Of Wine and Warcraft

Razor-Qt Desktop Environment

2012-01-02T02:21:00.005-05:00

GTK (the Gimp Tool Kit) is used in GNOME, XFCE, and LXDE, amongst others. Notable is that the desktop environments that use GTK vary from very featureful and blingified to the very thin and plain. On the other hand, Qt -- the toolkit used in KDE -- has always only been used in KDE, which is the most beautiful DE around and also the most resource-demanding.

Until now.

Now we have the Razor-Qt environment, which consists of a panel, desktop, app launcher, settings center and sessions, and is used with the window manager of your choice -- anything from fvwm to kwin, though the preferred wm is Openbox. Like LXDE, the developers are interested in modularity and low resource usage.

There's a PPA for Ubuntu, and I've installed it in Oneiric, but have yet to put it to use. (There are also optional repos for openSUSE, Fedora 15 & 16, Debian and Mandriva, and it's in Arch's AUR. I may be more likely to try it in my Mint 11 LXDE install first.) I'm going to have to grab some of my favored KDE apps to see how things go in there. While I'm generally content in Unity 2D (I can't stand the CPU spikes I get in 3D), I want to try this out.

Mint, Ubuntu, and DistroWatch

2011-11-28T19:14:00.002-05:00

It would appear that part of what is driving Mint's page hits per day on DistroWatch are all the articles about how Ubuntu is getting crushed by Mint in DW's page hits per day rankings -- all with links to Linux Mint's page there. I spent little to no time on DistroWatch when I had a distro I was happy with, and I think that's pretty normal. DistroWatch is a site to serve distro hoppers. The page hits per day are driven by two things -- interest in news about a distro, and interest in hopping to a distro. I'm going to stand by my previous analysis of what this means -- people seeking a new Linux distro are more likely to be interested in Linux Mint than Ubuntu.

Linux Mint is in an interesting position -- potentially on the cusp of explosive growth. That's something that has ruined many tech companies. I really hope they survive it. But I doubt they're going to replace Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has a gargantuan community, as evinced by the traffic on their forums, their IRC channels, and their fansites. I doubt Mint can compare. Ubuntu is also a better bet for corporate and server installs, especially since Ubuntu supports use of distro-upgrade (upgrade from one version to the next) and Mint doesn't (except for the rolling release Debian Editions, of course). And since the Debian editions are rolling release, they inherently lack the stability of fixed releases, especially those with long-term support. Me, I'm with Ubuntu's Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life, in being glad that Ubuntu as such an excellent and popular derivative, and look forward to Canonical's continued success (and hopefully, profitability to compare to Red Hat).

Linux Mint 12

2011-11-26T14:24:00.004-05:00

For anyone who doesn't know that Distrowatch is the de facto Linux release news portal, and doesn't follow Linux Mint, here's the news: Linux Mint 12 "Lisa" has been officially released.

Folks, there is no doubt in my mind that with Lisa, Linux Mint has supplanted Ubuntu as the ~~distro of choice~~ most interesting distro for seekers. Mint is well ahead of Ubuntu in both the 6 month and 12 month average hit per day rankings over at Distrowatch, and continues to pull ever further ahead. Their server has been so thoroughly stomped by traffic that I can't even bring it up. (If you want the release, grab a torrent seed directly from the links on the DistroWatch release announcement, and save Clem and his team some bandwidth.)

Nor is there any reason to be surprised. For the last three years, Linux Mint development has appeared to consist largely of correcting the issues everyone has with Ubuntu, and leaving the rest of it alone.

Current users have little or no love for touchscreen interfaces like Unity, the Gnome Shell (both of which admittedly have nice arrays of keyboard shortcuts, but neither of which behaves like I want it to), and Metro (the Windows 8 interface) on their desktops. Most people are used to the desktop metaphor with windows, icons, mouse pointer and panel, and don't want to change from it. They have muscle memory for workflows that only exist in such an environment, and have no desire to learn a new workflow based on activities (or tiles, but we shall see about that). From the ZDNet Blog Review, the Mint Gnome Shell Extensions are doing a much better of building some continuity between old and new than either the Gnome project or Canonical.

To Clement LeFebvre and the entire Linux Mint Team: Congratulations! Keep up the good work! You are entering the difficult phase, and have a huge amount of very hard work ahead of you. Just, please, don't let growing pains be the death of your enterprise.

As for me ... I downloaded Mint 32 LXDE last week. Openbox has been behaving a lot better for me than Compiz (the Unity window manager) in UO. I may spend a month or so in game; I may spend only the 10 day free Cataclysm trial that Blizzard has offered, once the semester ends. But my choice of distro will probably depend more on what I see on the WoW page at WineHQ.org than anything else.

20 Ways to Waste a Linux Install

2011-10-08T21:08:00.002-04:00

This is the article. These pitfalls mostly catch the new user, which makes this excellent content for my blog here.

Help for Newbies!

2011-09-02T13:34:00.002-04:00

For those who have yet to master the Google-fu techniques of finding Linux support, I present to you Sam Dean's List of All the Free Linux Documentation Resources You'll Ever Need.

Why Not Windows?

2011-08-09T11:53:00.006-04:00

Updating most Linux distros is pretty much a breeze. Every distro I've successfully used has had either Synaptic or a reasonable facsimile thereof (ie, PackageKit in Kubuntu and openSUSE, and I've forgotten what the graphical package manager was in Sabayon). You click a button that downloads the up-to-date package list, then click a button to select all updated packages for download, a third button to apply that selection, and a fourth to confirm the command, and it does it all. Rarely does this require more than one reboot or a half-hour. It might require more time if you are doing your first update for a rolling-release distro from an ISO that's several months old, but that's it.

According to zdnet.co.uk blog "Jaime's Mostly Linux Stuff," With Windows Update, the fun never stops! He describes in detail the sixteen hours and many, many reboots needed to bring a Win7 laptop up to date. It's excruciating, especially since he was in a tearing hurry to get ready for a trip.

I recently was given a Dell 5110 laptop with Win7 myself. I have some use for Win7. I can stream from my wife's Netflix account, it runs various Facebook flash games faster, and it's a better platform for Steam by far. But I have to say, my experience was pretty similar to his. I started by using my desktop system to load avast! and AVGFree antivirus and Firefox onto a thumb drive and installing those before enabling networking, and updating them first. I was also busying myself with downloading and installing other software (mostly through either Sourceforge or Nonags.com) while I ran through the Windows Update process. I wasn't in a hurry, so it took me two or three days.

Before I finished grabbing extra software, I downloaded Lubuntu 11.04 onto a thumb drive and installed it, adding a few extra items to extend battery life. Installing Lubuntu and bringing it up to date took less than an hour. Thanks to the folks at PlanetWatt.com (I borrowed the idea of using Jupiter, Granola and the XFCE4-Power-Manager applet from them), I was able to extend operating battery life by almost 50% over what Win7 allows. And it all works sanely, I don't concern myself near as much with system security, privacy invasion and intellectual property insanity (the folks at http://Windows7sins.org describe it in MUCH more detail than I'm going to) as I would on Win7.

But maybe our experience with bringing a new Win7 system up to date is atypical. Was yours the same, or different?

Talking Sense to Canonical

2011-06-27T13:30:00.004-04:00

Jesse Smith does it at DWW. This, by the way, is how to flame, with compassion and reason, instead of rage. It reads more like an intervention than a flame. It's so nice, it belongs on the Ubuntu Forums.

He makes the point that Ubuntu's early core values of humanity and universal access are apparently being tossed aside, and that he doesn't like it. I have to agree with him on this. I can readily believe that huge numbers of users and community developers were originally attracted to Ubuntu by its vision of helping unskilled people make use of otherwise obsolete equipment.

The Unity interface reverses this course, requiring people to have 3D enabled graphics hardware and the power to run it. The more I hear about it, the more I'm convinced Ubuntu is chasing after the smartphone and tablet market, not productivity. Nor can I think of Unity as an optimal environment for WoW. It requires 3d graphics acceleration, which hardly argues for lightweightness. Nor is this the only sign of less interest in universality. Check out the first paragraph from comment 32:

I read a review on Ubuntu recently that gave it mixed reactions and on the comments section there were plenty of new users using that elitist attitude of "love it or leave it" regarding Unity in Ubuntu and some of the changes that have gone on recently with it. Being I've used Ubuntu since its inception and played my part in the community both online and in person helping friends and relatives with it, it kind of made me mad that a new user with an elitist attitude was telling me (and people like me who share the same opinion) to either accept it or move away from it.

I haven't bothered with Unity yet. I'm not playing WoW, and thanks to PCLOS, happily off the reinstall treadmill. I have Lubuntu upgraded to Natty as a backup, and it's mostly ok (you have to use the command line to set mouse acceleration, no big deal, it's apparently an LXDE problem).

For the new user wanting to play World of Warcraft under Wine, I have to suggest other distros -- perhaps Lubuntu 11.04; or OpenSUSE's install DVD, selecting LXDE; MadBox (based on 10.10), Mint 10 Julia LXDE (also based on 10.10), or perhaps Mint 11 Katya with either pared down Gnome 2.32 or LXDE added on. It still has to be a distro with easy access to the development (1.3.x) branch of Wine, as it tends to do better with WoW than the stable, 1.2.x branch.

