LWJGL on a linux live cd / pen drive

[chriddel]

Hi,

I am trying to find a linux distribution that fits on a pen drive (256 MB) and execute my lwjgl applications with it. this way I dont need to install linux to my hard disk and I can always take it with me and show my projects on (almost) any PC that has nvidia or ati.

After a little bit of research I found the slax distribution (http://slax.linux-live.org). It fits on a 256 MB pen drive and you can download the libraries you need as modules. Just copy the modules in the module folder of your downloaded slax-image and copy it to the pen drive (using myslax creator if you prefer doing it in windows).

I had some problems installing the ATI-drivers so I did a little more research and found the LG3d project https://lg3d-livecd.dev.java.net/.
Its a live cd based on slax but has already installed nvidia and ati driver. I was able to adapt the scripts module and configure it to run my lwjgl application instead of the lg3d project. Well, at least it worked when trying it with an ATI graphics card.

So after configuring the scripts I had a live-cd / pen drive that boots and starts directly my lwjgl project (within 1 minute). If anybody is interested and/or needs any more information please feel free to contact me.

I also have two questions...  
1. When running my lwjgl application on ATI graphics with  fullscreen I am not able to syncronize it with the vertical refresh which is rather ugly for my animations. So I tried to configure it in the xorg.conf changing capabilities to 0x00000800 but it has no effect. Does anybody know how active the "wait for vertical refresh" ?

2. on NVIDIA I cant get direct rendering. Its rather odd because when installing knoppix (with XF86) I have direct rendering but when using slax or lg3d (that use xorg) I dont. Maybe it has to do with xorg or xfree86 but I am not sure. The rest of the installation seems correct, when starting X the NVIDIA splash screen pops up and I can run nvidia-settings so it seems to be installed correctly.

Any help is apreciated!! Thanks in advance


Chris

[CaseyB]

:shock: that's so cool!  It's a very creative solution to be able to show people your work!  Perhaps it is something fitting for the wiki?

[chriddel]

Yes, maybe its a good idea for the wiki. I dont know... lets see if some more people are interested.

But first I would like to solve the 2 problems I still have with the nvidia and ati driver. Any help?  

Chris

[chriddel]

OK, I solved the problem with the nvidia driver. Now I have direct rendering support in my linux pen drive.

I have to admit that I achieved it through a trick: I was unable to convert the installed driver into a slax module. So the solution is to compile the nvidia every time the system boots up. Thats not really an issue because compiling the driver is very fast (<10 seconds). bad thing is just that the pen needs to have compiler tools and kernel sources for building the driver, so it takes up more memory. My modified slax is using now about 350MB. Maybe I can delete some other stuff (firefox for instance) to break it down to 256MB.

The ATI driver still doesnt want to sync with the vertical refresh. But for my purpose I am satisfied with the result now. The only issue is that you see vertical lines sometimes when frames are changing fast.

Send me a message if you have any questions.

Chris