Showing post in category: Ubuntu
A few days ago i tried to make Sid Meiers Pirates run again with WINE.
As usual when trying to install the game I got the following:
Well that didn’t stop me this time. I started to copy Pirates from my Windows XP partition to my fake WINE Windows drive (notice the cool new GNOME 2.12 copy dialog.
Now I tried to start Pirates again but this time I got a message about missing 2 dll files:
You can find them by searching on Google
I copied the files to my fake Windows’ system folder ie. /home/je/c/windows/system.
Finally I applied a No-CD-patch and was now able to start the game, where I was greeted by a… black screen for a long time.
I’m serious…. a VERY long time.
I’m telling you – it’s still there 
Then finally I was presented with the title menu. YEAH!
I think I fiddled a little with some settings before I dared try starting the game.
Now a long waiting time again. But you don’t wanna go fetch coffe because you want to see this
Woah, I see an ingame movie… cool. I was so quickly taking the screenshot, that the menu didn’t get time to disappear. They call my Lucky Luke
I’m actaully able to choose with whom I want to got to the new world. The grey man was a little to creepy so England it was.
Long wait time…. again, and no movie of me fighting the captain – perhaps I accidentally hit a key, dunno.
Well suddenly I saw a little ship sailing and joy filled my body – YES!… and before I knew it the game had crashed. 
Perhaps tweaking with the video setting and stuff might make the game somewhat playable 
The few screenshots I created was worth it all. See you on the other side.
After reading a post on some Gentoo forum where someone said that they didn’t need the memory hack for Cadega to run World of Warcraft after using kernel 2.6.12, I gave it another shot.
The annoying not-beeing-able-to-click-on-anything-in-game-bug is now gone. So far I havn’t played more than 10 minutes but it seems the game just runs as it should 
My danish characters has stopped working again, though. But I think it has something to do with Breezy because it worked in Hoary.
Well, running WoW with the newest WINE release and a 2.6.12 kernel in opengl works!
Over and out!
After my success with installing Ubuntu Breezy I wanted to rip 2 new CD’s I got today. But the gstreamer MP3 encoder (gstreamer0.8-lame) isn’t in the Ubuntu repositories.
I found it at Marillat’s Debian repository (direct link) where I downloaded it and installed it with:
rivendell:~# dpkg -i gstreamer0.8-lame_0.8.10-0.1_i386.deb
You also need the package liblame0, which is in multiverse:
rivendell:~# apt-get install liblame0
In the Sound-Juicer in Breezy you can add a MP3 profil from within Sound-Juicer preferences.
You might wanna take a look at an earlier entry about MP3 ripping in Sound-Juicer in my blog.
…well it didn’t come working out of the box
- I installed Hoary from CD and upgraded Hoary packages from the internet (though I dont think upgrading was nessesary).
Logged into a console (Alt+F1) and shutting down X:
rivendell:~# /etc/init.d/gdm stop
Changed all Hoary soruces to Breezy sources in /etc/apt/sources.list
Then i dist-upgraded Hoary:
rivendell:~# apt-get -u dist-upgrade
I had to upgrade a few times before all packages was upgraded.
Now I tried to configure X with:
rivendell:~# dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
Didn’t read what it was saying just pressing enter, enter, enter…
Now I tried to start X:
rivendell:~# /etc/init.d/gdm start
But got the following errors in the logfile in /var/log/gdm/:0.log:
sh: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/xkbcomp: No such file or directory
Couldn't compile keymap file
(EE) Couldn't load XKB keymap, falling back to pre-XKB keymap
And:
Fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed';
the X server's font paths might be misconfigured, remote font server(s)
may be unreachable, and/or local fonts may not be installed or are not
configured correctly.
Note: I had trouple using my keyboard at this point but I waas able to get through all the messages wit the ‘d’ key, and back into the console.
Surfing the Ubuntuforums.org got me to the following:
rivendell:~# apt-get install xkb-utils
rivendell:~# apt-get install --reinstall xfonts-base
xkbutils gives the needed binary xkbcomp.
Actually I don’t think I had xfonts-base installed at all after upgrading to Breezy, so the option --reinstall might not be nessessary.
Now try restarting GDM and perhapes you are as lucky as me, and will now be greeted by the Ubuntu graphical login screen:
rivendell:~# /etc/init.d/gdm restart
My computer is equiped with a fairly old Nvidia graphic card, dunno if that makes any difference.
To night I tried to play a few games with WINE (NOT Cadega) on my Ubuntu Hoary system.
Here is what I found out so far:
World of Warcraft
NOGO
WoW version 1.6.1. Patches apply, game starts, you can login and select a character og play with it. But it there is a bug which makes it nearly impossible to click on any in-game items such as NPC’s, mailboxes etc. I read on some mailinglists that if you put the camara just right you are able to click on them. Preferable when you can have nothing but sky behind the object you want to clock at (yeah something like running around looking up in the sky all the time). From what I have read on the mailing lists it seems to be a Blizzard bug… a few Windows users suffers from this too.
Comon Blizzard… we are so close now. The game seems to run alot faster under Linux in WINE than on my Windows XP partition (though it havn’t been reinstalled for years now, so perhapes it isn’t a fair comparisson).
Update: It is actually a YEAH. Take a look at my post about WoW i Ubuntu Breezy
Sid Meier’s Pirates
NOGO
Can’t make the game install. I get an error code 1628 at once.
It seems that the game uses a MSI installer, but I havn’t found any guides (yet) on how you install the game, but perhapes installaing a native MSI would solve the problem (guide located in the bottom of this post).