Are Website Seizures Constitutional?

2011-04-25T01:04:00.002-04:00

David Makarewicz says NO, and at length. One reason is that a big ol' page saying "This site has been seized. By the way, federal law provides the following penalties for child p****graphy" will probably frighten away users, permanently.

The PCLOS website had a phony ICE seizure banner up for April Fool's day. Here's the post about it. Here are some of the reactions they got. Fear is prominent amongst them.

First OpenSolaris, now OpenOffice

2011-04-18T12:44:00.003-04:00

If you follow open source news at all (I pretty much only read DistroWatch Weekly), then you know that after Oracle bought Sun, support and development of OpenSolaris essentially ceased. The corporate folks who'd worked on OpenSolaris for Sun stopped, and the community pretty much never heard anything from Oracle, no matter how much or how often they asked, "Hey, what's going on? What are the plans for OpenSolaris?"

Now comes Oracle's press release announcing that OOo is going to be community-based.

"Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis," said Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect. "We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF)."

How do I read this?

"We would REALLY like for OpenOffice to just Go Away, so all of our commercial clients will buy Oracle's captive (and thus profitable) StarOffice or StarSuite (or our commercial cloud suite, still under development). So we're gonna quietly promote the idea that OOo isn't suitable for REAL work by REAL corporate clients. But we don't want the public relations fiasco we ran into with OpenSolaris. So, after denigrating OpenOffice to reduce its userbase, we'll cut it off, but a bit more slowly than we did OpenSolaris."

This is more or less the template everyone's been expecting, and it really isn't that hard to read the announcement that way. I am entirely unsurprised that nearly ever distro that has not already jumped ship to LibreOffice plans to. Within a year or two, LO will be well in the lead.

Is there anyone who REALLY thinks Java is NOT next?

Here's some more commentary from Ars Technica.

Canonical Is Making Me Mad

2011-02-28T22:21:00.003-05:00

Canonical is diverting money the Banshee developers had earmarked for the GNOME project to themselves. This is legal. Banshee's license permits them to do so. But they also asked the Banshee people, "Would you rather have 25% of Amazon's affiliate revenue for mp3s bought from Amazon.com through Banshee, while we take the other 75%, or have us set Banshee to default to buying mp3s from Ubuntu One?" Banshee's developers asked for the latter, and Canonical decided to do the former anyway.

The story has been around quite a bit, covered by LinuxUser and Network World.

I'm going to agree with the consensus that in this, Canonical has beaten themselves up with a BIG stick, PR-wise. This sort of high-handed, arrogant behavior is just what makes Micro$oft into the villain of the open-source community.

I have always expected Canonical to try to make money, and to try to create revenue streams. (See the "Applications" section of my Karmic Koala review.) This is a bit different: they're diverting a revenue stream given by the Banshee project (which they are planning to depend on) from the GNOME project (which they depend on) to themselves. I really don't care if they are increasing that revenue stream by more than the share of it they're taking. It remains the wrong thing to do.

So what am I going to do about it? I'm going to wait and see. But I think I'm going to not be recommending Ubuntu or its GNOME children so much as I used to. I think my main recommendation will be openSUSE in the future, or perhaps SimplyMEPIS or LMDE. For those willing to try a significantly different interface, I'll be suggesting #!10.

Another Reason

2010-11-30T18:12:00.001-05:00

Here's another reason to stick with open source software: you can be sure that nobody's gonna do you like they do this guy.

All My Framerate Tweaks

2010-06-26T18:56:00.001-04:00

Everything I Know About Improving Framerates

Try a different graphics API

The default graphics API for World of Warcraft is (I believe) D3D. The default graphics API for most GNU/Linux systems is OpenGL. OpenGL can also resolve some graphical issues and bugs. OpenGL works better for me. To set your graphics API, open the text file "/home/[USERNAME]/.wine/drive_c:/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf" and look for a line that starts, SET gxAPI. If you don't find one, add it. It should read SET gxAPI OpenGL or SET gxAPI D3D. You will have to restart Wow.exe for this change to take effect.

Reduce Graphics Load

Select the "Effects" tab of the Video Options screen, and minimize everything. Possible exceptions are view distance and particle density. You may not want the minimum, but keep them on the low side. Also, download Leatrix Gfx, unzip it, and copy it to your ~/.wine/drive_c/World of Warcraft/Interface/Addons/ folder. Use /gfx to bring up the config pane, and everything you can stand to reduce or shut off (such as color depth), do it. Be advised that color depth will reset itself to default every time you see a load screen.

Reduce Addons Load

If you're using addons, go for those that are lightest and use the least RAM and CPU cycles, and use the minimum. If at all possible, start with none, or just Leatrix Gfx, and add them one at a time, seeing what sort of effect that has on your framerates. I track framerates with a pair of addons: NinjaPanel, which is a LibDataBroker display, and zBrokerPerformance, which feeds framerates and latency to an LDB display.

Use a lighter desktop

There's a reason I like distros like CrunchBang Linux and Linux Mint Fluxbox Edition more than, say, Kubuntu, Ultimate Edition, or Sabayon. The desktop environments may have fewer features, but they also use less CPU cycles and less RAM. If you're using KDE, change to something lighter. If you're using Gnome, get the Clearlooks Compact widget theme and Simplicity window theme, and use them. Disable all desktop effects and uninstall Beryl/Compiz/Fusion. Switch to XFCE (not xubuntu-desktop) or lxde, or even just a window manager.

Disable unneccessary services

I'm not the one to decide which services are unneccessary, but it's a great topic for further research on your own.

Adjust swap priority to suit your needs

While not a basic thing, this has a HUGE effect. Chances are, if you see your framerates tank in busy zones, it's because your system started using swap for virtual memory. When you use swap, some of the memory pages in use get copied to the swap partition on your disk and deleted from RAM until they're needed for another CPU operation. Then, some other memory pages not in immediate use get copied to swap and deleted from RAM to make room for other pages that have to come back from swap to RAM. This obviously is going to slow your system way, way down. Even worse, any operation that involves using swap almost always gets lower priority than those that don't.

First, get a tool to monitor system RAM and swap usage. I use Conky. Just about everything I learned about Conky, I learned at Conky Hardcore and CrunchBang Linux forums. Here's my .conkyrc which is designed to cover part (well, most) of the title bar of World of Warcraft.

background yes
use_xft yes
xftfont Sans:size=8
xftalpha 1
update_interval 2.0
total_run_times 0
own_window yes
own_window_transparent no
own_window_type normal
own_window_color black
own_window_hints undecorated,above,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
minimum_size 80 10
maximum_width 900
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders yes
default_color yellow
default_shade_color black
default_outline_color white
alignment top_left
gap_x 0
gap_y 0
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
cpu_avg_samples 2
override_utf8_locale no
##############################################
#  Output
##############################################
TEXT
up:$uptime | RAM:$mem/$memmax | SWAP: $swap/$swapmax $swapperc% | CPU:${cpu cpu0}% at ${freq}MHz, ${acpitemp} C | Dn: ${downspeed eth0}/s, ${totaldown eth0} | Up: ${upspeed eth0}/s, ${totalup eth0}

Everything after TEXT is on a single line, so it will display as a single line. This allows you to check the Conky while playing World of Warcraft. You will want to see how much RAM you have free, and when you're using swap, and how much swap you use.

You will need root privileges. Edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf and edit or add a line for vm.swappiness. If you set vm.swappiness = 100 then your system will at least not reduce priority of swap operations. If you set vm.swappiness = 0 then your system will not use swap for virtual memory under any circumstances.

Originally, I only had 1.5 GB of RAM, and my desktop left about 1.35 GB free. In my experience in Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft would start out using about 800MB of RAM, and ramp up from there. When I set vm.swappiness = 100, I would see framerates drop into medium and even low single digits under heavy load, but they would generally return to normal when memory loads lightened back up. Later, I set vm.swappiness = 0, and framerates were typically at least 10, even with fairly heavy loads. But since WoW keeps every texture file it loads in memory, at least once and perhaps twice I reached 100% RAM usage during play, which completely locked my computer up. I now have 3 GB of RAM and never run out of available RAM. Hopefully this experience will help you decide which course you should take.

Fare Well!

2010-06-23T19:34:00.001-04:00

I'm leaving World of Warcraft.

Nothing against the game, nothing against my readers, nothing against Blizzard. But my life is getting pretty tough and I cannot afford to give my time to World of Warcraft when I need to really hustle to keep my head above water.

If I can return to the game at some point, I probably will, and I'll return to this blog at the same time. In the meantime, make whatever use of what's here that you can.

Recklessly Hacking Koala

2010-06-15T21:24:00.003-04:00

When I installed SalixOS, I used the old Koala root partition, and the old #! home partition, for my SalixOS install. But I had issues with liloconfig, and I was in a hurry to get in game and it was just not working. So I reinstalled Koala on the old #! root partition and a new home partition I set up for it, just to get GRUB2 up and running. And it worked.

