WineX Install Goes Sour for LinuxWorld Editor 131
jg21 writes "LinuxWorld's gaming industry editor apparently grappled with TransGaming's latest WineX release, now renamed Cedega 4.0, to such an extent that she "lost" half a day of her life. A trip to the Dark Age of Camelot site for a 7-day free trial ended in tears and installing Diablo II didn't go much better. Dee-Ann LeBlanc may have coedited Linux for Dummies, but she suffered more black screens than a multiplex during a power outage. Is the problem simply that she uses Fedora Core 2 - can't someone help her out?" Are these one-off problems, or symptomatic of a bigger issue?
I'm sorry to be a dick, but... (Score:3, Funny)
This is why most women would make a bad CEO, president and leader. You can't go around bursting into tears and sinking your spoon into a crate of Ben & Jerry's every time you have problems installing a video game.
I'm completely embarrassed for this woman and her apparent inability to control her emotions. Be a man; swear a little bit, pound your fist and move on.
Re:I'm sorry to be a dick, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'm sorry to be a dick, but... (Score:3, Funny)
He hee. Ha.
"Women should be leaders--when they lose control of their emotions, the cost is a box of tissues, not a new desk."
Re:OT (Was: I'm sorry to be a dick, but...) (Score:2)
We're here, but we're enlighted, so we give the woman a chance to defend herself first.
I'm sorry you're a dick too. (Score:3, Interesting)
The lesson: Fedora core 2 and Cedaga don't play well together. And here's why, with every step along the way. Clear, detailed, and with some personality to it, even.
I don't have infinite amounts of time to screw around with half-baked code that doesn't get the job done. If I'm going to plan out a Linux machine, I want to know, does this work, right out of the box, or does it require minor tweaking,
Re:I'm sorry you're a dick too. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'm sorry to be a dick, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking of Diablo II and Cedega (whoa, this is on-topic!)...
Is it possible to get Direct3D working with Diablo II under Cedega? It works with no issues at all in standard DirectDraw mode, but trying to use the VidTest app to set it to Direct3D causes X to hang every time without a fail on my system.
Re:I'm sorry to be a dick, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a Radeon 9600XT. Transgaming have noted occasional issues with the Radeon so I figured it would be somehow related to this.
I won't post the config file because the damn thing is huge. :-)
If you're not on NVIDIA, I will submit this issue to TransGaming support I think.
For an alternate view... (Score:5, Informative)
What was the target audience of this article again (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, am I stupid for thinking that most people aren't going to switch to Linux primarily to play Windows games?
Sure, it might be nice to be able to play some games once you've already jumped ship (and you're probably either knowledgeable in Linux already or willing to work at it to make things happen, as with quite a bit else you might have taken for granted in Windows), but I'd think that by that time you've done your research and made a commitment to switch, you aren't about to run crying back to mommy because that mean Linux beat you up and took your quarter to play at the arcade after school.
As Othium says, 'Hard tasks need hard ways'. Cedega may be a commercial and Linux may be coming of age, but I'm a little surprised at the (lacking) level of effort here for something as complex and demanding as running recently developed games tailored for a completely different operating system.
Perhaps I unreasonably expect a seasoned veteran with ten years of Linux experience plus twelve books and over one-hundred articles beneath her belt to be made of a little sterner stuff and perhaps a touch more resourceful -- but what does a rube like me know -- I just post on the internet.
Re:What was the target audience of this article ag (Score:2)
No. But, maybe they won't switch at all because they can't play games on Linux?
Re:What was the target audience of this article ag (Score:1)
But the article isn't directed at them -- it seems, more than anything, to be directed at the proverbial dummy-who-just-switched. The snake is eating its own tail.
Re:What was the target audience of this article ag (Score:1)
Avid game players use their computers mostly for playing games. If they can't do that in Linux, there's no point in switching to begin with. There's definitely no point in spending months to become adept enough to play the same game
My experience (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Installed Debian i386 unstable in a chroot on my Debian amd64 unstable machine.
2. Installed Cedega in the chroot.
3. Installed the Nvidia 6106 x86-64 drivers and copied the 32-bit OpenGL libs to the i386 chroot.
4. Installed Battlefield 1942, including the Desert Combat and Forgotten Hope mods, using Cedega in the chroot.
It plays great on my Quadro FX 4000, not just vanilla BF1942, but also DC and FH -- pretty impressive considering it's running a 32-bit Windows binary using 32-bit OpenGL drivers using a 64-bit Nvidia driver on a 64-bit kernel. Kudos to Transgaming, Nvidia, and the Debian project.
