The gaming racket

[Crawford Sausage Company]

I need a modern server with more memory
and more horsepower. I want to play City Skylines
which is a Sim City replacement that runs on Steam.

The game costs $30
The PC I had to buy to run it cost $600
and that was refurbished on sale at Microcenter.
You could easily spend over a grand on one
of these boxes.

Who is making bank on gamers?

Today I noticed that Microcenter eliminated
their games section and I think all software.
I remember there used to be aisles upon
aisles of boxed software and now not a single
aisle. They expanded the Arduino kit stuff
which is good and still have a modest book
section.

With Steam I have to run the latest greatest
Ubuntu. The Lenovo box comes with Windows 10
so I'll have to run Windows for awhile to make
sure everything is working properly. It will
be running on my monitored network so I'll
report back here with some traffic stats if
I get motivated. Also picked up a new Samsung
24" monitor for $120 and it looks nice. They
sell curved monitors for 3x the price.
Thankfully there are people funding
products I'll buy 3 or 4 years from now after
new and shiny wears off and the price drops.

[Michele]

On 8/25/2016 11:00 PM, Crawford Sausage Company wrote:
> I need a modern server with more memory
> and more horsepower. I want to play City Skylines
> which is a Sim City replacement that runs on Steam.
>
> The game costs $30
> The PC I had to buy to run it cost $600
> and that was refurbished on sale at Microcenter.
> You could easily spend over a grand on one
> of these boxes.
>
> Who is making bank on gamers?
>

Downloadable content has made stocking PC games unprofitable for
retailers. Walmart and Best Buy keep some PC games around for those
stuck with slow connections, but that's about it.

[Bruce Esquibel]

Crawford Sausage Company <m...@brandylion.com> wrote:

> With Steam I have to run the latest greatest
> Ubuntu.

Two cent comment from the peanut gallery.

I think they recommend using Ubuntu 14.x for that and the latest and greatest
(16.x) was just released within the last few weeks.

Use the 14.x.

I had a box set up using the 14.x and was mildly happy with it, did what I
expected but maybe because it was an upgrade rather than a fresh install,
the 16.x upgrade just ruined everything. Too much to list what went wrong
but all performance issues.

Spent the last two days copying off my code and crap collection, wiped the
boot drive clean and reinstalled the 14.x, all back to normal.

I didn't see anyone else complaining with a situation like mine so it's
probably one of those "it's just you" things but I'm staying away for the
mean time from the latest and greatest.

-bruce
b...@ripco.com

[Crawford Sausage Company]

I was teetering between Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 and had just downloaded 16.
You make an excellent point and convinced me to use 14. I think I have
an iso for it around here somewhere or should I download a fresh copy.
I do image processing on a machine running 12.04 and it's constantly
nagging me to upgrade. If I upgrade ffmpeg goes away and all my scripts
break. Can't seem to tell it to STFU. In order to run Steam it's
either Ubuntu or Windows and no way will I ever run Windows 10. Have
an XP and 7 box for peripherals that will last another decade or more
at least.

[Bruce Esquibel]

I don't really follow the Ubuntu all that much, looks like the box here
started with 12.04.4 and worked up to the 14.04.5 it was running before the
problem with the 16.04.1 upgrade. I guess it took all those updates before
without any problems, till now.

I don't use it for anything critical, mostly as a backup server running both
nfs and samba, but that stuff didn't work right under 16, mostly the nfs,
seemed like even with nothing mounting the drives, lockd kept crashing
causing the nfs server to go into a 90 second delay, totally usuable. The
video was tearing too, mostly when the mouse was moved around. I just use
the built-in ivybridge, no card but the point is, it didn't do it before.

The killer for me was I have an IR dongle on it for a remote, after the
upgrade just tapping one key on the remote was like smashing the key down,
it took it like 5 or 6 repeats.

Since all this stuff seemed kernel related or a broke library somewhere, it
just wasn't worth the effort to figure it out. A clean wipe and reinstall of
the 14, copy a few scripts back and everything was fine. I probably should
of tried it with a clean install of 16 but crap like this leaves a bad taste
in your mouth.

-bruce
b...@ripco.com

[Crawford Sausage Company]

On Saturday, August 27, 2016 at 5:25:32 AM UTC-5, Bruce Esquibel wrote:

> I don't really follow the Ubuntu all that much, looks like the box here
> started with 12.04.4 and worked up to the 14.04.5 it was running before the
> problem with the 16.04.1 upgrade. I guess it took all those updates before
> without any problems, till now.

I never upgrade major versions of any OS on old hardware. That should
be in some kind of best practices. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
I'm running Fedora 14 on this PC and it should last another 5 or more
years. That systemd in later/current versions has given me many problems
that took time to solve. I haven't had any systemd problems with my
Ubuntu 12 build.

>
> I don't use it for anything critical, mostly as a backup server running both
> nfs and samba, but that stuff didn't work right under 16, mostly the nfs,
> seemed like even with nothing mounting the drives, lockd kept crashing
> causing the nfs server to go into a 90 second delay, totally usuable. The
> video was tearing too, mostly when the mouse was moved around. I just use
> the built-in ivybridge, no card but the point is, it didn't do it before.
>
> The killer for me was I have an IR dongle on it for a remote, after the
> upgrade just tapping one key on the remote was like smashing the key down,
> it took it like 5 or 6 repeats.
>
> Since all this stuff seemed kernel related or a broke library somewhere, it
> just wasn't worth the effort to figure it out. A clean wipe and reinstall of
> the 14, copy a few scripts back and everything was fine. I probably should
> of tried it with a clean install of 16 but crap like this leaves a bad taste
> in your mouth.

It's never worth the effort to figure it out. If you need anything from
a newer OS you can always run Virtual Box which is free and set up a
virgin install of that OS.

[Crawford Sausage Company]

On Saturday, August 27, 2016 at 5:25:32 AM UTC-5, Bruce Esquibel wrote:
>
> I don't really follow the Ubuntu all that much, looks like the box here
> started with 12.04.4 and worked up to the 14.04.5 it was running before the
> problem with the 16.04.1 upgrade. I guess it took all those updates before
> without any problems, till now.

16.04 is not a stable install. I had to do some googling to fix
problems and kind of regretted not using 14.10. I had
problems with UEFI secure boot when installing VirtualBox which
requires 3rd party low level drivers to run.

Got Steam running and downloaded a demo to test it out and it seems
to work. Now I'm going to spend $20 for a game I spent $500 and
a 1/2 day time on hardware to run.

BTW: Windows 10 is a bunch of garbage. Edge kept disappearing on me
and I could barely do anything on it. In the short time I had it running
it downloaded 250M from a microsoft domain and 100M from a lenovo domain.
Not sure what the hell lenovo was downloading. Nothing on screen
showed any indication that this much network activity was going on.

All your data are belong to us.