Then I asked myself, "What am I going to do with Koala now?" I figured using it as a test bed to see just how much I could hack out of it and still have a working system was as good as anything. The rest of this was written largely as a stream of consciousness as I did it.

I should have documented what all I'd done. I'm sure I forgot some of the things I hacked out. For starters, I removed libmono0, libmono-corlib1.0-cil, libmono-corlib2.0, everything else with *cil, all bluetooth and bluez packages (and lost network manager along the way, which did not shut down my wired ethernet connection), openoffice (everything), compiz (everything), pulseaudio (only the server stuff--lots of gnome goes away with the libs and client stuff), all xorg video drivers except for v4l, vesa, and nv, xorg input drivers related to touchscreens and tablets, whatever wireless packages I could (wireless-crda would have taken the whole kernel with it!), usb-creator-common, Totem (parts were dependent on other things I yanked), toshset (not on a laptop), smartdimmer (not on an LCD), pxljr (no HP color laser printer), pcmciautils (no pcmcia cards), nvidia-96 and nvidia-173 modaliases, mobile-broadband-provider-info, min12xxw (no Konica or Minolta printer), brltty (don't use a braille terminal), computer-janitor (it is both way too zealous and too lax in removing software), telepathy (prefer Pidgin to Empathy), most of Evolution (except evolution-data-server-common), radeontool (no radeon GPU), sane (no scanner), couldn't remove libsane (it would have blown some support for my printer), splix (another printer I don't have), and then did sudo apt-get autoremove to remove all unused packages and all config files. It's still working at this point.

Then, shortly after the Lucid Lynx release, I updated everything, to kernel 2.6.31.21, and then ran the distro upgrade. I had bad luck with distro upgrade back around Kubuntu 7.04 to 7.10, and this is the first time I've tried it since. Since I've only hacked away at the system, rather than adding anything to it, I have some hopes, and also -- I really don't care if it breaks.

Well, the upgrade actually worked, except that it used all but about 250-275 MB of a 5.8GB root partition. I fired up the Software Center, and got rid of OOo, most of the games, Evolution, F-spot, Tomboy, Banshee, Empathy, Compiz, Computer Janitor, Bluetooth, PiTiVi, and Rhythmbox. Then I used Synaptic to get rid of PulseAudio; as far as I know, there's still no PA integration in Wine. Then I went into the terminal for sudo apt-get autoremove and sudo apt-get autoclean which remove unused dependencies and unused config files, respectively. I also removed the 185 series nVidia drivers; I figured Jockey has something more recent. The kernel is upgraded to 2.6.32 from 2.6.31, which is nice. All of this increased my free space to 1.3 GB. But the fact remains that the install takes up about 4.8GB even after getting rid of all that stuff. Running sudo apt-get clean removes installation files, which freed up about 700MB more.

As everyone has no doubt heard, the default WM buttons are now all on the left: close, minimise, maximise/resize. If you want the WM menu for a window, you have to right-click the titlebar. As a result, I'm using alt-f4 to close windows a lot more often. I also grabbed the Simplebox window decoration theme (and wound up still using Simple), the Clearlooks-Compact control theme, and the Still Life icon theme from art.gnome.org through the appearance manager.

nVidia drivers were installed automatically -- v.195.36.15 which is cool. Firefox is at 3.6.3. Gnome, of course, is at 2.30. And that bug where nvidia-settings 185 could not parse my xorg.conf is gone, tyvm!

Framerates at the test spot (29.7, 50.3 in Grizzly Hills, looking at the waterfall upstream) were about 23-24 in gnome, and even hit a peak of 25, and about the same lxde. Since I now have lxde, I can probably get away with purging pulseaudio client stuff. Incidentally, you can't run both the gnome screensaver daemon and the X screensaver daemon (which is default in lxde). But in truth, I'm done with hacking my current Lucid Lynx install. I'm working on how I want Arch, and how I want get there. Once I have a hand on that, I will probably completely blow my main drive and install Arch and a minimal Ubuntu+LXDE Lucid system with a vastly different partitioning scheme, designed to enhance performance of World of Warcraft in all distros, but Arch in particular.

Upgrading Salix to 13.1

2010-06-06T12:12:00.005-04:00

The Salix wiki has a very handy howto on how to upgrade from 13.0 to 13.1.

I noticed that my Slackware mirror was in Germany (.de). I ought to fix that, but I'm not sure how. It would be stunning to me that there are no US mirrors for Slackware.

I did figure out how to lock Wine, to keep it from reverting to 1.35 or so. There's a step to remove obsolete packages, but that also removes anything I've installed, which includes nVidia drivers. I'll be reinstalling them as per my instructions in the SalixOS 13.0.2a post, but changing all paths and URLs from 13.0 to 13.1.

My rather sketchy journal about upgrading Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 is coming next. Then comes the building Arch journal.

SalixOS 13.0.2a

2010-05-01T15:23:00.009-04:00

Test Run: Salix OS 13.0.2a

Salix OS represents three significant departures for me. First, it uses the X Fast Clean Environment, or XFCE. I don't remember which distro I first added XFCE to, but it was probably Kubuntu. I do remember that I was playing on desktop 3, and hit control-F1 to enter stealth. In XFCE, that's the standard keybinding for switching to desktop 1, which caused me to panic. Having no clue about how to set keybindings, or even that it could be done, I swore off XFCE. So my return to XFCE is the first departure.

The second is a move into more advanced distros. I originally intended this blog to help the beginning Linux user, and this SalixOS is not the sort of plug-and-play distro that Ubuntu, Mint, and openSUSE are.

The third is the entry into the world of Slackware. My last mention of Slackware was to say I had no interest in fooling with it. SalixOS is one of three Slackware-based distros mentioned in this Distrowatch review. I also found TechieMoe's rant and Red Devil's review after I'd installed. I've read reviews for the other two (Zenwalk and GoblinX) before. Zenwalk especially appealed to me for its light weight and "one app per task" approach to building a distro. But I thought SalixOS would be better for me. As far as I can tell, the SalixOS team is a bunch of former Zenwalk people who thought the one serious problem with Zenwalk was that it is not 100% binary-compatible with Slack. The appeal of that is that if I have a problem that the SalixOS community can't help me with, I can go to the Slackware community.

Slackware is the eldest active GNU/Linux distro. Patrick Volkerding and his community have to be doing something right. The two things that people seem to rave about when it comes to Slackware are unmatched stability and that the sysadmin has unmatched levels of control over the system. It also seemed reasonable to me that they would have the deepest level of experience and documentation. When going into something like Slackware, which has a well-earned reputation for requiring a sysadmin who knows what he is doing, I think excellent documentation is very important.

While SalixOS is 100% Slack-compatible, it isn't exactly Slack. They make installation and configuring a little easier than with Slack, and they use slapt-get and gslapt, a graphical frontend, to resolve dependency issues. Software dependency resolution is almost heretical in Slackware, so it's another reason I was willing to try Salix when I wasn't ready to try Slack.

On with the test run.

Installation

According to Darrell Anderson, the SalixOS team uses the Absolute Linux installer, reverted to the Slackware color scheme. It's an ncurses based installer and I thought it was pretty straightforward. I admit I set up my partitions by running Gparted on my Koala live CD rather than fooling around with cfdisk, the partitioner the Salix team added to the installer. I never saw an option to name the system. So I am stuck with the default, and that's a little unsettling. Hiding your system name is one of the easier things to do that helps system security. EDIT: The system name is kept in /etc/hosts and /etc/HOSTNAME. I suggest editing them in that order. You will need root privileges. Thanks to gapan in #salix@irc.freenode.net It also formatted my swap partition, giving it a new UUID, which I had to put into /etc/fstab on my Mint8FB system. You are required to provide a root password and set up a user account. Don't skip this. By default, Salix does not let root log into X. The user account does not get sudo privileges. I have had to use su for anything requiring root privileges. This isn't scary for me. I know when I'm root and when I'm a normal user, but sometimes sudo is handier than su.

The installer calls liloconfig to set up the lilo bootloader. I chose the "basic" option, which turns out to have been a mistake. It did not find my Mint8FB partition. I reran liloconfig and chose the expert option a couple of times from the terminal as root. It seemed to work, but it always hung on exit. I got into a hurry before I figured it out, and installed Koala again just to have grub2. Oddly enough, the entries I put into the lilo menu file were imported as-is into the grub2 menu. The lilo entry for Mint8FB in Koala's Grub2 menu didn't work.

Setup

The first, and easiest, thing I did was install all the multimedia stuff. Anyone who is serious about raids will watch the excellent TankSpot's Guides on Youtube, which require the proprietary Adobe Flash plugin. It's very simple; click Menu -> Multimedia -> Install Multimedia Codecs, and provide the root password. This is what happens.