I'd much rather see a native port of BF1942 to GNU/Linux, though.
Re:My experience (Score:2)
Re:My experience (Score:2)
Native binaries of games are even better. The other night I played Neverwinter Nights while transcoding some mpeg2 video to xvid in the background, and didn't even notice any change in performance when transcode finished.
Some things like the Loki games won't run on amd64 until you give them some old libraries to play with (I just copied a whole diectory of libs in from a stock RedHat9, and told ld.so.conf where to find it).
On
Re:My experience (Score:2)
Re:My experience (Score:1)
Somebody's in the wrong sandbox. (Score:4, Informative)
When we play emulated Nintendo games on other consoles or our PCs, there's always some glitch. If the sound cuts out or a character's animation begins to loop, that's just the way it goes. Come back after the next revision and see if the emulator has been fine tuned to handle that specific game. She admits trying only two games with Cedega before writing the experience off as too frustrating.
I'm really happy to see her investigative journalism turn up the shocking truth about the industry: many games run Linux on their backends. But it's sad to see her expectations for the emulation of Windows clients are so unreasonable.
Seriously, if you want a hassle free Linux gaming experience, go back to playing Tux Racer.
Re:Somebody's in the wrong sandbox. (Score:1, Insightful)
The difference is that TG claims they work well when in fact they don't work for shit. Second, she isn't just a "ga
Re:Somebody's in the wrong sandbox. (Score:5, Interesting)
It didn't play for shit on a Geforce 2 but that's no shocker, it doesn't play for shit on a Geforce 2 on windows either. I can't think of any game with higher requirements. I popped in a FX5200 and away I went with a happy not laggy or buggy in the slightest DAOC experience.
Re:Somebody's in the wrong sandbox. (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux doesn't do Windows games. Wow, news. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fun story: A friend tried to run my copy of SkiFree through Wine. If he tried to use the keyboard (or maybe it was the mouse, can't remember), it would crash.
I understand that as the emulation gets better, or perhaps as Linux gains a critical mass of people and game developers start making their games such that they'll run on Linux natively, this will stop being an issue. That time is not now.
[Pre-emptive "but, but, but, dual boot" response: why bother? I have WinXP running, it's stable (I don't think I've *crashed* my system in about 6 months, and those were hardware problems), why should I reboot repeatedly to do things that I can do with Windows already?]
Re:Linux doesn't do Windows games. Wow, news. (Score:2)
So, I understand that they might be keeping you from switching to Linux, I don't think you're in very large company. Since Microsoft seems determined to have a fairly small update cycle of consoles (XBox Next released next year), gaming on PCs might soon be even more of a fringe thing than Linu
Re:Linux doesn't do Windows games. Wow, news. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Linux doesn't do Windows games. Wow, news. (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you blind?
I have been a PC gaming snob for many years. Only recently have I begrudgingly started playing consoles more.
Walk into any gaming store. Software Etc. used to have entire walls dedicated to PC games. Niche genres like flight sims, other military sims, point-and-click adventures, hex-based strategy, etc, used to live quite comfortably.
Today, PC games have almost no shelf space. Entire genres are dying out.
If you're sitting there saying nothing is changing,
Re:Linux doesn't do Windows games. Wow, news. (Score:3, Insightful)
My hands hurt after using the controller for too long.
My tv is high def, but still isn't as nice as my computer screen.
the graphics just don't compare to what my computer can do.
I have more options for multiplayer online games, such as mogs , etc that i don't have with the console.
I don't have a keyboard with my console to communicate with (though, xbox live is a nice step in the right direction).
Also, i like going 'away' somewhere in my co
Re:Linux doesn't do Windows games. Wow, news. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm... yesterday I installed Ground Control 2, it installed okay, ran, started the tutorial and it froze dead. Apparently I need the new drivers for my card. So I go and grab the new drivers, install them, GC2 works.. So later I play Thief 2... only I don't because it won't work with the new drivers until Ichange a directive to a text file to tell it to ignore the texture memory use. And don't even get me started on the amount of messing around it takes to ge
Half a day? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Half a day? (Score:1)
Re:Half a day? (Score:2)
My beloved old Thinkpad fell apart from old age before I got Linux working properly on it. I still keep looking at the shelf and wondering if Fedora Core 2 might detect the sound card properly.
