EE@HackerHotel.nl

Bit of a last minute decision, me and a small crew will be at the HackerHotel even in The Netherlands. Event is the upcoming weekend. We'll be there Saturday and Sunday with our setup. I will only be there Saturday.

Details, location, price, what else is there, can be seen at: https://hackerhotel.nl/

I'll try to see if we can take some new photos/movies this time. The ones I have are a bit too old to show these days :-)

Comments

  • I did record some video, but the screen became a blob of light when it was night and otherwise I was busy being helms/captain/engineer/weapons/GM/science etc.

    The first day was rife with technical problems, and I hate windows even more now...
    Both with a Linux server and a windows server both windows machines only see windows and Linux machines only see Linux machines.... And yes windows receives and responds to network discovery and receives responses from Linux machines. in the end we were able to network boot a 64bit machine that previously only worked with UEFI and did not work with out setup, and compile EE on Linux for a different laptop. we also had fun with HDMI to VGA converters and more.

    The 2nd day was smooth sailing all the way, we even revitalized one console by swapping out the VGA cable but this allowed us to have relay back, and we had a few requests to come to different events.

    We now have added a dedicated audio box and blackout plastic to our kit (our 2nd hand rugged touch screens like it dark).

    Someone from RevSpace had an idea to put us into their Final Friday evenings. I think that a setup for half a day is a bit of a waste of time but some more long term setup we can post on meetups as well might be a nice idea.
  • Video to come later if it's any good.
  • Maybe you could consider the use of a live-cd, in combination with a precompiled linux version, so you have a fallback for such situations.

    I had positive experience with MX Linux, it is based on debian stable and has a good remaster-tool included, so you could also integrate EE in the iso, if you don't want to use an extra device with the game on it. For gaming, you should of course run the OS from usb instead of cd, or load it into the ram if the computer have enough.
  • Many laptops have no CD player (mine included), that means a bunch of USB sticks and flashing new versions to that once in a while, that is slow enough to quickly become tedious IMHO (writing new Cd's is even worse though).
    While it might work as a backup it's a lot of setup work just for that.

    I'd prefer working network boot on all machines, maybe we have that now, to be tested? The network boot setup also gives us one point to update when we want to test some new features.

    The network setup also allows us to boot up consoles set to auto connect as helms/weapons/etc based on mac address of each computer it's not fully documented yet but already quite powerful.

    If we ever manage to switch to raspberryPi's we might have to change our setup a little bit though...
    and make sure it still works with X86 and X64_86 architecture. but the Pi V1B, V2 and V3 can do a net-boot, so that is nice to know! https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-3-booting-part-ii-ethernet-all-the-awesome/

    We just need a dedicated main screen PC and maybe even a dedicated GM PC as we've not had that all this time which is a shame. I have 3 old PC's at home now where I think I can fix 2 of them up for this purpose, and with the whole setup at home I can give that a try :smiley:
    Still the windows version should just be able to communicate with the Linux version, it looks like windows is doing evil things in it's firewall even when it's turned off in a private network etc...
  • While it might work as a backup it's a lot of setup work just for that.
    Well, it could be at least semi-automatized and at least for me, it is still is magnitudes faster than getting current netboot script to work with stretch :smiley:
    I tried it multiple times, swapped the guest system to oldstable and modified the script each time according to the latest error to see how far i get next, and while almost every time I got a bit closer, i gave up at some point.

    But yeah, if some work could be done on the current netboot script, so it supports more systems and runs on debian stretch, that would be cool.
  • As I understood, Bobsico did some work to get UEFI network booting to work. He just hit a snag with the 32/64 bit (as UEFI forces you into 64bit)
    Should have been simple with a 64bit linux kernel and 32bit userspace. But he tried the long route of a 64bit userspace, and hit a wall somewhere.

    The network booting is pretty great, only 1 machine to update with newer versions. Centralized configuration management. It's a bit more work to setup initially, but after that it saves a whole lot of time.
  • does it support autoconnect of main screen?
  • The network booting is pretty great, only 1 machine to update with newer versions. Centralized configuration management. It's a bit more work to setup initially, but after that it saves a whole lot of time.
    Biggest problem is that the current sript needs heavy modifications to work with stretch, like adjusting packet names. I even can't see how it could possibly work with jessie, as it relies on sudo at one point (the first thing I had to change on my test).

    Unfortunately It seems I don't know enough about netboot to modify it myself to get it to work, but maybe I try it at some point again.

  • Well, the script starts with the disclaimer that you need expert knowledge. I never claimed the script was complete. It just contains the steps I think I did to get it to work.
  • Well the disclaimer said you need to know some terms, which I did not consider expert knowledge. Basically I thought it's worth a try. (with careful preparations of course).
    But please don't get me wrong, I did not want to argue here at all, nor wanted to complain in any way. So no offense intended.

    I made that post basically to say that I would appreciate if that netboot part will get some attention and to encourage people that are already thinking about working on it (as it looked like Bobsico is planning to do some in that direction. If I misunderstood that, that is perfectly fine. And as said, maybe I try It again at some point.).
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