Next came fixing the keybindings. It is hard to play when switching stances also switches desktops. Menu -> Settings -> Window Manager -> Keyboard tab for window manager behavior, and Menu -> Settings -> Keyboard -> Application Shortcuts tab to set keybindings to launch my favorite apps. Then I started fooling around with screensavers. Some of them completely locked up my system when using the vesa video driver. I suggest setting screensavers to blank screen only (Menu -> Settings -> Screensaver) until a better driver can be enabled.

Package Management

Package and dependency management are the two scariest things about Slackware. Basic Slack has installpkg, removepkg, and upgradepkg to install, remove, and upgrade binaries, and slackpkg to track installed packages. There is no software to fix any dependency issues. The sysadmin does it. No code is the simplest code, but this is very hard on on the admin, especially a chicken like me. Salix uses slapt-get for installing, removing, upgrading, and resolving dependencies. It is modeled on Debian's apt-get. They also include graphical front end Gslapt, which is modeled on Synaptic. Synaptic includes a way to lock packages out of the update process, but I've found nothing of the sort in Gslapt or slapt-get on my own. Gslapt's search functions in particular are nowhere near as powerful as Synaptic's. Nor could I use these tools for nVidia drivers or the current development version of Wine (which is at v1.1.36, while current is 1.1.43). These packages are not available there.

I mostly like the default applications. Thunar isn't my favorite file manager (no tabs), but it's the default for XFCE and it works. I can barely tell the difference between one terminal emulator and another. I did not want to use the GIMP for my PDF viewer, so Gslapt got me evince. I needed to modify the default sound behavior, so I installed alsamixer-gui for that. Getting any sound changes I made to stick required changing to root and running alsactl store in the terminal. Thanks to agent | wario in ##slackware@irc.freenode.net and Borromini in #salix@irc.freenode.net -- they told me this within 1 minute of each other.

Video drivers were next. I found this guide to installing video drivers in Slackware. It has two methods, one for installing into the kernel yourself, using code you download from nVidia yourself. This has to be done in runlevel 3, with X not running. I didn't use it. Instead, I used the SlackBuilds.org method. Here's what I did in the terminal to install the nVidia GPU drivers, v.195.36.15, as basic step-by-step as I can make it.

su
slapt-get -i kernel-source

(see note 1)
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.ori (see note 2)
cd /tmp (see note 3)
wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/13.0/libraries/libvdpau.tar.gz (see note 4)
tar xvf libvdpau.tar.gz && cd libvdpau (see note 5)
. libvdpau.info && wget $DOWNLOAD (see note 6)
./libvdpau.SlackBuild (see note 7)
installpkg [GENERATED PATH AND FILENAME] (see note 8)
cd /tmp (see note 9)
wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/13.0/system/nvidia-kernel.tar.gz (see note 10)

tar xvf nvidia-kernel.tar.gz && cd nvidia-kernel
. nvidia-kernel.info && wget $DOWNLOAD
./nvidia-kernel.SlackBuild
installpkg [GENERATED PATH AND FILENAME]
cd /tmp
wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/13.0/system/nvidia-driver

(see note 11)

Notes

salix doesn't include kernel source code by default, which you will need to recompile the kernel; this installs it
makes a copy of current xorg.conf
you don't HAVE to do this in /tmp, and some will tell you that you should have a specific directory in ~/ where you do all this sort of thing
grabs the SlackBuilds.org scripts to install libvdpau, a dependency for the SlackBuilds version of the nvidia driver
extracts the scripts and moves you into their directory
libvdpau.info sets the value of $DOWNLOAD to the URL of the source code; wget $DOWNLOAD actually downloads it
this is the script that generates the SlackPackage; it tells you where the package is when it finishes
and now you actually install the package
replace /tmp with wherever you decide to do this
starting the process over with the nvidia driver's kernel headers It works just like it did with libvdpau
doing it all again, with the actual nvidia driver. Repeat the process, using nvidia-driver in place of nvidia-kernel

Restart X (logout and login) and the drivers should be working.

It turns out that SalixOS doesn't even bother to create an /etc/xorg.conf file. I opened a terminal and ran nvidia-xconfig as root to do so (thanks to wolven in #salix@irc.freenode.org), and then nvidia-settings as root to adjust resolution to how I like it. SalixOS also doesn't create /etc/sysctl.conf -- I just put vm.swappiness = 0 into an empty file at that location to disable swap.

Installing Wine was far less involved. I downloaded the most recent version from this page on Sourceforge. I then opened a terminal to the directory where I saved the file, switched to root and ran installpkg wine-1.1.43-i486-1sg.txz I expect to upgrade by downloading the next version when it's released and then running upgradepkg wine-1.1.44-i486-1sg.txz

Running the Game

I used my usual routine of adding the entire partition with WoW installed to my ~/ directory. This time, though, the path was ~/mount/sda5/ rather than ~/.wine/dosdevices/drive_c/programs/ I created a new toon, and set custom colors for Chat channels. But they, and a few other UI settings, didn't persist through restarts, and I think the way I mounted the WoW partition may have been responsible. I wound up copying WoW to sda2, where I put the SalixOS /home partition, before testing. It may once again be bias rather than perception, but I think the reduced number of system services and more advanced video drivers have made the game a slight bit more snappy than it was in Mint8FB.

Will I stick with it? I think so, for now at least. I intend to find out more about blacklisting unwanted system services, and seeing what difference that makes. I am also starting a new framerate test that should give me more consistent results. Running a 10-man raid and trying to keep an eye on zBrokerPerformance while actually participating is a bit much for me. Instead, I will disable my framerate cap and go to 29.7, 50.3 in Grizzly Hills, looking NNW at the falls. It's right at the center of a sawn-off tree trunk that is the center of a bridge. It's sufficiently demanding to somewhat tax my card, and sufficiently isolated that I don't have to worry about other players affecting results with their extremely high resolution armor textures and spells. In SalixOS, that results in 23-24 FPS. In Mint8FB, I get 22-23 FPS. And it makes me wonder if using an even less demanding desktop, such as in Absolute Linux, could push the framerate even higher. But the difference could also be due to SalixOS running fewer system services than Mint8FB. Comparing very minimal to full-featured desktops based on the same distro will be a better test of that.

If you decide to use a Slackware distro, you might check out this informative post about another user's journey into the Land of Slack.

CrunchBang Linux News

2010-04-24T14:45:00.003-04:00

I decided I wasn't going to write or post this until I had Salix OS installed. It's installed, but it needs a lot of work. As SalixOS is 100% Slackware binary compatible, I fully expected that.

My favorite environment ever is the one used in CrunchBang Linux (#! hereafter; you can read my review). The last stable release for #! was 9.04.01, based on Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope." I followed the news and forums on the #! site enough around Koala's release to know that distro leader Philip Newborough (aka Corenominal) was not planning to create a #! release based on Koala. So I kept my eyes open while reading DistroWatch for other Ubuntu-based distros that were planning lightweight Koala-based releases. There are quite a few -- Masonux, U-lite, wattOS, and Mint LXDE CE, to name some. But the first I tried, of course, was Linux Mint 8 "Helena" FluxBox Community Edition which is still my distro of choice for playing World of Warcraft.

I do my best to read DistroWatch Weekly. Usually, about once a month, I go there and read all the issues I haven't previously read. And on one of those, I see that ArchBang Linux has been added to the DistroWatch waiting list. As its name may suggest, it is Arch Linux with its user interface based (largely) on the #! interface.

I could not contain my glee. There are many, many things about Arch Linux that really appeal to me, such as their emphasis on "simple" over "easy," their excellent package manager Pacman, their strong preference for vanilla packages and applications, their superlative wiki, and the Arch User Repository and the Arch Build System. And, of course, my favorite user interface so far is still #!.

So I promptly went to the #! IRC channel and asked about it. Feedback was generally positive, but the #! community is much more interested in what Philip Newborough is doing -- namely, building #! 10, code named "Statler," from Debian Squeeze sources. Thinking about it, this makes sense to me. For one thing, this relaxes the pace of development quite a bit. Canonical is just about fanatical regarding their release dates -- April 29 and October 29 of each year, and they push out new releases of all official versions of Ubuntu on those dates, regardless of what bugs may still be unfixed. Debian, on the other hand, is pretty fanatical about NOT releasing a release until it is ready. Of the elder distros, only Slackware has a better reputation for stability. And of the two, Ubuntu is also lots more likely to tweak packages to fit their kernels rather than push fixes upstream so they can release vanilla packages. And of course, Debian's repositories are the most complete of anybody's. Nor is Mr. Newborough the first to do this. Warren Woodford switched SimplyMEPIS from Debian to Ubuntu for version 6, and then back to Debian for v.7. My last try at SimplyMEPIS was 8.0, which did not go very well (see my review).

But those are my takes. Philip Newborough gave an interview, posted here, in which he explains his reasons. And to be honest, his reasons seem to echo those I remember Warren Woodford giving, when he made the same move back to a Debian base for SimplyMEPIS. Either way, I'm excited for #! and looking forward to a Debian distro that I will be more strongly motivated to try, and to make work.

