Wednesday, January 28, 2015

steam-wrapper and Linux performance

Currently Steam for Linux is only officially supported on Ubuntu. This means that Valve is only obligated to really provide support for Ubuntu systems running some flavor of version 12.04. Of course, this has not stopped almost every distribution from adopting Steam into their repositories and adapting the install and other scripts to work on other distributions. The performance on these distributions however, can sometimes be questionable.

Steam provides a runtime which is used for compatability accross a wide range of distributions, using libraries that are standardized to stay in line with Ubuntu 12.04. This allows systems running older libraries like old Stable distributions, and bleeding edge distributions with newer library versions to all run Steam with a similar experience: standardized library versions.

On many systems however (Debian, ArchLinux) the Steam runtime links to a version of gcc that can be outdated or provides less than optimal performance. To remedy this, a couple of files can be removed from the Steam runtime to cause the system to fall back on the native built ins, which are reported to provide increased performance. Some users even choose to go so far as to disable to runtime completely using STEAM_RUNTIME=0, making Steam run entirely on native libraries.

steam-wrapper is a generic bash script which attempts to remove the stale or outdated gcc libraries and then passes relevant arguments to run Steam. It provides an easy way to set the runtime and other variables for Steam. And although it is purely made for convenience, because it may help those who were unaware of library issues or other conflicts, I have decided to post it on GitHub under the name pyamsoft/steam-wrapper. It may help you, it may not.

If for any reason you are experiencing problems with Steam and wish to restore the runtime to its default state and not have to reinstall all of steam and your games, you can launch Steam from the command line like this:

steam --reset

which will reset the runtime back to the default.

Woohoo!

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Thursday, January 22, 2015

Small Things

My attention span, for one.

But also, small updates pushed out today. Home Button and Power Manager. Tasty little animations added to both, lots of bugfixes in Power Manager, and a couple of refreshed visuals to top it all off. This should hopefully fix the issue with radios randomly turning off, as I've had mine running fine for a couple of weeks now. But like always, fingers crossed. It seems like every time a new feature is added onto Android, or a new device announced, new bugs appear in things that I always assumed would work. Oh well.

Hardcore SoftGlow work, as I've wanted to release for a while now but never could quite get it finished.

Also one big thing. pstate-frequency has been rewritten to use C++ cause I find it a bit easier to expand upon and handle new interfaces with.

And after that, perhaps a game.

Who knows.

Well.

I do, but. Still.

========================
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Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Cruft Cleanup

Got a lot of work done today on various things.

Power Manager

Added animations to transitions between fragments. Ooh. Ahh.
Visual correctness when transtioning between application states.
Thread safe code for manager interfaces.
Better handling of precision screen events down to millisecond accuracy.
Performance increases.
Memory usage improvement.
The color blue.

SoftGlow

Added extended screen options, ridiculous range for screen dim. To the point where things are starting to get too dark to be visible.
Floating Action Button because woohoo material design

Home Button

Added better handling of startup options. I know.
Couple other fixes.

pstate-frequency

Better handling of automatic power profiles. Smaller memory, lower number of allocations (significantly lower), reduced file accesses, reduced code depending on compile time options.

Woohoo


========================
Follow pyamsoft around the Web for updates and announcements about the newest applications!
Like what I do?

Send me an email at: pyam.soft@gmail.com
Or find me online at: http://pyamsoft-official.blogspot.com/

Check out my Android Applications
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=========================