Haven’t tried to copy from my Windows partition
Risk II
NOGO
Yeah this is an old game which I usually play with the guys when we make some of our small lan-parties. There is no visual evidence (spalsh screen, menu, mouse cursor etc.) that the game actually starts, it just dies almost before it is excecuted.
Warcraft III
YEAH
Remove movies from the Movies/ directory. Apply a no cd patch and the game will run with the -opengl option. Haven’t looked into playing on Battle.Net… yet.
Here is a few good reads:
I have to try this applet out for size.
At work we have several servers running Debian anb because we are multiple persones maintaining them we end up having software (packages) installed that no one remember the reason for. I thought I would be of great if apt/dpkg had some build-in preference you could enable so people had to ad a comment why they install the software which they are about to, and the comment would be saved along with a list of the packages installed.
Perhapes if using sudo you could also log who is installing what. You cannot trust that people always will leave a name for a number of reasons. I think the two greatest reasons would be:
- pure laziness
- hiding that they are about to fuck something up
I have to google around some more, to see if something like this have actually been implemented.
A colleague pointed out that ‘rpm’ have the ability to roll back you system to a specific day… though havn’t tried it so sadly I don’t know how well it works. But that would be a great thing to have in ‘dpkg’ also.
I found gnome-blog a while back which is a small application from which you can add entries to you weblog. It also integrates with your GNOME panel so a blog entry is only one click away. At least it should integrate with the gnome-panel (running Ubuntu Hoary) but everytime I try to add it get this error:
> The panel encountered a problem while loading “OAFIID:GNOME_BlogApplet”.
At the time of finding, I though it would be great if it actually worked with Serendipity (my weblog), and maybe just maybe if I had actually taken the time to look into it, I would have found that is does.
In gnome-blog Preferences you have to set XML-RPC URL to point on the serendipity_xmlrpc.php.
I have testet it now – but I’m not that impressed
It puts in html tags around paragraphs which I’m not interested in, since I want the markdown post-processor to do that for me.
Also when using BloggerAPI protocol the title of the post wasn’t saved in the title field as supposed to, but instead saved as the first line in the entry body. Last but not least my new post wasn’t activated (only saved as draft), so I have to open the webinterface anyways to activate it after posting. So much for trying to go around the webinterface…
I dunno if it is gnome-blog or Serendipity that fucks it up.
Using the MetaWeblog protocol seems to work okay… now if it would just stop adding html tags!
Yeah yeah Frank I know it is Open Source
After I stumbled upon the cool Markdown syntax and the Markdown text parser, some time ago. I have been looking for a wiki system which uses this cool syntax. We use a wiki system at work to document customer setups in, and a wiki with a decent syntax would be nice.
A guy has made PHP Markdown an port of Markdown to PHP and I hoped it would be easy to find a wiki system using markdown syntax. So far I only found Instiki who lives up to this demand fully, which works very well under Ubuntu.
Other wikis – like DokuWiki – are able to use markdown as a rendering plugin but it never feels fully integraded.
With DokuWiki you need to wrap you text in tags like this:
text with markdown syntax here
… and why would I want to do that on every page I create?
Another thing that turned me away from DokuWiki was the fact that I wasn’t able to make it work
Thought I find Instiki really cool it has it’s drawbacks too:
- The first I noticed was that it is written in ruby.
Not that that Ruby is a bad thing but I would have prefeered a wiki system in PHP
so I would understand the code myself. This I can live with.
- The fact that it is written in Ruby, makes unable to run it on port 80 where my
Apache server is running. Perhapes I would be able to solve this using some sort of
proxy thing with Apache. Requsts on a certain domains/page gets forwarded to
another port (for Instiki that would be 2500)… I think this is also the way Zope
usually works. If this would endeed work I could live with that. I havn’t searched
for this “problem” on their website though…
- I’m not able to upload files not even images and that is a thing I cannot live without.
When image (file) upload enters Instiki it will contain all I need for a great wiki. I trust they will implement it in a good way… all the other things they made is.
It would be cool if I could use the syntax in my weblog… but that is only a matter of doing a little footwork.
A few days ago I tired to get World of Warcraft to work under Linux using WINE (Not WineX – now know as Cadega). Installing the game was a success. Though some buttons was missing their text I pulled myself through. A while back I expirenced an annoying problem while installing a game (I cant remember which or when). I was prompted to change CD but WINE locked the drive, so I was unable to unmount the drive (at least I think WINE was the problem). Anyway I don’t care if it was WINE, Ubuntu or whoever fixed it, now it just works!
After installation I started the game with the opengl parameter which is neassesary for the game to run:
je@rivendell:~$ wine c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/WoW.exe -opengl
I heard that they are pretty close at having the DirectX9 implementation in a state where it is possible to play WoW with that.
Starting the game I was greeted with the well know login screen (a least for people regulary playing – Those who rarely or don’t play at all or those who never logs out (yes there are a few those also) might recall this screen as a blur?!?)
When I logged in a patch was downloaded with a peer-to-peer program which also just worked. The patch was applied without any trouble (again only some bottons was missing their text).
At my second login I was forced to patch again… but this time the patch program crashed and after e few tries I gave up This morning I saw that the WINE release 20050310 had ben packaged for Debian in WINEs Debian repository, see my earlier post.
I tried again and now it just worked. I experience a few problems though:
- My fouthe mouse botton dosn’t work which means that I can’t enable auto run.
- ÆØÅ and æøå danish characters dosn’t work.
- The sound sometimes scratces, but it is really not that much.
Are you still reading… go play your farvorite game on your farvorite OS