Coming next: A test of Salix OS, and then I look at what happens when I tear packages out of Koala with only minimal concern about whether I'll break my install. And, of course, Lucid Lynx is coming, and there is an LXDE variant in development.

nUI and other addons

2010-04-12T03:03:00.003-04:00

I am having stability issues related to addons. I know it's the addons, because the load screen crashes stop when I disable them all. I blame the ones that are out of date, like my beloved HUD, StatusBars2. So I have been looking around WoW Interface for a replacement HUD.

One of the most popular is ICE Hud, but I was always cool to it. Its gargantuan size makes me think it is kludged together, and comments elsewhere about it being a CPU hog reinforced this. Others I looked at include MicroHUD and BroHUD. But the vagaries of Google and Ask wound up leading me to this thread.

If you want to see what nUI looks like and how it works, you should check out the screenshots posted on nUI download page at WoW Interface. The screenshots don't show combo points, but those are little red dots where the cast bar usually goes. With a stack of 5 combo points, they turn green.

I would consider using nUI and getting used to it.... except that my framerates dropped, to under 5 during all fights in Ulduar 10 man and running through Dalaran during Noblegarden, when everyone was there to get Shake Your Bunny Maker.

So I went searching for other HUDs. The first I considered was ouf_FavHUD2. This is not a stand alone addon, but a layout for oUF, which is a framework for custom unit frames, sort of like how LibDataBroker is a framework for data feeds. Most oUF layouts are off to the side of the screen, much like the default Blizzard layout. As a proof-of-concept, for using an oUF layout to make a HUD, it works great. But when it comes to being a HUD I would use, it fails.

I'm used to my HUD showing things very much like default unit frames do -- small horizontal bars with text values printed on them, only shown below my toon in the center of the screen, with buffs and debuffs just below the unit frames of the HUD. There are up to three: one for self, one for target, and one for pet. Favorit does everything very different from that. He uses the same sort of layout that IceHUD and nUI use, with large vertical bars for self on the left and target on the right, with focus outside self and target-of-target outside target. He uses a color gradient over life bars to show cast bar progress, but it's almost too subtle to see. Text values are to the inside of the life bars, and not shown for focus and ToT. Player buffs and debuffs are in the upper left corner of the screen, and target buffs and debuffs are in the upper right corner. In both places, they tend to overlay my NinjaPanel. So it works, but not for me.

I also tried BroHUD. It is a VERY simple HUD. The bar to the left shows player health, with text outside at the top, and the one to the right shows power, again with text outside at the top. Where it fails is in real time. I am used to my energy bar updating every 0.1 second. I have been ever since they got rid of the 20 energy every 2s energy gain model. I'm not sure what BroHUD's update interval is, but it is periodic, not real-time.

Careful examination of MicroHUD led me to not try it. It looks like the sort of unitframe addon I would like, only with info laid out in chunky blocks to the left and right of the player, with a player unitframe to the left and a target unitframe to the right. It might work out for me, but I would rather have that information displayed below the center of the screen.

But before I got around to trying it, I cleaned out a few of my other addons, and updated a bunch of others. In particular, I replaced Gatherer with GatherMate. While I love the Norganna community, their crown jewel is the Auctioneer suite. And between that and Gatherer, I'd rather have them do Auctioneer. StatusBars2 still works, and as far as I can tell, without error, so I am back to using it. EDIT: And my framerates in Ulduar were largely returned to what they were before I tried nUI.

My current Addons list:

Auctioneer Suite
BankItems
Broker: GotMail
Broker_Aileron
BugSack
Cellular
Deadly Boss Mods
DeathClock
evl_SliceDice
GatherMate
GearScoreLite
LeatrixGFX
LoadIT
MapReveal
ncImprovedMerchant
NinjaPanel
Omen3
OmniCC
PicoDPS
Postal
RangeColors 2.1.4
Statblock_Ammo
Statblock_Memory
StatusBars 2
TasteTheNaimbow
Trav's Unit Frame Extensions
TomTom
zBrokerDurability
zBrokerPerformance

Coming Soon

2010-04-07T19:28:00.003-04:00

Lots of good stuff to come this month. First will be a review of gigantic addon nUI, then news about CrunchBang Linux, and finally a test drive of SalixOS. Really exciting stuff!

I'm mentioning all this to put a bit of pressure on myself to actually do all of this before Lucid Lynx launches on the 29th. I'll be testing it in May. I'm glad I got The Noble Gardener achievement quickly. And it is because Lucid Lynx will be launching well before I can get into wattOS that I am not going to test that worthy distribution.

Linux Mint 8 Fluxbox

2010-03-06T12:03:00.002-05:00

The full name of the distro I am reviewing (and using) is Linux Mint 8 "Helena" Fluxbox Community Edition. But I think that is too long for a post title. I will be calling it Mint8FB throughout this review.

Linux Mint "Helena" is derived from Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10). Mint in general is often described as "Ubuntu Done Right." Mint Fluxbox edition was abandoned after Felicia (6), but a new developer, Kendall, picked it up for Helena. He has done yeoman's work. While the help and suggestions of the community have been invaluable, Mint8FB would not exist without him.

Most people use a Desktop Environment for their daily computing. These include KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and LXDE. They include a lot of different applications: a window manager, a file manager, a display manager, a picture viewer, a media player, a note app, an instant messager, a panel and its widgets, a menu manager, configuration apps, a text editor, a terminal emulator, an email client, a web browser, and quite possibly an office/productivity suite -- to start, anyway.

A lighter way to go is to start with just a window manager and only add the apps you need. This is the way CrunchBang is done. Corenominal started with an ubuntu minimal install, added OpenBox, Tint2, Leafpad, VLC, gpicview, Firefox, Terminator, and GDM.

Kendall has dome something similar, but he seems to have borrowed many of these apps from XFCE. Fluxbox is the window manager, of course. It has a nice graphical tool to set keybindings (and you will probably want to use it). The file manager is Thunar. At first, I found it easier to install PCmanFM. I don't know why, but Thunar has all the right file associations and PCmanFM doesn't. I don't feel like fooling with PCmanFM enough to fix all that, so I am learning Thunar instead. He's using Totem movie player, GPicView picture viewer, Firefox 3.5.x web browser, Sylpheed email client, Decibel music player, Catfish search tool, LXterminal, Mousepad text editor, Squeeze archive manager, Pidgin IM client, and OpenOffice.Org 3.1. XChat is configured to automatically join the Linux Mint support channel on spotchat.org. The folks there are usually alert and helpful, but most of them don't really know the Fluxbox edition. I wound up connecting to freenode.org and the #fluxbox channel for my fluxbox-specific questions.

Also included are Mint specific tools: mintUpdate, mintInstall, mintConfig. I like Synaptic better than mintInstall. But the "Mark all upgrades" button is gone from the mint build of Synaptic, so I use mintUpdate to check for and install updates. Normally mintUpdate is a little padlock in the system tray. If it's closed with a little check box, your system is up to date. If it's open, there are system updates available. Since it checks the repos for updates every 15 minutes, I let it make a check when I first power up, and kill it if there are no updates.

Conky is also available from the main Mint8FB menu: System > System Tools > Conky. One idea I took from the default Mint8FB conky was to use different colors for my upload, download, and CPU load graphs.

Mint8FB has less variety in window, widget, and icon styles than any other distro I have ever used. I think that aesthetics are probably the most disappointing thing about the distro.

Installation and setup

Installation is with Ubiquity. Kendall didn't put the slideshow into his build for it. It's too bad but I am sure he has his reasons. The live CD has GParted, so I used that to set up my partitions. Installation went flawlessly. Once Mint8FB was installed, I found Jockey (the tool developed by Ubuntu to install proprietary drivers, tweaked for Mint) from the main menu: System > System Tools > Hardware Drivers. It's also in mintConfig, under Hardware. I added the Wine repo for Ubuntu 9.10 using the command line instructions from this page. But the command line instructions didn't work for installing Wine. I used Synaptic instead.

I don't copy World of Warcraft to each home directory any more. Instead, I have learned to use fstab to mount the partition where I keep it into my home directory, and then add a bookmark to the directory with the Launcher.exe and Wow.exe to the file manager. I learned to fstab from this Ubuntu help page.

Most of what I needed to change to make Mint8FB more friendly to playing World of Warcraft was in the keybindings (System > Preferences > Keybindings or mintConfig, Hardware tab, Keybindings). Mod1 refers to alt, and Mod4 refers to the windows keys. The first two keybindings are for alt-drag (move window) and alt-right-drag (resize window). Fluxbox only has resizing handles at the bottom corners of windows, so I wanted to keep that function. I added shift to both the move and resize functions, and they no longer conflict with how I play WoW. Other default keybindings I use are Alt-f1 for the terminal and alt-f2 for a single command line. I added keyboard shortcuts to launch the file manager, web browser, and text editor.

Mint8FB does not have PulseAudio installed, so the sound issues I had in Koala did not arise. That was a huge relief. It does have Bluetooth, which I used Synaptic to remove. No mono-based apps are part of the distro.

