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Showing posts from March, 2016

Lying to Get the Job Done: Adventures in setarch and export

It says something about the power and flexibility Linux when you are provided a means to lie in order to get an application to execute. And by this, I mean using the setarch command and a few other tricks to fool an application created for an older system so it will run on more modern system architectures. I'm occupying myself trying to install some old games and so far, it has been challenging. In the heady turn-of-the-Millennium days, Linux installers were all the rage, promoted by Loki , a company the developed the Linux installers and produced Linux versions of then-popular games, but wound up in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Even in the throes of  their demise they didn't forget the Linux gaming community and made their installers and the GPL source code available for the world to use. That would be great had not fewer and fewer servers carried the actual (now "old") files -- most of the links are dead -- and had not the development of Linux progressed so m