The Symptoms

The game worked great while I was in the vault. My issues started when I got out of it. My first crash happened literally seconds after leaving the vault. I turned around to see how the vault entrance looked behind me an BOOM! The game crashed to desktop giving me the extremely descriptive error message:

Fallout 3 has stopped working

Really? It did? Hey, thanks for letting me know! If you didn’t I would be sitting here wandering why Capital Wasteland looks exactly like my desktop background.

Actually, I take that back. This was after all a generic Vista dialog that shows up whenever something really, really fucked up happens inside a program. It means that the game itself crashed hard – it was not an exception or a runtime error that someone forgot to catch. It was a “holly shit, this was not supposed to happen” type of thing.

Whatever – I thought – shit happens. After all, Oblivion used to crap out on me like this every once in a while but it was otherwise totally playable. So I launched the game again, and this time I managed to explore a little bit of the wasteland without a crash. Until, that is, I reached the abandoned school and the game crapped out on me again. This was probably after 20-30 minutes of me aimlessly exploring the wasteland. Same stupid message.

I restarted the game, leaded it, explored the school and went outside and the game crashed again. That was it. After that, every time I would load the game from that auto-save outside the school’s door it would dump me back to the desktop. Something was seriously wrong here.

My first instinct was to google the error message but as you could imagine it was pretty much like searching for a needle in a haystack… of other needles… at night… blindfolded… and wearing mittens. Everyone has seen this message and wrote a blog/and or forum post about it. Adding “fallout 3” to the search query didn’t really improve the results.

It did give me back a lot of forum discussion threads but I quickly realized it is one of those vague problems that everyone talks about on the internet but no one has a solution. It’s like that damn irql not less or equal shit which can be triggered by just about anything – hardware, software, the phase of the moon, or the color of your underwear.

It was clear to me that I was not going to find a solution this way. So I decided to dig deeper. So I opened event viewer and almost immediately found the culprit:

Fallout 3 Error Message - check out the DLL

If you can’t figure it out from the screen, let me spell it out for you. This error log, clearly implicates the file called nvd3dum.dll as the one causing or facilitating the crash. The naming convention seems familiar, isn’t it? Who would name their DLL’s with an nvd prefix? Why nVidia of course – the maker of my video card.

So I found the reason for the crash – my video card driver and Fallout 3 were not playing nice. Armed this information I did some more googling and came up with a solution.

The Solution

Using the name of the DLL in my research yielded much better results than before. For example, this forum threadwas extremely helpful in pinpointing the exact issue.

This is what helped me:

1. Start Fallout via the FalloutLauncher.exe
2. Go to Options
3. Click on Advanced
4. Change to the Water section
5. Set Water Multisampling to Low

Presto! No more crashes! Well, for the most part. The game still sometimes bugs out in V.A.T.S. but it is very rare now. I have no clue what Water Multisampling is but I’m assuming it makes the puddles and rivers in the game look more liquidy and watery. There is something in the way they go about it though, that causes Fallout 3 to crash to desktop.

Interestingly enough it only happens with the recent drivers. So if you have an older card and an older driver you will be fine. Downgrading the drivers also works. But I found it easier just to crank that feature down to low and enjoy the game without it. Frankly I can’t tell the difference so the multisampling effect was evidently lost on me anyway.

Now the million dollar question is, who to blame for this. Is this yet another Bethesda bug? Or is this yet another case of a badly written 64 bit driver? Initially I assumed it was a bug in the game code. Now I’m not sure.

Either way, if you are experiencing this crash, the way to get rid of it is to disable that multisampling feature. I hope this will get indexed by google and will show up in search results where people can find it and get on with their game.

Redundant copies of your data – this is the only way to go. Hard drives fail – it is not a question of “if”, it is a question of “when”. Remember that folks. Never trust your hard drives!

The external device looked intact. The owner swore up and down that it was never dropped, submerged under water, rinsed or put in the microwave. But you know how it is – I bet at least one of these things did happen to the device – presumably the first one. Still, that did not seem to be the cause of the failure.

When the drive was connected to the computer, it took a really long time to show up in My Computer. When it finally did, Vista did not display that neat little capacity bar. When you right clicked on it and tried to check properties, the OS reported that the drive has 0 bytes of free space, and 0 bytes of total capacity.