Gameplay is about the same as in #!. Peak usage in Dalaran gives me framerates around 5 (my server is VERY high population -- locked, in fact), and I actually had framerates around 1 in Wintergrasp at the climax of the battle. Low-traffic zones have framerates from 15 to my cap of 30. Bear in mind that I am playing on a GeForce 7100 with only 128MB of RAM. But I have the sense that the 2.6.31.x kernel and 185 series nVidia driver available through Jockey from the Karmic Koala repositories perform slightly better than the 2.6.28.x kernel and 180 series nVidia drivers I had in #! 9.04, from the Jaunty Jackalope repos.

Sound in Koala

2010-01-08T20:16:00.003-05:00

So I've decided to look into fixes for the sound issues I had in Koala. I started by searching the ubuntu forums.

The first suggestion I ran across was to install a version of Wine with PulseAudio support. The howto is in this blog post. This fix has a drawback or two. First, you have to add another private repository. You have to trust the guy who built the software. Second, Wine is stuck at v1.1.31, which was released 9 October 2009. The author (Neil Wilson) built and compiled his version with PulseAudio on 11 November 2009. Additionally, I have no sound in WoW.

The second fix suggested was to change Wine to use oss instead of Alsa. I probably won't try that, see the complaint at the top of this thread about how either WoW has sound, or Ventrilo has sound, but never both at once. This is because oss can only run sound for one application at a time. The thread also includes instructions on using alsa-oss to feed an oss sound stream into alsa. Read posts #7 to #10. That didn't work for me either. I could have sound in Vent, or sound in WoW, but not both. And sound in Vent went bad.

The last option is to somehow do completely away with PulseAudio. You cannot just uninstall it with Synaptic, it wants to take the entire ubuntu-desktop with it. (EDIT: A lot of stuff in Gnome depends on libpulse0, about 17 packages plus mangler, but not the pulseaudio server.) There is a howto that looks pretty good in Post #4 of this thread. I am trying this now. EDIT: This has worked for me.

Review: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

2009-12-20T14:51:00.012-05:00

So I'm finally getting around to writing about Ubuntu Karmic Koala, after having it installed (on a new HD, and I ordered more RAM when I got it) for a week or so (about since Dec 13th). Lots of people complained about Koala when it was first released (Dedoimedo for one). But lots of people complain about every Ubuntu release when they come out. Check out this page for a comparison of reported experiences of most releases. The numbers you want are a good ways to the right. Bear in mind that the worse a person's problems are, the more likely they are to hit ubuntuforums.org (the source of the numbers) and gripe.

Being both lazy and cheap, I used the 32-bit live CD that Canonical sends through Shipit. I decided that for the purpose of this review I was going to use Ubuntu as it was installed, without modifying it beyond updates. At least, as much as I could.

Interface

The first thing you notice is that the theme has gone from very orange-yellow to very cocoa. That doesn't affect me much, I nearly always customise my color schemes. But there is one really nifty widget difference. Check out these two images from page two of the Ars Technica review.
Koala Widgets

Jaunty Widgets

The colors are set by selecting System -> Preferences -> Appearance, clicking "Customize" and then picking the Color tab. What's cool is that in the new Human controls theme, the highlight color is applied to slider tracks. I just wish they were applied more evenly. In some applications, the highlight color is applied to the full side of the slider, and in others, to the empty side.

Installation and Configuring

Installation is with Ubiquity. The two main changes are first, you are given the option of encrypting your /home partition during installation. Second, they have added a slideshow to explain features of the OS. This is something Windows has had at LEAST since Me. It's a good idea, it points converts in the right direction for many common tasks, so they are less likely to get frustrated by some of the differences. As always, I use Gparted (System -> Administration -> GParted {or Disk Partitioner, or something like that}) rather than Ubiquity to set up my disk partitions prior to installing.

The Ubuntu proprietary driver tool (which is called Jockey) works the same as it did in CrunchBang. If needed, it can be invoked from System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers. The current version in Koala is 185.18.36. When I try to save my settings to xorg.conf I get "Failed to parse existing X config file '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'!" Even when run as root. Rats.

Applications

Ubuntu has an excellent selection of applications. OpenOffice.org 3.1, Firefox 3.5, the usual Gnome utilities. Pidgin has been replaced by Empathy. I don't like it quite as much, but it seems pretty workable for my needs. There is a new software installation utility, at the very bottom of the Applications menu, called "Ubuntu Software Center." Originally it was going to be called "Ubuntu Software Store," with plans to include paid-for software, presumably encumbered by copyrights and even patents, with the FOSSware. This sends the Libre fanatics in the FOSS community frothing at the mouth. I can see why Canonical has done it, though. Red Hat is the only consistently profitable Linux company so far. They make their money selling training, support and repository subscriptions for their enterprise Linux customers. Nobody else is doing that anywhere nearly as well, and I don't really expect it. Other Linux companies will have to find their own business models. I don't think anyone is going to make a profit with just licensed merchandise. The Ubuntu Software Store could be a working model of how to make a profit with Linux.

I used Synaptic out of habit and installed xchat, Adobe flashplugin nonfree, gnome-alsamixer 0.97, and gweled from that. I just didn't see Ubuntu Software Center at the bottom of the Applications menu, until I was reminded of it and went looking for it. I used it to uninstall Evolution (email) and xsane (scanning). I wasn't willing to remove Compiz with it, because it was going to take the Gnome session manager with it. It makes installing things easier, but it doesn't give the sort of control I like over package management.

Sound

Koala uses PulseAudio as the default sound server. It is really loud. I wind up keeping main volume at about 30% and reduce it in nearly every application I use. PulseAudio also allows the use of a FOSS Ventrilo client I have recently found, Mangler. The look and feel are pretty similar, especially when connected, but the sound theme in Mangler is much more whimsical.

WINE still uses ALSA. ALSA and PulseAudio do not work well together. More on this later.

Wine and WoW

Installing Wine has gotten even easier. Go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and select the Other Software tab. Click "Add" and paste ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa into the Dialog box and click "Add Source". Fire up Synaptic, search for Wine, mark the 1.1.xx for installation, click "Apply" and you are done. Instructions are directly from this page on WineHQ.org (which includes screenshots). Once you have Wine installed, you need to run winecfg (either use Alt-F2 to bring up a run dialog box, or go Applications -> Wine -> Configure Wine) This will populate ~/.wine with a directory structure that will act like a normal Windows environment for your Windows applications.

The copy of World of Warcraft from my failing disk, well, failed. I downloaded the installer from Blizzard. You go to World of Warcraft, select "Account Management" from on the right, log in using your Battle.net account, and click "Download PC Client." Save InstallWoW.exe to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files and run it. If you get a complaint about it not being an archive, right-click, select "properties", select the "Open With" tab, and pick "Wine Windows Program Loader" out of the list. This becomes the default for all Windows executables. I selected "Wrath of the Lich King" from the product list.

Once the Installer had finished, I ran WoW.exe from Nautilus, not bothering with the -opengl switch at this time. Logging in downloaded and installed the 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3 patches in succession. Each patch install ran Launcher.exe by default, which in turn removed all permission from the World of Warcraft directory. Fixing this requires opening a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and running the command
chmod 755 "/home/[user]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft"
each time Launcher.exe is launched. Use Shift-Insert to paste to the terminal. Once the 3.3 patch had been installed, I tried to log in, but ran into this problem:

I found a solution on ubuntuforums.org: download the Microsoft Visual C++ SP1 Redistributable Package from this page. Save it to your ~~/Program Files directory and run it from there.

Configuring and Running the Game

Having finally logged in, WoW generated the World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf file. I added SET gxAPI "OpenGL" to it, and the line vm.swappiness = 0 to my /etc/sysctl.conf file. Only do this if you have plenty of RAM for World of Warcraft. It completely disables swap usage. And since WoW keeps every texture file it loads in RAM, it could use all available memory, locking up your system. I started doing this when I had about 1.35GB of RAM free when I started WoW. I would monitor RAM usage with Conky, and when it got to about 100-200MB free, game performance would crap out and I would reboot. It is VITAL to have a RAM monitoring applet running if you are going to do this. If you do not wish to disable swap, your best bet is to set vm.swappiness=100. Swap is one of the biggest destroyers of framerates out there. Default swap is terribly slow. Setting vm.swappiness at its maximum value helps make it less slow than it would otherwise be, by increasing the priority of swap usage.

Sound was the biggest issue. I listen to the game, and I count on sound effects to tell me a lot of what is going on. But sound stuttered horribly. I haven't pinned down what is causing this, and don't really know how to start. The fix I have been using is to add a line to my Config.wtf file: SET SoundBufferSize "[value]" Value is from 50 to 250, and different values seem to work each time. It is all very annoying, and I expect to revert back to my previous distro on the basis of that flaw.

I plan to try wattOS next. I just need to get myself some blank CD-Rs first.

Preparing for Linux Dual-Boot

2009-12-19T19:07:00.005-05:00

All kinds of people run Linux without dual-booting. But Live CDs are absolutely no way to run World of Warcraft in Linux, and a Wubi install of Ubuntu does not perform as well as Ubuntu on its own partition(s). Since boosting WoW performance is one of my regular issues, I suggest installing to a dedicated partition. If you have a whole disk you can format for Linux, you can ignore most of this.

