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Author Topic: What linux desktop environment for DF?  (Read 1255 times)

funkydwarf

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What linux desktop environment for DF?
« on: January 06, 2016, 10:17:18 pm »

 :D I know enough to know that could be a volatile question!

I don't mean in general, I mean specifically for my scenario...I am sure all off them could be the best for whatever.

Ok enough flame retardant...here's my deal,
I got a dellrackmount 1850 with two 3.6ish(forget,irrelevant )single core xeons with 16 gigs of ram and with the few ways to "remotely" run DF,now and on the horizon, I am determined to be able to fiddle with my fort while stuck at work with downtime.   I have had a highly modded Minecraft server on it and use it to serve a few games here and there, so I am fair to middling with the Linux terminal, but never used x.

 I am pretty sure DF needs x to run in Linux for opengl.

So will the ultra light environments not have stuff I need? Do I simply need opengl support? Will the fancy modern puffy ones take some cycles away from DF? or not since it dual cpu and DF uses mainly one.

My plan is to wrestle with dfeverywhere a bit.or vnc ...I know I can remotely run x over ssh on my phone, could I just play through that,with a Bluetooth keyboard lol. These are the questions I am setting  out to answer.

Tldr; which graphic environment has the least impact on df in Linux.  My distro is deb 8.
Thanks
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fluffymormegil

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Re: What linux desktop environment for DF?
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2016, 08:52:02 am »

If you want graphical display of any kind from a Linux program, you need X.

Running graphical games - even at the level of Dwarf Fortress - in X over any network connection with worse bandwidth or latency than a single-segment 100MBit LAN tends to be uncomfortable.

data/init/d_init.txt indicates that the Linux and OS/X builds of Dwarf Fortress support an ncurses-based terminal-oriented output mode, but I have no idea whether that has acceptable performance because I've never tried to use it, even locally.
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funkydwarf

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Re: What linux desktop environment for DF?
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2016, 09:13:08 am »

I went with lxde, cause its built to be lightweight. If I am missing any packages, apt-get is real easy so I went light.

So bandwidth issues are why people go with vnc, I wondered why they didn't just remote x over ssh.
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Thief^

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Re: What linux desktop environment for DF?
« Reply #3 on: January 07, 2016, 11:07:33 am »

I'd investigate using text mode over ssh, can't get much lower bandwidth than that!
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Dwarven blood types are not A, B, AB, O but Ale, Wine, Beer, Rum, Whisky and so forth.
It's not an embark so much as seven dwarves having a simultaneous strange mood and going off to build an artifact fortress that menaces with spikes of awesome and hanging rings of death.

Max™

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Re: What linux desktop environment for DF?
« Reply #4 on: January 09, 2016, 01:36:10 am »

If you want graphical display of any kind from a Linux program, you need X.

Running graphical games - even at the level of Dwarf Fortress - in X over any network connection with worse bandwidth or latency than a single-segment 100MBit LAN tends to be uncomfortable.

data/init/d_init.txt indicates that the Linux and OS/X builds of Dwarf Fortress support an ncurses-based terminal-oriented output mode, but I have no idea whether that has acceptable performance because I've never tried to use it, even locally.
Technically Wayland should be able to handle logging in and playing df, I haven't quite migrated over to it fully but I'm pretty close to being able to do so. Apparently http://hawaiios.org/ is fully Wayland and lightweight but the stability is a work in progress. You can get Kwin working with Wayland too, but if you just wanted lightweight besides checking out how ncurses rubs you, look into xfce/lxde/awesome/i3 maybe?
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funkydwarf

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Re: What linux desktop environment for DF?
« Reply #5 on: January 09, 2016, 09:58:32 pm »

Wow text mode via ssh is EASY

I thought I would have setup dfterm and use an older version, I did not realize that I could simply run it in text mode, till I did, and now I am very happy.

lxde is working fine btw as far as that goes...but the built in ncurses/textmode is cool for me...

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