Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am working on one of my smaller dream projects: a bridge simulator. Let’s get started!
Space Nerds In Space (SNIS) is a LAN game for Linux available as source code hosted on GitHub [1,2]. In it, you and several friends take on the roles of a starship bridge crew manning your stations and going on sci-fi adventures in deep space.
LAN: Local Area Network
I have access to an old church office computer with Windows XP installed. I’m gonna try running it on there. The main site [1] recommends against trying anything less powerful than a Raspberry Pi 4B, but I want an idea of how low the game can go. I’ve set my expectation to “This computer has absolutely no business running this game.”
In old or low-end machines, the weight of an operating system often becomes a significant contribution to resource consumption. At the same time, both low-overhead distros I’ve worked with before (Tiny/Micro Core and Puppy) have specialized package managers, and I’m not up to a self-guided crash course on repositories this week.
My first thought was that I’d prefer access to AUR for an “one-click install,” like how I cheesed it into working on Manjaro. I located an 8GB thumb drive, but the old church computer didn’t appear to be a fan of booting Manjaro. Instead, I researched low-overhead distros which could cleanly install packages from apt. I came across DebianDog Linux which sounded perfect until I learned development had stopped and shelved the idea as a backup plan. Puppy –as I learned– already has the means to use .deb files, so I stashed that as another backup plan in my recent experiences with Puppy, it has to be told to connect each boot.
AUR: Arch User Repository
Bodhi Linux
Further research found me Bodhi Linux, an Ubuntu derivative with downloads as light as 747MB and RAM requirements well under a gigabyte. Its native apt support means access to a large selection of standard packages, which will come in handy when compiling software.
I found my way onto the Bodhi Linux Discord server, where I reported the Arch logo of all things showing up in the installer. After I provided a screenshot from a staged second installation, we figured it was a bug with the installer Bodhi borrows from Ubuntu.
My installation was a success. I found the Moksha desktop maintained in-house [4] to be surprisingly polished, but a bit too flashy for my needs. Were I moving into it as a daily driver, I’d be disabling the animated taskbar icons. The terminal visual bell would also have to go, as I about hear sirens whenever I trip it – and I trip it frequently with my liberal use of tab to complete. I did –however– get around to removing Chromium.
Installing Space Nerds
This was neither my first attempt compiling SNIS nor my first time getting a product out the end, but it was my first time successfully doing so manually. I installed git and cloned the SNIS repository. I passed up my previous attempt by using util/install_dependencies as opposed to finding/installing dependencies manually. My first attempt at opening the compiled program I was… met with a solid green window and the computer crashing hard. I never figured out why, but on attempts where that didn’t happen, I had to wait through a 5 minute, 30-40 second loading screen where I realized later how lucky my second attempt was to have not ended in a massive flicker between black and the desktop – and this second attempt ended in a display of erroneously rendered polygons after a few minutes of play.
I inquired as to SNIS’ minimum system requirements on GitHub [2] and smcameron, the game’s creator, kindly helped me get it “working.” You can read the full discussion here: https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/discussions/333, but to summarize: I provided a number of logs documenting various error states and we figured my graphics card was running out of memory, as I didn’t get a light show when using lower resolution planetary textures.
Takeaway
This computer has no business running SNIS, yet it runs – if only barely. My fun this week was in coaxing this game to running on such an outdated system.
Final Question
What is your go-to low-overhead Linux distribution?
I look forward hearing your answers in the comments below or on my Socials.
Works Cited
[1] S. Cameron, “SPACE NERDS IN SPACE,”github.io, [Online]. Available:https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/ [Accessed May 24, 2023].
[2] S. Cameron, “space-nerds-in-space,”github.com, May 21, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space [Accessed May 24, 2023].
[3] Bodhi Linux, “WELCOME,” bodhilinux.com, [Online]. Available: https://www.bodhilinux.com [Accessed May 24, 2023].
[4] J. Hoogland, “Introducing Moksha Desktop,” github.io, March 3, 2014. [Online]. Available: https://mokshadesktop.github.io/Hello-World/ [Accessed May 24, 2023].