Check Disk Space

Microsoft suggests that Windows have at least 30% of disk space free. I think they are padding that to ensure top performance. I have seen Windows work fine on a disk with only 15% of disk space free.

To find out how much space you are using, open your My Computer icon, right-click the drive c: icon, and select Properties. (I'm sure it's different for Vista and Seven, but I have never seen or used either of those.) Multiply the amount of space used by 1.3 to keep 15% of space free, and by 1.5 to keep 30% of space free, for your Windows partition. Then add 5GB for Linux, and (optionally) 25GB for WoW. I read some people run WoW in Linux out of their Windows partition. I never have, but I don't see why it can't be done. Then figure out your swap needs: anywhere from RAM + 512MB to 2x RAM. If you don't have enough space, you will need to clean up your disk.

Disk Cleanup

First, run the Windows Disk Cleanup accessory, and remove and uninstall any services you don't need. Use the Add/Remove Software tool in the Control Panel to remove any programs you don't use. Many people like to use utilities like Fine Uninstall and nLite to do that sort of thing. You should also think about removing programs where Linux alternatives exist. Many of them work better, especially anything to do with the internet. That's why I first started dual-booting in 2007 -- because Windows 2000 would regularly load only part of many large files, like some .jpgs and most YouTube videos. Sometimes, I would have to try with Opera and even Internet Explorer when a file was docked when Firefox downloaded it.

Disk Maintenance

This is NOT optional. After freeing up as much disk space as you can, get and run a registry cleaner. I used RegSeeker and it's pretty good, but a friend of mine says that Registry Repair is better. Run it at least twice.

Third, defrag your disk. Even if you did not need to free up disk space, this is probably one of the most important things you can do to make sure that nothing is corrupted or lost when you resize your Windows partition. If you don't like the Windows disk defragmenter, you can try the Auslogics Disk Defrag instead. It is probably faster.

If you also have a disk optimizer, use that too. It will move all your files to the front of the hard disk. If you find one that is FOSS, or at least giftware, please let me know. I would like to recommend it to my readers.

Optional

The most up to date Linux distros these days favor the Ext4 journaling file system. It is the default for Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. But if you plan to use Ext3, which is not quite as fast and does not handle the huge files and partitions that Ext4 does, then you should get Ext2 IFS for Windows. It will allow you to read Ext2 and Ext3 file systems in Windows. I use Ext3 on an old IDE drive I use for archiving, and Ext4 for everything else.

Archive!

Protect your data. As much as possible, compress and copy to some storage device other than your main HD. While I have never lost data by resizing a Windows partition, I cannot promise that you will be so lucky -- or that I will, next time.

Chosing Your Distro (for beginners)

2009-12-18T15:01:00.001-05:00

This is too long!

Go for Linux Mint. The Linux Mint team started with Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a very good distro, and the community is friendly, helpful, and very, very large. The Mint team improved Ubuntu, by making it much easier to use Adobe Flash and proprietary codecs. They also kept the Ubuntu proprietary driver tool, and made Gnome a lot more like Windows than it is in base Ubuntu. It retains the broad Ubuntu driver base, and nearly any command-line fix that works for Ubuntu works for Mint, so the Mint community is nearly always able to pick the good fixes from the Ubuntu forums and post them on their own. There's typically several users in the IRC chatroom that are paying attention. Right now, there is hardly a better distro for the typical starter or new convert.

But I want to use KDE!

Go for openSUSE. I think that Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) is a lot better at Gnome than KDE, and I am not alone. But SUSE was KDE-centric for a long time, and the community has decided to make openSUSE KDE-centric again. In my last review of openSUSE, I found it was really easy to find and install both the ATI and nVidia drivers: you go to the right web page on the wiki, and click the right button. WINE is almost as easy. As far as I'm concerned, the instructions are really clear. See my review for instructions on both. And there's YAST, the all-in-one graphical tool for administration, configuration, and customization. Enough poking around in YAST will solve most new user problems.

Other Distros

Fedora is an excellent distro for somebody who really wants cutting edge software, but doesn't know the stuff required to install Arch Linux or configure sidux. But setting up nVidia drivers in Fedora seems pretty involved. It's less involved for Mandriva (see instructions for One), but there is no Wine repository for Mandriva. You can download and install binaries from Sourceforge, but that's not so fully integrated into package management. Debian isn't really regarded as a starter's distro. Slackware, Gentoo, and Arch Linux are definitely not starter distros.

Mint is too resource-heavy!

Try CrunchBang Linux. The desktop interface is non-intuitive for new users but I think it is very efficient (here's my review). Ubuntu 9.10 uses about 180MB of RAM on my rig with the default setup. CrunchBang 9.04.01 Lite typically used about 110-125MB. If #! doesn't appeal to you, consider moonOS. The LXDE version is both lighter and more familiar than the Enlightenment version. Enlightenment is built around some novel and innovative concepts. The English localizations are not perfect, but they are far from awful. In both communities, the latest version is still based on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. There is a Fluxbox Community Edition of Linux Mint in the works, but it isn't ready yet. (See this Mint forums thread.) It will be rip-roaring fast and light once it is. Hopefully it will be early in 2010.

3.3 Patch Broke WoW!

2009-12-15T18:07:00.002-05:00

I got a Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Error when I tried to log in to World of Warcraft, after updating to patch 3.3. This thread fixed the issue for me.

Why People Try Linux

2009-12-13T16:39:00.004-05:00

There are lots of reasons besides mine for trying linux. In no particular order, here are some of them:

It's Inexpensive

Most distros are as free as free beer. That includes all of the ones I recommend and review. You don't have to pay anyone to download, install, or use them. Most of your costs will be of time, not money.

I Like New and Different

Microsoft and Apple usually don't release new versions of their operating systems but once every two or three years. Ubuntu gets a new release every six months. If you check Distrowatch, you will usually find a bunch of new releases every week. Arch Linux uploads updates to all of their packages whenever they are ready. Sidux usually gets a new kernel every day. There is always something new in FOSS. And as I said in my last post, Linux is very different from Windows.

I Like Choices

The whole point of the GPL is to give you the choice to do what you like with software. Many people develop FOSSware just so they can have an app that does just what they want, just how they want it to. So no matter what you want to do, there are probably lots of apps to do it. Take web browsing: I can name Firefox, Seamonkey (the follow-up to Netscape Navigator), Konqueror, Midori, elinks (text only), Ayama -- all just off the top of my head. I know there are at least a couple more webkit browsers currently being developed. Checking the Ubuntu repositories reminds me of Abrowser, Arora, Conkeror, Chimera2, Dooble, Kazehakase, Netrik, and Netsurf.

I Like Customization

Don't like the way your desktop looks? Get some new artwork for it. People make eye candy for their desktops all the time, and most of it gets uploaded to the Internet. You can get (or make) different window decorations, different icon sets, different color schemes, different wallpaper, different panel themes, different widget themes, and on and on. If it's Gnome, visit gnome-look.org and art.gnome.org. If it's KDE, visit kde-look.org. There is also xfce-look.org for XFCE users, box-look.org for window manager based interfaces, and e17-stuff.org for the Enlightenment desktop.

I Like Control

No proprietary operating system will give you the control that a FOSS OS will. EULAs nearly always forbid you to examine, let alone change, the source code. And by choosing your distro wisely, you can strike the right balance for you, on dependency resolution: from highly automated, with minimal input or knowledge required (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, PCLinuxOS) to complete control, with you approving or disapproving every package on the system (Slackware, Linux From Scratch). And there are distros at every point in between.

I Like Security

Windows XP is not inherently insecure. (EDIT: That is easily disputed.)It's just set up to be completely insecure, and there is a lot of software that won't run if you are trying to use some basic security practices, like running as a mere user, instead of the all-powerful Administrator. In nearly all Linux distros, administrator intervention is only needed to add and remove software, and to edit system configuration files. And if you really want to, you can change that, too.

I Want Less Malware

Windows has so much malware because nearly everyone nearly always runs it as Administrator. Running when any click, web page, or email has the privileges to install software is what gets most people infected with worms, trojans, spyware, and viruses. Too bad there is so much user software that just will not work unless you are running as Administrator, and that most of it does not work well (and sometimes not at all) using the "Run as Administrator" option. Most FOSS distros require no such thing. You have to put in a password to install software or configure system files, but that's it. Almost no userland type of software requires root privileges.

I Like Rapid Bugfixes

Microsoft patches once a month, and there is a minimum delay of one week between a bug or security report and a patch. So security holes last at LEAST one to five weeks. Some never get fixed.

FOSS developers keep close track of information about their software. Some programmers who file bug reports include patch code with the report. Developers may use this code directly, or base their own patch on ideas in those sent in. They upload patches immediately, and patches usually work their way into repositories in a few days at most.

I Like Freedom

When you get proprietary software, you have no rights. You have a license (permission) to use it. You don't own it. The publisher is the one who owns it. This includes a lot of software that you don't have to pay for (aka giftware). You have permission to use it, and that's it. You don't have permission to copy it, distribute it, decompile it, modify it, adapt it, or look at or use its code.