When you tried to access it, an error message would pop up saying:

H: is not accessible. Parameter is incorrect

Not encouraging. I wasn’t very positive about prospects of data recovery from this drive. I formed a plan in my head:

1. Run chkdsk on this machine if possible
2. Plug it into my laptop and see if Linux can see any data
3. If all else fails, give it a Viking funeral

Running the Check Disk app from the Properties menu did not work. I got another error message saying the disk is not accessible. Curiously enough running it from command line, did work. In Vista however, you need to remember to run it as an Admin.

1. Type in cmd in the Start Search box
2. Right click on cmd.exe that shows up and choose Run as Administrator
3. Run chkdsk command on the faulting drive

I used the following line:

chkdsk /F /R /X H:

Make sure you substitute H: which whatever letter your drive is using. That’s it. The scan itself took several hours – I don’t know how long exactly – I ran it overnight and went to sleep. When I woke up, the drive was working fine again. I unmounted it, mounted it again and it was running like new.

If you ever see this problem happening on your external drive, try chkdsk before you give it the Viking funeral (cause, you know – you always give hard drives Viking funerals). You have to burn it and drown it to make sure people don’t try to recover your pr0n from it.

It’s either that or disassemble it, take out the cool magnet and hang the platters on your lamp or something.

Yes, I know, I know. Yet another dry and boring HOWTO post. Tomorrow I’ll post something more entertaining… Maybe.

First let’s talk about platform choice. If you want to make videos of game play, then you are a gamer. If you are a gamer, then probably own a PC with some version of Windows installed somewhere in your house, and that is your main gaming machine. That is the box you will be using for making the videos. I mean yeah, some people do play on Macs but they have a very limited library of games to pick from. Last time I checked, they can choose between World of Warcraft and… World of Warcraft.

If you are playing on Linux under Wine/Cedega then more power to you but that’s way to much hassle than it’s worth. I use my Linux box for serious stuff and my Windows box for gaming. So we will be using windows based tools here.

First thing you need is a screen capture software. I did a little bit of research on this, and the interwebs seem to think that FRAPS is the best tool for the job. Unfortunately it is a proprietary, and costs money. Now it is uncharacteristic for me to recommend non-free software but I downloaded a demo and it worked perfectly for me. It is small, unobtrusive, has almost no noticeable impact on your FPS or performance and worked perfectly for recording clips of Morrowind game play. The demo will only let you record 30 seconds of footage, but the full version has no restrictions.

It’s only $37, you get a lifetime license, free updates and there is no DRM involved. In my book, this is a sound investment. Of course if you are a gamer who scoffs at paying for software, then you probably won’t have to pay for the full version of this tool either. FRAPS is very popular, and thus you will very likely find illicit copies of it through the same channels as you find cracked copies of your games.

The interface is very intuitive and easy to use:

Note that if you are planning to capture Morrowind you will need to rebind the video capture key. By default it is set to F9, which by coincidence is “Load Quicksave” in Morrowind. I bound it to F10 and all was well.

You’ll probably want to capture video at half-size because this will reduce the size of the files FRAPS will generate. I recorded 3 minutes of Morrowind footage at full size and ended up with a 1GB avi file. If you are making vids that will end up being posted on Youtube you will have to re-encode these things into something more sensible anyway so capturing at half size shouldn’t really make a difference.

How do you use it? Launch FRAPS, minimize it, start your game and then hit the video capture hot-key (by default F9) when you are ready to start. Hit it again to stop capture. That’s it!

Now as I mentioned, FRAPS output files are HUGE with capital H and capital UGE. What you want to do next, is to load that shit into Windows Movie Maker which should be installed on your machine. If it’s not, you can download it. There are better tools for video editing out there, but you just spent $37 for you capture software so let’s cut our losses. Windows Movie Maker will probably be enough for now.

Open Movie Maker and drag the file generated by FRAPS onto it. On the bottom you should see a timeline where you can select frames and do stuff to them. On the sidebar, you will have options to add titles, captions and credits to your video. It’s all very straightforward and you should be able to figure it out in minutes. If not, there are millions of tutorials on the web that will teach you to use this thing.

So add a title, credits and whatnot and then hit “Save to My Computer” on the sidebar. It will then ask you what format do you want to save it in:

If you are planning to upload this video to Youtube or similar service then probably the best choice here is the “Video for Broadband (512 Kbps)”. Anything lower will yield crappy video quality. Anything higher will produce bigger file size which will then be converted to FLV and made look no better than the 512Kbps copy.

This took my 1GB video, and re-encoded it with much lower resolution into a 10MB avi file which was perfect for Youtube.

