Craig Mayhew’s Blog

I’ve setup a Freelancer server for anyone to use. Here’s how to use it:

For the moment we are running Freelancer without any mods, so feel free to skip steps 2 and 3.

1. Install freelancer
2. Install mod manager (1.31)
3. Install Discovery Mod (4.85) (http://www.moddb.com/mods/discovery-freelancer/downloads)
4. Run “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\EXE\fldirect.exe” and when asked enter the IP 93.97.160.59 and leave the port as 2302.
5. At the bottom it asks if you want to boot freelancer… you do!
6. If it asks, update freelancer to update 3.
7. Once freelancer is booted, go into multiplayer and then LAN.
8. Select our server “Liberty”.
9. Play!

If you get tired of the low resolution here is an article on how to increase freelancer’s resolution.

It appears one of the updates to the linpus linux operating system used on Asus Aspire One netbooks messes up the networking. In short the permissions get set wrongly on the network settings files. Symptons include, not being able to see the network icon on the menu, clicking “Network Settings” icon on the settings page and having nothing happen etc..

Before you run this fix, please understand that you will lose all your saved network connections and you will need to add in your network keys again.

To fix:

Press Alt+F2 and a run box should appear.
Then write “terminal” and click “Run”.
In the new terminal windows that has appeared type “sudo gconftool-2 –recursive-unset /system/networking” to clear all the root network connections.
Then type “gconftool-2 –recursive-unset /system/networking” to clear all the user network connections.
Reboot the netbook and the network icon appears again after about 20 seconds but you need to reconfigure the network connections again by adding passwords etc…

If this hasn’t fixed your problem then this forum has loads more info on the subject http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=2620&sid=7ee9a1caf5a8ccaf10dd281ac6caf861. I recommend reading the whole forum thread before trying the solutions, as you may want to try easier ones first!

If you need to concatenate several files on a windows system the command is as follows:

“copy /B filePart1 + filePart2 + filePart3 outFileName”

The /B indicates the files are binary files.

As soon as I switched to beThere and the appalling TG585v7 router they sent me I ran into VPN issues. Absolutly no outgoing VPN connections would work through this router. There is normally something called “VPN Pass Through” that needs enabling on routers to allow outgoing VPN connections. Unfortunately this router has no way of doing that through the web interface so I was forced to use the following “solution”.

This will require you to have a spare DSL router as we will be turning the Thomson router into just a modem by using “bridging”. You will also need your static IP, subnet mask, gateway IP and DNS server IP addresses which Be should have sent you in your welcome email.

1. Plug your spare router into one of the ethernet ports on the back of the bebox.
2. Login to your bebox
3. Click “Thomson Gateway”
4. Click “Configuration”
5. Click “Setup”
6. Click “Next”
7. Select “Bridge”, Click “Next”
8. When asked, add your IP and DNS info.
9. Reboot router, it may do this automatically
10. Your “spare” router is now your actual router, plug the rest of your computers/network into it instead of the bebox.
11. Your VPN should now work.

If anyone else has a better solution than this, please drop something in the comments box below.

If it helps, the manual can be downloaded from here:
http://www.technostation.com/documents/26049/thomson-tg585v7

The noatime option tells an ext filesystem to not update the “last accessed” timestamp every time a file is opened. This enables you to save disk i/o and have you disk caches perform much better.

You need to edit the fstab file to use the noatime option.

sudo vim /etc/fstab

Your fstab file will look different to this. At this point I should warn you that if you mistype this, delete something you shouldn’t or otherwise break this file, you Linux system MAY NOT BOOT. You can see below where I have added noatime which is visible in bold.

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro,noatime,auto 0 1

Reboot and if all is well then you should have a faster filesystem.