow6432Node would be appended automatically.
Without losing too much words on this, creating a desktop shortcut is as simple as using QFile::link().
User should be able to cancel the installation at any time and have its system intact. This means that we can't simply leave a bunch of files and registry entries on the system, we need to put everything back to the original state. I solved this problem by dividing each installation step in a separate method and then writing a rollback counterpart that does exactly the opposite. For every copied file I have a file removal and the same goes for every other modification. I also call the rollbacks if any of the installation steps fail.
If you are modifying existing files it is a good idea to first make a copy of the file and then place it back in case of a rollback.
Try to keep the system as intact as possible in case of a failure or cancellation.
Let's say you want to copy your program files to C:/Program Files/Yourproject and you also want to create a desktop shortcut. You have two problems. First problem is that you don't know whether your folder should go to Program Files or Program Files (x86) because you don't know on what system you are. If your program is 32bit you know it should go to the (x86) but you don't know if that even exists – you might be on 32bit OS.
You also don't know the path to user's desktop. You have to use WINAPI and even that is a problem because Windows XP lacks some flags that newer systems have. I came up with the following function:
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QString getProgramFiles() { TCHAR szPath[MAX_PATH]; if (IsWinXP32()) { if(SUCCEEDED(SHGetFolderPath(NULL, CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES, NULL, SHGFP_TYPE_DEFAULT, szPath))) { return QString::fromWCharArray(szPath); } else { return ""; } } else { if(SUCCEEDED(SHGetFolderPath(NULL, CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILESX86, NULL, SHGFP_TYPE_DEFAULT, szPath))) { return QString::fromWCharArray(szPath); } else { return ""; } } } |
The culprit is CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILESX86 which returns an empty string on Windows XP.
For finding the desktop you can use CSIDL_DESKTOP flag.
Determining 32bit Windows XP can be done like this:
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bool IsWinXP32() { DWORD version = GetVersion(); DWORD major = (DWORD) (LOBYTE(LOWORD(version))); DWORD minor = (DWORD) (HIBYTE(LOWORD(version))); return ((major == 5) && (minor == 1)); } |
Making the uninstaller is quite an easy task except for the last part – removing uninstaller itself. A running process cannot delete itself so this is quite an annoying problem. A few examples can be seen here. What I ended up doing is basically calling cmd.exe and doing a rmdir (which contains the uninstaller:
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QStringList a; a << "/c"; //command a << "rd"; //rmdir a << "/s/q"; //with subdirectories and silently a << projectpath; QProcess::startDetached(getSystem32()+"\\cmd.exe", a); QApplication::quit(); |
where getSystem32 returns the path to System32 using the above mentioned CSIDL flags. This pops up a cmd window for a brief period after the uninstaller quits by itself.
These are a few problems I encountered along the way when working on my own installer. it is really not that difficult but there are a few subtle problems which might get you along the way, some inside Qt and others in WINAPI. Hopefully this can save someone a few hours combating the same issues if you happen to land on this blog. :)
Cen