The end result can be seen here:

I’m pretty happy the way it turned out. I did get a weird stuttering glitch in Suran (you will know what I mean if you watch the video) but for the life of me I could not avoid it. You see that I hesitate for a second before I walk below the two banners just before that glitch hits. I did this run several times and it always glitched at that exact spot or somewhere near it. I could have edited it out, but that made for an ugly cut in the middle of the scene, so I just left it in.

Here is another one:

This time around I took advantage from Movie Makers’ ability to overlay titles and captions over the image frames. It probably took me 3 minutes to do this whole thing – its’ that easy.

Also, if you think I’m moving way to fast, you are right. But I’m not cheating or artificially speeding up the video. I’m wearing Boots of Blinding Speed (fortify speed 200, blind 100%) and Cuirass of the Savior’s Hide (resist magika 60%) and another enchanted trinket that increases my magika resistance so I can use the boots virtually without penalty.

Anyway, that’s how you get it done. Now that I have FRAPS you may expect to see me make more videos to either supplement my game reviews or just for fun.

Have you ever needed a file of specific size to test something but you didn’t care what that file was? You know, just a space holder or a space filler kind of a thing? This is what you need to do to create one on Windows XP:

fsutil file createnew file.ext 10000

Naturally file.ext is the desired name of the file you want to create, and the numeric argument is the desired size in bytes. Note that fsutil creates a sparse file which means that this operation will be blindingly fast. For example it took about 3 seconds to create a 10GB file on my elderly windows machine.

Useful trick. I sometimes use it to see how a given app will act when it encounters a file of certain size. To accomplish the same thing in linux you apparently need to do something like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=my-file bs=1 count=0 seek=10G

I messed around with it, and the bs and count are important so don’t just skip them. The seek attribute specifies the desired size of your file, and here you can use human readable units (like 10Gb in the example).

So if you ever need a file of a specific size to test something, here is how you make one. How is that for a short post? What do you mean 350 words is not short? Ah, go to hell then. I tried. Next post will be verbose again. ;)

Why am I posting it now? Because I needed to reinstall windows once again on my desktop, and now I need to get my blackboard scrips to work again.

This is really a multi step process. I’ll assume you have perl installed already. If not, you can get Activestate Perl which works pretty well on windows. Just grab the MSI package, install it and all the useful tools including perl, cpan and ppm will land in your path. From there follow these 3 easy steps:

Step 1: Get nmake

You will need nmake – the windows version of the make utility to compile most of the CPAN packages. How do you get nmake? There are several ways to do it, but probably easiest one is to grab the Microsoft version of the tool from their knowledge base. Once you download it, dump it somewhere in your path. It doesn’t really matter where it is, but I stuck it in the bin directory of my Perl install.

Step 2: Get YAML from CPAN

You will need YAML to build WWW::Mechanize. What is YAML? Sort answer is: do you care? Long answer: look it up. All you need to know is that you need it. So run cpan from your console and type in:

install YAML

This should cause some streaming text on the screen as the package is fetched and compiled. If it fails, make sure nmake is in your path, and that it is named nmake.exe and not something else.

Step 3: Install WWW::Mechanize

Final step is the easy one – just fetch and install the WWW::Mechanize package using the traditional method:

install WWW::Mechanize

Make sure you do step 1 and 2 before you try this. If you have tried this before you installed YAML the build will fail for some reason. To avoid that, just quit cpan, and run it again. This will clear the local cache and will re-fetch the package for a clean build.

So, there you have it. I know it’s a bit of a dry and uninteresting post for Monday morning. But this is more of a reminder to myself than anything else. I never remember where to grab nmake or what is that other package without which nothing ever builds on windows. Hopefully some of you will find it helpful. :)

[tags]perl, activestate perl, activestate, yaml, nmake, www::mechanize, windows[/tags]

I’m pleased to report that my Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG card worked out of the box without any tweaking. It is listed in the Restricted Drivers section but there was nothing I had to do to enable it. It just popped into action and that was that. I’m very happy about this. As far as I could tell everything else except for the sound card worked. Yes Aplhast, my sound card doesn’t work! I’m blaming you! You jinksed it buddy! ;P

Lshw tells me that I have an Intel 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller. In Ubuntu circles ICH8 is an acronym for “fucking pain in the ass”. It just doesn’t work without major tweaking. Patching and recompiling ALSA might be required. And even then it is not guaranteed that it will work at all.