Re:Half a day? (Score:1)
Re:Half a day? (Score:1)
Heh, I got my Conexant HCF driver working in 3 DAYS.
The sad thing is, that's still an obscenely long time. :-\
Re:Half a day? (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No decent gaming distros (Score:2)
Re:No decent gaming distros (Score:1)
And the install really isn't that complicated; there are installation guides on the CD that explain the process quite well, and you're even told how to access them before you're dropped to a shell.
Re: Your problem is a gaming CARD (Score:2)
Re: Your problem is a gaming CARD (Score:2)
Dee-Ann LeBlanc and technical expertise (Score:4, Insightful)
I met Dee-Ann LeBlanc at a recent Linux conference and after a few minutes it became clear that (1) she is very much the stereotypical gamer and (2) she is very good at sounding like she understands the technical side of Linux.
It's very much like the candidate in a job interview who knows some basics but then starts throwing out terminology to give the appearance of knowing what they are talking about. To a non-technical person it all sounds very impressive but a real techie can see through it pretty quickly.
Someone who writes for a magazine with a technical audience like LinuxWorld should at least have some deeper understanding of the technical side of things. As an earlier comment said, this installation journal is written from the perspective of a recently switched Windows user who does not have a technical background. I doubt that's who Transgaming's main customers are.
She writes "If I have to do "Linux Guru" things to get a mainstream product working, then there's a serious problem." Sorry, but this is not a mainstream product in the conventional Windows-user sense. It is a mainstream product in the conventional Linux-user sense.
Linux desktop users tend to be technically oriented and those that aren't tend to be using it for basic things like Web, e-mail and office applications, not games. Games are among the most complex and demanding pieces of software anyone can run on a computer and some people are bound to have problems, especially when emulating Windows.
Too many of her complaints of a "wasted afternoon" are about Fileplanet and Gamespy, their download times and registration issues, which have absolutely nothing to do with Cedega.
Now I'm just wondering who the ghostwriter was that provided the technical information for the Linux books where she appears as the sole author. It seems obvious that her co-writers and the "et al" on some of those books are the source of the technical information they contain.
It also makes me wonder what the value of those Red Hat certifications she has are.
Re:Dee-Ann LeBlanc and technical expertise (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought the article was helpful: if I was considering running Cedaga on Fedora Core 2, it would tell me what I needed to know. Namely, Radeon cards aren't well supported, and expect to get your hands dirty.
It's an afternoon saved, from my point of view.
Lsatly, your "ghostwriter" comments are so much sexist crap. And you really are a coward for not signing your name.
Jon Acheson
Re:Dee-Ann LeBlanc and technical expertise (Score:2)
I'm not sure whether to rant or just refute you. WINE is a commercial product, offered to make it easy to get games running under Linux. If you think 'gamers' under linux automatically is far superior technically to 'gamers' under Windows, I think you're mistaken.
Linux is an easy to use desktop product, for everyone. You make it sound like it more difficult to use than windows.
In this case, it was no doubt more difficult to use, and I can understand it - as we're talking about
Re:Dee-Ann LeBlanc and technical expertise (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dee-Ann LeBlanc and technical expertise (Score:2)
Trust me, my wife is someone who is *NOT* computer-savvy, and when she talks its nothing like Dee-Ann. Instead its phrases like "The thingy wouldn't do the stuff."
Incidently, I'm also fascinated that many of the comments in t
In a word .... (Score:2, Funny)
Are these one-off problems, or symptomatic of a bigger issue?
yes.shouldnt
I had trouble with Point2Play also (Score:2)
Re:I had trouble with Point2Play also (Score:2)
Re:I had trouble with Point2Play also (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:I had trouble with Point2Play also (Score:2)
I don't use p2p, and it's overwritten my config quite a few times. And the reason I can't do that with the ISO mounts is that I need to mount more than one disk in some cases, and when WineX is overwriting my configuration to set it back to one disk, it doesn't help. :-/
As for not running it in root... I'm sure it's dependency hell trying to build a chroot setup, and even if I got it working, it would still be breaking from the clean Gentoo install. Maybe if I could convince the ebuild maintainer to have
Re:I had trouble with Point2Play also (Score:1)
Why are you assuming you ned to chroot/run winex as root anyway?
