Lars’ Braindump

I admit it, the girlfriend I spent most time with during my teenager years was simply called Amiga. But after some exciting years of soundtracking, spreading (remember the good old Postlagerkarte?), copy parties, and all that stuff, I left her… But - she’s back! On my Linux screen, thanks to the UAE Amiga Emulator! Have a look at Play Digital #42 (!) to get some introduction.

Using Ubuntu you can simply install UAE via Synaptic. Note that you need a Kickstart ROM to do something useful with it. Even though the UAE homepage states that the RSI Megademo runs with the minimal free build-in Kickstart, this didn’t work for me. You can buy the Kickstart ROMs at Amiga Forever.

To get also sound running, you have the problem that UAE was compiled for OSS instead of ALSA. But that doesn’t hurt, install the package alsa-oss. Now start UAE via the command aoss uae.

There is also E-UAE, which adds some features to UAE. Furthermore, it comes compiled for ALSA. Just downloading and running the Linux binary should work out of the box. I just get sometimes some snatchy sound output, no clue, yet, why.

Having it running, a huge and free archive of games, demos, and applications is available. The UAE site already points to some. Also noteworthy are, e.g., the Amiga pages at Netzreport and Wikipedia. If you liked Amiga music, also have a look at Amiga Music Preservation (I found there a few mods of mine, and I was soooo glad since I lost all of them some time ago…). Finally, a great site for demos is DTV.

How could I ever leave her…

One nice feature of Gnome is, that remote desktop sharing via VNC is already embedded. Here is a simple nano-HOWTO on how to set up a remote desktop via an SSH tunnel:

1. Enable VNC on the remote machine which you would like to view and/or control. In Ubuntu you find the corresponding tool under System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop. You can also try the "vino-preferences" command.
2. Make sure that an sshd server is running on the remote machine, and that SSH is permitted by the firewall. Note, that if the machine is behind a router (e.g. a DSL router), it may be necessary to enable a port forwarding for the SSH port (commonly port 22) on the router.
3. Know the IP address of the remote machine. Note also here, that if the remote machine is behind a router, the real IP assigned to the router is important, not the local IP the router has assigned to the remote machine. You can check the real IP for instance by simply visiting sites like http://whatismyip.com/. Keep also in mind, that DSL providers may change the IP address frequently, even if you have a flatrate.
4. On the client machine from which you want to view and/or control the remote machine, do this:
   a) ssh -L 8025:localhost:5900 REMOTE_IP
   For REMOTE_IP enter the IP address of the remote machine.
   This command sets up the SSH tunnel from the local port 8025 to the remote VNC port 5900.
   b) vncviewer localhost::8025

That’s it!

Note that there is also a listening mode in the vncviewer. Using that, it is the remote machine which can connect with the client machine, not the other way round (as done above). Doing so can avoid some of the described hassle when dealing with a remote machine which is behind a firewall.

Huh, another blog no one asked for…  Anyhow, welcome to Lars’ Braindump! This is the first post, just playing around a bit.