But there is no way in hell I’m willing to accept “doesn’t work” without at least trying. After some googling I found two possible solutions. First one was very simple – simply add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=1 model=3stack

I did just that, rebooted and found out that this doesn’t work. Of course! Why would it. Things can’t be this easy, can they? I left the line in it’s place just in case and moved to the next suggestion which was equally easy. Just install one small package and reboot.

sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-generic

I rebooted and heard a faint chime of KDE startup sound. It was a little bit quiet so I mashed the Volume Up button above the keyboard. Gutsy actually knew about this button, and displayed a nice overlay volume bar on my screen. I maxed out the sound, fired up Amarok and played the welcome message. It wasn’t as loud as the sounds in Windows, but for my purposes it was perfectly adequate. So yes, sound is working. All is well!

Just about everything else worked including Bluetooth. Ot at least I think it works because the LDE lights up, and KDE has a nice icon in the taskbar which tells me the MAC adress of my card. Unfortunately I do not have any bluetooth toys that I could test it with. Any suggestions for a bluetooth appliance for this laptop?

The Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M card was red in the restricted driver panel signifying that the proprietary drivers were not installed but are available. Since everything looked fine I decided to leave it be for now. I could always go back and install the driver later. So I messed around with it some more, and then decided to plop it in the place of my regular laptop.

As soon as I connected the laptop to my external monitor and hit Fn+F8 (which is the CRT/LCD switch) everything went to hell. I got incredibly colorful, psychedelic, blinking patterns on both screens and that was it. Killing the X server did nothing – this weird display corruption had to be happening at a lower level. Only thing I could do was to pull the monitor plug and REISUB.

So I figured this was the time to install the nvidia driver. So I went to K-menu, System Settings, Advanced, Restricted Drivers and installed it without ever dropping down to CLI. Neat! Naturally I needed to reboot for the new driver to go into action. Unfortunately I immediately realized that Nvidia decided to take away my Fn+F8 function. I was able to flip back and forward between LCD and CRT during the framebuffer loading screen, but as soon as X started the picture would jump back to the laptop LCD and stay there.

It took me few minutes to figure out the magical spell I needed here:

nvidia-settings

It pops up a very nice config dialog you can use to set up he multi-display stuff:

Once I did that, everything started working just fine. Now I’m running on a beautiful 1280×1024 resolution and enjoying how incredibly fast this hardware seems compared to my old 700 Mhz junker. It is a great machine!

If you are planning to buy a machine for Linux though I would probably recommend the Dell Ubuntu line – this way you avoid the fun I had here with the sound card. And that machine comes with an integrated webcam (kinda like Apple does) which is kinda awesome. I got this one because it was supposed to be a dual boot machine and I kinda needed it to have an XP license attached to it. I’d recommend it but only if you are not afraid of getting your hands dirty messing around with the sound card. You know what… I take that back – it’s just one package and one line in alsa-base file (I don’t know which one did it, and I don’t care at thisp point) – I did the research for you so it should be easy. :mrgreen:

[tags]ubuntu, dell, dell latitude, dell latitude d830, d830, kubuntu, gutsy, ubuntu gutsy, kubuntu 7.10[/tags]

Of course I could download the precompiled Emacs + AUCTex bundle from the AUCTex website but I wasn’t really thrilled about that. You see, I was already had a nice copy of Emacs on my system – on windows I’m using EmacsW32. What is the difference you ask?

Well, EmacsW32 comes with a nice MSI installer that adds all sorts of registry hooks that make it act as a first class Windows application. It also makes the GUI look more polished and native. I prefer it to other ways of getting Emacs on windows because I get an up to date binaries that work right out of the box.

AUCTex unfortunately does not ship binaries you could just “plug” into place so I had to download the sources and compile them. Compiling? From Source? On windows? Yup, that’s what I said. I can sees shock and disgust sweeping all over your faces. Before you run away let me assure you it’s easy as pie. Well, at least it was for me.

You will need a working copy of gcc and make. How do you get them on Windows? You could always get the MSYS from MinGW. Since I didn’t have MSYS but had a working Cygwin installation I used that. I simply pulled up my cygwin bash sell and did:

$ ./configure	--prefix='c:/Program Files/Emacs/emacs/' 
		--with-texmf-dir='c:/Program Files/MiKTeX 2.5' 
		--with-lispdir='c:/Program Files/Emacs/site-lisp'
$ make
$ make install

You may want to tweak the parameters for the configure script with appropriate paths. As you can see I’m using MiKTeX 2.5 on my machine. If you are using something else, you should probably change that line. Also, if you are not using EmacsW32 then you might need to change the –prefix and –with-lispdir lines to point them to your emacs installation directory. If you get an error, tweak the parameter or download dependencies and try again.