Re:I had trouble with Point2Play also (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Of course it is ... (Score:3, Funny)
Of course it is. And if she were using Mandrake, that would "simply be the problem". And if she were using RedHat, that would "simply be the problem". And if she were using [insert name of distro here], that would "simply be the problem".
Re:Of course it is ... (Score:1)
Dee-Ann (Score:4, Interesting)
I first read her as a Lockergnome [lockergnome.com] Linux newsletter subscriber. Let us be kind here and say that I was underwhelmed by her knowledge of linux. To not be kind - there is a reason she wrote Linux for Dummies [amazon.com]
Sera
Re:Dee-Ann (Score:2)
I'm not saying she's a Torvalds or Carmack, but she's certainly intelligent and knowledgeable, and she's definitely a real, longtime Linux user. If she's having problems getting something to work, chances are I will too.
I thought the article was detailed, informative, and clear. I could follow exactly what she did and where she hit problems. I can clearly tell that Radeon support is still not
Re:Dee-Ann (Score:3, Informative)
Reflecting on my people skills is a nice segue but really shows your "skills" as well, it shows my opinion, no more. I told about my impression of her based on her Lockergnome columns
Re:Dee-Ann (Score:2)
Re:Dee-Ann (Score:2)
Jon Acheson
Re:Dee-Ann (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Dee-Ann (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Dee-Ann (Score:1)
I don't know her but... (Score:1)
if you ever tried to teach anything to anyone, you know that it takes great knowledge to be able to explain it in simple terms so that linux illerates like me can understand (i have her book)
I read somewhere above you that the linux community was somewhat composed of male chauvinist. I largely agree with that but I think its a necessary evil for the community in general to mature. Dee-Ann is one of the first to get shot at but as linux will gain popularity, it
Self fulfilling prophesy (Score:2)
What does this have to do with it? I don't care if she is animal, vegetable or mineral. Her gender has nothing to do with my opinion of her as an educator
No, not really, if you are seeing this I am sorry for you.
more over if you need help
...ask...
Here, have my email
take out the
ask away, I make a
Re:Self fulfilling prophesy (Score:1)
Re:Dee-Ann (Score:2)
Bias Against Female Techies (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bias Against Female Techies (Score:1)
Re:Bias Against Female Techies (Score:1)
Here's what I posted at Linuxworld after reading her article...
Given she admits she's trying to do this in Fedora for some (to me) unfathomable reason, and specifically says she repeatedly resorts to 'k
Re:Bias Against Female Techies (Score:1)
Re:Bias Against Female Techies (Score:1)
Re:Bias Against Female Techies (Score:2)
Just to illustrate the point, here's a couple of posts from *this ve
Re:Bias Against Female Techies (Score:1)
Re:Bias Against Female Techies (Score:2)
It's no wonder converting people to linux is hard-- the people singing its praises will tear you to shreds if you have to ask for help.
Re:Bias Against Female Techies (Score:1)
Re:Bias Against Female Techies (Score:2)
I like Linux. I really do. I probably would like it more if I was back in college or high school, with more free time than money. But these days, I'm busy and want things to work quickly.
That said, I accept that linux is hard to use primarily because it's FREE. Having any expectations of it at all is a little unfa
What? (Score:3, Informative)
Only half a day? (Score:2)
WineX/Cedega is great! . . . for certain games (Score:1)
There's been a lot of talk on the Transgaming forums, which are not open to the public, about the games which are "supported" by Cedega. The key point with Cedega is that some games work perfectly, some games have problems, and some games don't run at all. If the games you play don't run on Cedega, it's not worth paying $5 for the package.
Though some people bitch about this fact, I have no problem with it. It's simple business: if their games work, people will pay for it. If they don't, well, they won
I finally got WineX working (Score:4, Interesting)
My biggest gripe is the fact that the emulation has a problem with breaking copy protection. Best I can tell, the first thing you have to do to get a WineX game working is go find a no-CD crack. (Make sure your cookie and pop-up shields are up; you're gonna need 'em...) Since most folks think of no-CD cracks as evil pirate stuff, no "legitimate" board would ever serve them (hey, Transgaming... your product kinda _requires_ 'em, why not chase 'em down and make 'em available to subscribers?) and they seem to be tough to find. Google for a civilization III no-CD crack and most of what you get are forum posts asking where to get one...
