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I have used Blender for some years now and I recently began to think about buying a 3dconnexion Space Navigator.

I read that Blender and the Space Navigator worked under Linux and managed to borrow a Space Navigator from work over this long weekend.

I downloaded the 32bit drivers (3DxWare for Linux (i386)) from http://www.3dconnexion.com/service/drivers.html as well as the “Blender plug-in for Linux i386 (beta)“

Installing the Space Navigator driver

I extracted the 3dxware-linux-v1-4-3.i386.tar.gz file to /tmp/3d/

tar -xvzf 3dxware-linux-v1-4-3.i386.tar.gz -C /tmp/3d/
cd /tmp/3d/
sudo ./install-3dxunix.sh

I then recieved an error saying libXm.so.3 was missing.

/etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv: error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I pressed CTRL-C to abort the script.

After a little checking I found that I have libXm.so.4 but not 3, so I created a symbolic link from libXm 4 to 3.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libXm.so /usr/lib/libXm.so.3

I then re-ran the install script again.

This time it all worked.  I did not configure it to auto start though.

Now I simply started the driver via

sudo /etc/3DxWare/daemon/3dxsrv -d usb

and was greeted by the blue lights on the Space Navigator and the messages

3DxWareUNIX = V1.4.3
Device      = SpaceNavigator
Firmware    = V3.17

there was also a minimised window called 3DxWare 1.4.3, which appears the be the settings dialog (like the Windows Control Panel control)

I then ran the xcube example from /tmp/3d/ and the space navigator worked great.  I changed a few settings as I prefer pressing and pulling to be zoom in and out.

Installing the Blender plugin

I was a little surprised by this, as the forums said I should have a ~/.blender/ directory and I didnt.

I decided that creating the directory couldn’t cause any problems so I created a directory

mkdir -p ~/.blender/plugins/

and copied the 3DxNdofBlender.plug file into it.  The new NDOF icons appeared at the bottom of the viewport.  See http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/ndof-support/

I’ve started to use more and more ISO images as disk space is becoming cheaper and its a lot easier to manage ISO files compared to physical CDs/DVDs.  Mainly because I keep forgetting where I put the physical media.

Linux

appleseed movie

Create an ISO file using dd

 download the x files i want to believe dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image.iso

Mount the ISO using local loop back download smokey and the bandit part 3 movie (you may need to be root)

mkdir /mnt/disk
mount -o loop image.iso /mnt/disk

Windows

• rocky ii movie download

For Windows you should get a copy of the free program MagicDisk

numb download

I use it all the time at work and I’ve never had any problems with it.   Its small simply and works well.

barbie as the island princess download Well I finally finished my first draft on my guide on how to generate panoramic images with Hugin, Enblend, Autopano-sift and GIMP.

The guide is available here

This is one of my best images I created. Its a panoramic image of Avoriaz taken in 2007.

This is another I took in Avoriaz a few years before.

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Well after reading an article on OpenRC at Roys webs, I decided to take a look at my current system. I started by emerging bootchart.

Firstly I needed to unmask bootchart

echo "app-benchmarks/bootchart" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

I then enabled the java use flag so I get the java code to generate png files

echo "app-benchmarks/bootchart java" >> /etc/portage/package.use

then I emerged it

emerge -av bootchart

I had to add init=/sbin/bootchartd to the end of the /etc/grub/grub.conf kernel line like this

kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.23-tuxonice-r11 root=/dev/sda3 init=/sbin/bootchartd

Then I editted the /etc/conf.d/rc and changed

RC_USE_BOOTCHART="no"

to

RC_USE_BOOTCHART="yes"

I enabled the auto chart creation by editing /etc/bootchartd.conf and changing

AUTO_RENDER="no"

to

AUTO_RENDER="yes"

This is what I got the first time.

Virtually all of my boot time is spent checking the internal tree of the 2 300Gb disks. One disk took around 17 seconds to check and the second one too around 15 seconds (its slightly smaller). Both are reiserfs. Both disks were unmounted cleanly and the fsck knew they were clean file systems, but the tree check still takes some time.

Do I really want it to not check the file system when it boot? That is the question…..

Heres the bootchart with the check disk disabled

I just changes the /etc/fstab entry from

/dev/sda3		/		reiserfs	noatime		0 1

to

/dev/sda3		/		reiserfs	noatime		0 0

I didnt enable the Process Accounting part so some short-lived process may not appear in the bootchart images. Ill try this next and see if I anything interesting.