I really had no dependency problems or anything but I don’t remember what exactly did I have in my Cygwin install. It’s possible that you may need to download a package or two like maybe the cygwin Emacs version. Before you ask – I don’t use the cygwin version of Emacs because I don’t feel like running a full instance of X server for the GUI. Besides, EmacsW32 is much more responsive being that it is a native app and all.

Note that I’m using the Windows path notation with inverted searator specifying the drive as c:/ instead of the cygwin notation /cygdrive/c/. Your cygwin installation should be able to map C:/ to /cygdrive/c/. If not you may need to adjust this. If you installed your cygwin in C:\ instead of C:\cygwin then you can just use / to indicate the root drive. This is actually the “smart” way to use cygwin – Steve Yagge says so, and when Steve says something you better listen and take fucking notes.

The make install command should seamlessly slip AUCTex files into your EmacsW32 directory. Unfortunately, you will need to configure your emacs manually to use them. How to do this?

Open up your C:\Program Files\Emacs\site-lisp directory and edit site-start.el file. Add the following lines somewhere:

(load "auctex.el" nil t t)
(load "preview-latex.el" nil t t)
(require 'tex-mik)
(eval-after-load 'info
       '(add-to-list 'Info-directory-list "c:/Program Files/Emacs/share/info"))
(setq TeX-auto-save t)
(setq TeX-parse-self t)

I actually got this snippet from Oliver Sturm who figured this configuration before me.

When I tried to use the inline preview feature of AUCTex it did not work for me. It game me some odd message saying that “gs” is not a recognized command or something like that. It turns out that it was right. On windws the default ghostscript binary is not called gs but gswin32c.exe. You will need to change this – simply open some LaTex file, pull down the Preview menu, go to Customize and find the GS Command option. Set it to: C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.54\bin\gswin32c.exe. Make sure you are not using the C:\Program Files\Ghostgum\gsview\gsview32.exe binary. That is the default windows DVI viewer which ships with Ghostscript and many people confuse the two.

All that was left was to add a command to convert the DVI files into PDF. AUCTex already ships with a DVI to PS script under Command called FILE (yeah, go figure why they called it that). I simply added the following to my .emacs:

(eval-after-load "tex"
  '(add-to-list 'TeX-command-list
                '("DVI to PDF" "dvipdfm %d" TeX-run-command t t) t))

This will add a DVI to PDF option in the Command menu which will let you generate pdf files.

So, was this really hard? I thought it was a piece of cake, compared to for example setting up that nethack server.

Happy Emacsing everyone!

[tags]emacs, emacsw32, auctex, windows[/tags]

For some inexplicable reason most MySpace users absolutely love, ugly, cluttered, unreadable profiles. You can whine and complain but they are not going to listen. Ugly ass myspace pages that hurt your eyes, and provoke cause nausea and are here to stay. But there is a solution. There is a way to browse myspace without subjecting yourself to the shitty layouts and musing. There are two things you need to accomplish this:

1. Firefox
2. Greasemonkey

One thing that I hate more than the shitty page layouts is shitty music blaring at me from a page with a shitty layout. Auto-play is fucking inconsiderate, annoying and evil. And of course it is the default for MySpace media player. This is why I use the Automatic MySpace Media Remover script. It disables the flash media player by default, and replaces it with a placeholder. You can bring it back by clicking on it.

Then there is the matter of ugly ass layouts. We can make them go away with greasemonkey as well. Personally, I use the Custom Layout Dis/Enable which actually gives you a button in the upper right corner that you can hit to strip the site out of layout. If you don’t like it, there are several other similar scripts like this one, or even this one.

Now, if I could only have a Stupidity Filter script or plugin, MySpace would actually be a nice website to visit. ;)

[tags]myspace, greasemonkey, custom layout, remove custom myspace layout, remove myspace media[/tags]

As you may or may not know, I set up my own little public nethack server that can be found by telneting to luke.kicks-ass.org. And since for some reason he output is a bit garbled in the default windows client, I sought out replacement. PuTTY is probably on of the better free, open telnet clients for windows out there. There is simply not much competition on that market anyway, because the basic windows client is not that bad. Still, I find PuTTY superior.

The problem is, by default handling telnet links such as telnet://luke.kicks-ass.og is by default hard wired to the windows client. Therefore if I wanted to use PuTTY I had to manually open it, and type in the server address instead of just clicking on the link. I decided to change this behavior, and set PuTTY to be my default telnet handler from now on.