But even before you run into that problem, you find that you're still missing parts-- Installshield, ferinstance, uses parts of DCOM98, which aren't emulated by WineX. That's OK; you can get your hands on those directly from Microsoft.
Once you've got that working, part of the nature of the beast is that the error messages are going to be cryptic. Back to the Civilization example, when I'd run
cvswinex c/Program\ Files/.../Civilization3.exe
it crashed horribly, basically telling me "Hey, you should probably fire up a debugger..." Not WineX's fault, mind you, how is it supposed to know that your current working directory needs to be the same place as the Civilization executable, and Civ crashes if it ain't? Oh, and when you ran it before the no-CD crack, it was happy to actually hand you a window that said, "Hey, I refuse to run in a debugger because I think you're trying to break my copy protection!" So you're thinking the no-CD crack is broken up front, which sends you barking up the wrong tree.
None of this, mind, is documented in the Civ forum on Transgaming's site, aside from the need for a no-CD crack.
Now that it's running, it works pretty well (I've found one minor broken feature), but it was a chore getting it that way...
Re:I finally got WineX working (Score:1, Informative)
"Since most folks think of no-CD cracks as evil pirate stuff, no "legitimate" board would ever serve them (hey, Transgaming... your product kinda _requires_ 'em, why not chase 'em down and make 'em available to subscribers?) and they seem to be tough to find. Google for a civilization III no-CD crack and most of what you get are forum posts asking where to get one..."
Forget the Google searching - this site is a savior for games whose copy protection doesn't work on your system: www.gamecopyworld.com [gamecopyworld.com]
My experience with Diablo 2 was much better (Score:2)
The only problem I ran into at all was needing to comment out the default line in my hosts file to connect to tcp/ip games on the lan.
Game play is excellent, battlenet and local network games work fine. I've played it all the way through and just restarted on Nightmare level. Since I don't play DAoC anymore I can't spea
Re:Sure shows... (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux is partly about freedom and choice, and I am delighted with my choice. Surely unconstructive distro bashing should be a thing of the past by now?
Re:Sure shows... (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing I've learned around here, regardless of whether or not there's a reason to bash, a large percentage of the population will.
Note, I wasn't saying you bashed MS, just that it happens constantly and often times for no good reason.
Re:Sure shows... (Score:3, Funny)
Much like right wing talk raidio.
Re:Sure shows... (Score:2)
I admit it, I've not tried Fedora. However, I was forced to use Redhat 7.X, Redhat 8 and Redhat 9. To be quite honest, RedHat 6 was the last version of RedHat I used and was satisified with.
In the fall, I'll be forced to use RHEL 3. I don't look forward to it. It _may_ be that I'll be surprised, but I wouldn't expect so.
Anyways, compare that to SuSE, and I hated the guts o
Re:Sure shows... (Score:1, Troll)
That was for my main box, but for my laptop I tried Knoppix for kicks, but found it wasn't production ready for permanent installs as much as I'd like, and I now run FC2 there. It simply isn't as mature, predictable, or stable as Debian (even testing/unstable). I'd never use it on a deskto
Re:Sure shows... (Score:1, Insightful)
In Windows, however, problems *can't* be solved...
Re:Sure shows... (Score:2)
I Dont mean cool things, or nifty hacks that might be useful...
Re:Sure shows... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can't acknowledge the benefits of a Unix-style system, well...I guess you'll never understand why most of the web runs Apache.
I've got karma to burn, so... (Score:1)
Seriously though, your descriptions of the raw power of Minux makes me want to go see what #cat /dev/urand /dev/mem does.
mods, do your worst.
Re:I've got karma to burn, so... (Score:1)
(I'm new at this)
Re:I've got karma to burn, so... (Score:2)
Third time's the charm:
#cat
Re:I've got karma to burn, so... (Score:2)
Re:Sure shows... (Score:1)
Nice.
The only fix I could find was to create a new user account and copy my files to that account's document folders and such. Show stopper? Hardly, but it was annoying in the extreme, and it would have bee
Re:Sure shows... (Score:1)
P.
Re:Sure shows... (Score:2)