Episode Details

This week on BSDNow, we have “Weird Unix Things”, “Is it getting Steamy in here?” and an Interview about BSD Sockets API. (Those

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

playonbsd with TrueOS: It’s Getting Steamy in Here and I’ve Had Too Much Wine

We’ve done a couple of tutorials in the past on using Steam and Wine with PC-BSD, but now with the addition of playonbsd to the AppCafe library, you have more options than ever before to game on your TrueOS system. We’re going to have a look today at playonbsd, how it works with TrueOS, and what you can expect if you want to give it a try on your own system. Let’s dive right in!

Once playonbsd is installed, go back to your blank desktop, right-click on the wallpaper, and select terminal. Playonbsd does almost all the configuring for you, but there are still a couple of simple options you’ll want to configure to give yourself the best experience. In your open terminal, type: playonbsd. You can also find playonbsd by doing a fast search using Lumina’s built-in search function in the start menu after it’s been installed. Once opened, a graphical interface greets us with easy to navigate menus and even does most of the work for you.

• A nice graphical UI that hides the complexity of setting up WINE and Steam, and lets you pick select the game you want, and get it setup
• Start gaming quicker, without the headache

If you’re a PC gamer, you should definitely give playonbsd a try! You may be surprised at how well it works. If you want to know ahead of time if your games are well supported or not, head on over to WineHQ and do a search. Many people have tested and provided feedback and even solutions for potential problems with a large variety of video games. This is a great resource if you run into a glitch or other problem.

Weird Unix thing: 'cd //'

• So why can you do ‘cd //tmp’, and it isn’t the same as ‘cd /tmp’?
• The spec says:

An implementation may further simplify curpath by removing any trailing characters that are not also leading characters, replacing multiple non-leading consecutive characters with a single , and replacing three or more leading characters with a single . If, as a result of this canonicalization, the curpath variable is null, no further steps shall be taken.

• “So! We can replace “three or more leading / characters with a single slash”. That does not say anything about what to do when there are 2 / characters though, which presumably is why cd //tmp leaves you at //tmp.”

A pathname that begins with two successive slashes may be interpreted in an implementation-defined manner

• So what is it for? Well, the blog did a bit of digging and came up with this stackoverflow answer
• In cygwin and some other systems // is treated as a unix-ified version of \, to access UNC windows file sharing paths like \server\share
• Perforce, the vcs, uses // to denote a pat