How to do it? You can use the little registry hack below:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\telnet\shell\open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\PuTTY\\putty.exe\" %1

Copy the code snippet, paste it into your favorite text editor and save it as a .reg file. Then double click it to run it. From now on, telnet links should open in putty, as long as you have it installed in C:\Program Files\PuTTY. If you want to change it back to the windows client, here is a snippet to reverse it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\telnet\shell\open\command]
@="rundll32.exe url.dll,TelnetProtocolHandler %l

Enjoy!

Btw, can you think about other legitimate uses of telnet, that would not be appropriate for ssh or other tools? Let me know in the comments.

[tags]telnet, putty, mud, nethack, nethack server, ssh, telnet handler[/tags]

The mouse is nice, but not all that special. It seems a bit more accurate, and it is comfortable but I’m not entirely sure if I would buy one. It’s a notebook mouse so it’s slightly smaller than my old mouse, but I guess thats not a bad thing, considering that my new humongous keyboard takes like half my desk. The middle mouse button is a bit stiff and takes considerably more force to push down than on most regular mice. The zoom bar is located in a really weird, out of the way place that kinda makes it a bit useless. Still, it’s a very nice mouse so I’m not going to complain. I just need to remember to switch it off when I leave for home to conserve the battery.

Now the task at hand was to get the damn thing working under Dapper. By default my Kubuntu completely ignored the zoom bar, site tilts of the scroll-wheel and the little button above it. The side buttons were detected as right and middle mouse buttons. So the mouse was functional, but not fully.

I found this lovely thread on Ubuntu forums with a solution. There is an app out there called btnx designed with the Logitech Revolution and MX high end mice in mind. It let’s you configure all the nifty additional buttons. The newest version has a very nice GTK GUI that let’s you detect and configure all the buttons using an easy to use wizard. Unfortunately I couldn’t use that version because it requires GTK 2.10.x and I’m on Dapper. The most recent version in the dapper repos is 2.8.x. I didn’t feel like compiling GTK from source just to get a damn configuration wizard working.

Since the VX Revolution is one of the mice fully supported by btnx out of the box, I opted to install the old 0.2.14 version with a text based config and no GUI. The process was very simple:

wget http://www.ollisalonen.com/btnx-0.2.14.tar.gz
tar -xzvf btnx-0.2.14.tar.gz
cr btnx-0.2.14
make
make install

At this point I got a weird error message. Here is the output of the last command:

root@inuyasha:~/btnx-0.3.2/btnx-0.2.14 # make install
chmod a+rx ./scripts/install.sh
./scripts/install.sh
Installing...........
btnx successfully installed. Starting btnx.
/etc/init.d/btnx: line 34: /lib/init/vars.sh: No such file or directory
make: *** [install] Error 1

People in the Ubuntu forums say this is a non-issue. So I went into /etc/init.d/btnx and commented the line that refers to vars.sh (line 34 I think). Then I did:

/etc/init.d/btnx stop
/etc/init.d/btnx start

This restarted the daemon and plopped btnx_config file in my /etc/btnx. This is where all the keys are configured. The side buttons are mapped to key combo that changes tabs in most applications. It works in Firefox as well as Komodo Edit so I’m relatively happy with it. The little button above the scroll wheel refreshes the page in FF which is also a nice touch. I think I’ll keep that. The zoom bar was configured to do Ctrl+Alt+Left and Ctrl+Alt+Right which switches virtual desktops in Gnome. I reconfigured it to Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab for equivalent action in KDE but the key repeats very fast making it a bit difficult to control. To switch desktops one at a time you kinda have to quickly tug at the button instead of holding it. I may change this to something else.

Finally tilting scroll wheel invokes back and forward browser commands by default. I don’t particularly like this option because it seems like it can cause trouble. I can see myself tilting by accident and backing out of a half, written blog post. So I will probably change that also. Then again this haven’t happened yet so go figure.

I might actually swap the functionality between the side buttons and scroll wheel tilting. Use scroll wheel to control tabs, and side buttons to go back and forward. This way there is less risk of accidentally leaving the page while scrolling inside a text box.

My only issue is that one of the side buttons is still sometimes detected as RMB. It’s like a little lottery – I never know what it will do. There might be a way to override it. If I find it, I’ll post it here.

[tags]vx revolution, logitech vx revolution, mouse, mice, logitech, btnx, dapper[/tags]