Gaming with Linux, speed up

Btw, here is my configuration (instruction) for games (hardware: my good old Intel Pentium III, 786 MByte RAM, OpenSUSE 10.2, Nvidia Geforce MX2 400 32MByte):
* first do a init 1
* /etc/rc.d/boot.udev start
udev is needed for sound card device creation ("/dev/dsp")
* /etc/init.d/alsasound start
this starts your sound card
* dhcpd eth0
of course start the ethernet network, you probably want to play online
* chmod 0777 /dev/dsp
so you can use your sound card
* X & xterm -display :0.0 &
this starts a X-server, most games like America's Army need a running X server
* with the started xterm, you can start your preferred game
of course you should now change from root user to your day-by-day user
* su yourusername

The noticed performance benefit is overwelming. A nearly empty process table, excellent. So for America's Army v2.5 in runlevel 5 with Gnome the game judders, within the minimalistic it runs fluid. Sadly I cannot provide any frames per second.
But with this, my good old P III is still competive.

Privacy!

Hi,
i can only encurage everybody to run tor+privoxy+squid for your (web) anonymity. As of the 1st January 2008 in Germany the "Vorratsdatenspeicherung"/1/ /2/ started and every IP based access is logged from your internet service provider and can be used against you. So be aware if you are surfing torrent sites :-) . One good solution is tor (the onion router), tor is a set of proxy hosts, where your request is routed between a huge set of tor-hosts. This makes your surfing slower of course. The benefit is that in the tor cloud there is no logging, so in past it is not (as current date) possible which way a request has gone. Important to remember is, that this kind of networking is still a Point to Point connection
.

OpenSUSE 10.3 provides the neccessary open source projects packets (source: http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/10.3/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/ for AMD64 X86_64[Hammer architecture]) privoxy-3.0.6-71.x86_64.rpm, squid-2.6.STABLE14-22.x86_64.rpm and torcs-1.3.0-81.x86_64.rpm but no fear you can install it out of the box via Yast2 :-).

In here the OpenSUSE 10.3 helps you:
- use Yast2 software installation and install privoxy, tor and squid
- do following configuration:
* enable in file "/var/lib/privoxy/etc/config" the line 1053 "forward-socks4a / localhost:9050", this is important for other services that they can use the SOCKS v4 protocol for transfver,
* copy the sample configuration file "/etc/tor/torrc.sample" to "/etc/tor/torrc" to default enable the tor
* create in your home directory the file "~/.kde/Autostart/tor", this one is for automatic starting the tor service with KDE start (if you use KDE), edit this file that it contains "#!/bin/bash
tor &", and make it executeable via chmod u+x tor
* now edit the file /etc/squid/squid.conf (ok it is a lot):
line 1034 "cache_dir ufs /var/cache/squid 100 16 256"
line 2544 "http_access allow localhost"
line 594 "cache_peer localhost parent 8118 7 no-query default"
line 2864 "visible_hostname localhost"
line 3777 "never_direct allow all"
- now start these services with rctor start, rcsquid start, rcvivoxy start (you need root priviledges)
- if you want these services be started with every boot time, do:
chkconfig privoxy on;chkconfig tor on; chkconfig squid on or configure it via Yast2 (of course as root)
- last but not least, configure your browser to use the proxy at 127.0.0.1:3128, for Firefox at configuration->network->connection
- do not forget, if you have other applications which uses internet to point them to use the local proxy to use tor, probably you have to set the SOCKS usage.

/1/ see the CCC (chaos computer club), http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cre051.html
/2/ http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung


More links:
- Tor FAQ
- Firefox Tor Button