MadSoft


16 Dec

Configuring the PlayStation 3 Controller on Linux


A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a slew of information related to using the PS3 controller as a joystick on Linux. I immediately took my PS3 controller and started experimenting with the documentation out there for doing this sort of thing. Unfortunately however, not everything mentioned in this documentation worked correctly. For instance, I was not able to use a joystick on the controller to control the mouse without a separate piece of middleware. This was because the application I used (the only decent one I was able to find) to signal key presses for every button press on the controller, is unmaintained and had a blocker bug with mouse emulation.

You will need two components in order to make this work: the first being QJoyPad to bind controller buttons to keys, and JoyMouse to use one of the joysticks on the controller to control the mouse. Also remember that I am only using the USB cable to use the controller rather than using it via Bluetooth. I will post directions for using Bluetooth and the accelerometers in the controller at a later date, if I am able to get a hold of a Bluetooth adapter. Nevertheless, the tools are the same.

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28 Sep

SETI@Home Optimizers on Linux


As I am a big proponent of the SETI@Home project as well as a Linux user, discovering that optimized SETI applications existed and how to use them was important. It took quite some time to figure this all out by myself since there are hardly any (from what I could find) resources on SETI@Home optimized clients on Linux. Eventually I ran into this site which offers SSE3 and SSSE3 optimized clients for Linux in addition to SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 clients for FreeBSD.

For those of you who don’t know what SETI@Home optimizers are, they are essentially specialized versions of the standard version of the SETI@Home client which take advantage of extended floating-point instruction sets available to certain x86 (Intel, AMD, or the like) processors. Using these instruction sets allows optimized clients to complete work many times faster than it could before with the standard client. For example, prior to using an SSSE3 optimized client on my Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 my recent average credit (RAC) on SETI was in the 500 range including one other active machine and now my RAC has spiked over 2,500 not including the other active machine.

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