With open source software, you pretty much do own your copy. You can do anything you like with it. But when you give it, or software you built from it, to somebody else (either for free or in exchange for money), then they own their copy, and have the same rights you do.

Signs You Should Not Use Linux

2009-12-09T22:45:00.002-05:00

Linux is not for everyone. There are boosters who would froth at the mouth to hear a user say so, but it is true. Nearly all Linux boosters love Linux in part because it gives more choices and freedom. But if you are going to give somebody freedom, you have to accept that some people will choose differently. Some will make a choice that is entirely wrong for you, and it will be the right choice for them. So here are some reasons I think are good ones for not making the switch.

I already hate it!

If you have used Linux before, enough to learn how to solve problems, and you still hate it, you should not switch. I am not going to argue with you about your feelings. But if you have not learned to solve even one of your problems, I don't think you have given Linux a fair shake.

I don't have time!

It is more fair to say that you don't want to use your time to learn Linux. I think this is an entirely fair beef. If you have other things you would rather do with your time, who am I, or anyone else, to tell you they aren't more worth it?

But I need (whatever)!

This is another fair beef. If you need a specific program, and it doesn't work (well enough) in Wine (check the Wine AppDB), and there is no Linux equivalent (or they aren't close enough), you ought to keep your current OS, at least part time. You might want to try Wubi, the Windows Ubuntu installer (less risk) or dual boot (better performance), though.

I like my current OS just fine!

Seriously, if this is true, it is reason enough to stay with it. But be honest with yourself. For most people, the world where Windows "just works" is a dream land. Keep track of how often you really have Windows problems for a month or two. Mark them on your calendar so you will be honest with yourself.

Of course, there are also a lot of bogus reasons to not switch to Linux.

There's no support!

There is SCADS of support! Googling "ubuntu linux help" got me over 15 million English pages. Ubuntu tech support got 1.74 million pages. Mandriva help, openSUSE help, Fedora linux help, and Debian help each yeilded over a million pages. Paid support is available all over the place too, starting with Canonical themselves. Red Hat makes their money providing support to their clients. There are sites, IRC channels, mailing lists and service professionals everywhere. Finding support is not the problem. The problem is narrowing it down to the help you need. That is an acquired skill.

It's not ready for desktop!

Neither are Windows and Mac. Each has their own set of bugs, issues, and problems. But since over 90% of desktop usage is web surfing, instant messaging, email, managing digital photos, and word processing -- all of which are done as well in many Linux distros as they are in Windows or OSX -- I don't buy that.

It doesn't work like Windows!

Linux is supposed to be different from Windows. Linus Torvalds wrote the original Linux kernel because he did not like the way Windows worked. There are some programs with graphical interface designs heavily derived from Windows, but most of the time they just pass commands to command line programs. The distro that I think has gone the farthest to feel comfortable and sensible to Windows users is Linux Mint.

You have to be a genius/ uber-geek/ computer science professional!

Not any more, at least not for most distros. Some are still be like that, but certainly not the ones I have reviewed here. I haven't used Wubi, but it looks like the most stupid easy way to install Linux ever developed. People are not any smarter in the developing nations where Linux is most popular, and I think they would have less support.

Hardware support stinks!

Lots less than it used to, and don't pretend that Windows never has hardware issues. Ubuntu and Fedora both have made huge strides in supporting more and more hardware.

Should you switch to Linux? I really don't know. It depends on you and your needs. But if you decide not to, at least do it for a real reason, and not a bogus one.

Disk Woes

2009-12-05T16:00:00.003-05:00

My main hard disk has been failing at least since July. I found out when I first looked at Fedora 11. (Why I didn't try it is at the bottom of this post.) Fedora included Palimpsest, which is a disk utility. It told me my main HD had bad sectors. Palimpsest is also included in Ubuntu 9.10, and it showed me 385 bad sectors. I had Ubuntu Karmic Koala installed, but had not finished setting it up for World of Warcraft or even cleaning out cruft when the MBR failed. I am currently using Puppy Linux 4.1.2 live. It's kind of out of date, but because it is a lot faster than any of my other Live CDs and includes flash, it is a better "working" OS.

In the meantime I am not playing any World of Warcraft, so of course I am finding other ways to occupy my time. Like this:

I think it is a better version than the color one that they made later because it has some lines that they cut out of later versions.

Ventrilo Client

2009-11-29T15:57:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure what my issue with Ventrilo is any more. Somebody using Mint 7 posted Gold results to WineHQ's AppDB. Mint 7 has the same Jaunty base as the CrunchBang 9.04.01 I am using. Ventrilo still has no mux or line in the hardware mixer.

I discovered Mangler today. It is a FOSS client for Ventrilo 3.x servers. Right now it does not work either. I have lots of research to do. I may have to update to a Karmic Koala derived distro.

EDIT:
Well, reading the howto on the Vent client's WineHQ AppDB Page enabled me to actually activate my mike. Volume was way, way too low, until I went and installed the gnome-alsamixer package, and enabled mic front input. I did not need Mic boost after that.

Distro News and Musings

2009-11-29T10:54:00.005-05:00

Today I went to Distrowatch. The Karmic-based version of Linux Mint (Helena) has been released. I remember seeing a thread on their forums about an LXDE version. The Mint community has not developed one yet. So I went to see what news there was for LXDE-based derivatives of Ubuntu.

Lubuntu did not meet its originally proposed launch, which was supposed to be with Karmic Koala. The Lubuntu team is nowhere near ready to drop a release-candidate version. But you can download the latest development ISO from here.

I have not seen any real progress from the U-lite community at all. But wandering their forums, I found links to Masonux. Christopher Thomas Mason has used CrunchBang, but thought it was too heavy and overloaded for his purposes.

So he whipped up Masonux from the Ubuntu Minimal CD. He built a remastered LiveCD ISO from Jaunty, which you can download here. His instructions for building from the Karmic minimal CD are posted on this page. Instructions to add popular packages are on this page.

Masonux is an intermediate distro, not a beginner distro. But more and more, I think that I am going to have to get at least a little ways away from beginner's distros to really pare down on the weight of my operating system. And it looks like it would be a lot easier than building up from Arch or a Debian netinstall.

Debian Live should be easier than a netinstall. There is an LXDE iso free for download. The Debian Free Software Guidelines mean that no proprietary software will be in the base distribution, or available without tweaking your repo list. That would include most media codecs and the AMD and nVidia drivers. Again, that is not a beginner way, but finding and installing the extras needed to run WoW in Linux are probably easier than building and configuring a desktop environment.

Apropos of random OS chatter, a new version of ReactOS was released back in July, version 0.3.10. It is still in alpha and will be through 0.4, with 0.5 planned as the first beta release, and suitable for everyday use. There is not much evidence of updates on the PureDarwin site. Developers still require a full, working version of Macintosh OSX to develop PureDarwin. Neither is ready for me to use. But I'm glad to see that both are still making progress.

More On Patching and Permissions

2009-11-19T21:37:00.002-05:00

Because Launcher.exe removes all owner permissions to the World of Warcraft folder (see Patching and Permissions), the launcher cannot get the background downloader started. Like the game client, BackgroundDownloader.exe must be run separately. If you are running it from the terminal, use

wine "/home/[username]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/BackgroundDownloader.exe"

More Addons

2009-11-15T13:09:00.002-05:00

I've grabbed two new addons.

VirtualPlates. This looks GREAT. I like having nameplates up, but when there are a lot of them -- think Onyxia when the whelps spawn -- they can be overwhelming. This addon scales them down with distance. It also lets you set how big they can get, and how small they can get, and how far away the mob has to be for the nameplate to disappear. EDIT: My framerate has tanked. I blame this, since ColorTools only changes one dialog box. I will try again when I have a GPU better than my 128 MB Geforce FX 7100.

ColorTools. I like this. I like to set chat channel colors. This will let me make them more consistent among my many many toons. You can use HTML hex codes (another example here) or RGB saturation to pick your colors instead of the default color wheel. It includes a saturation slider.

Patching and Permissions

2009-11-12T16:38:00.003-05:00

The patch Blizzard launched on 10 November 2009 changed the launcher. It now wrecks permissions for the World of Warcraft folder. It removes all permissions for the user who owns it. I could not even enter the folder.

Thanks to Ubuntu Forums, I have a fix that ought to work for any distro using bash. Open a terminal, and paste in

chmod 755 "/home/[user]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft"

From that point on, do not run Launcher.exe. Instead, invoke the Wow.exe client directly:

wine "/home/[user]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Wow.exe"

Distrowatch

2009-11-04T19:25:00.004-05:00

Just got around to checking the latest issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Good news there.

Obviously, Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) has launched. I am waiting for my Live CD to come from Canonical. Canonical is not giving them away with the same abandon that they used to. But I expect them to send me one. I am poor and live in a remote area, and Canonical gives priorities to people they think will have a hard time getting the download. All of the official Canonical variants have also launched: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu, and Edubuntu.

We can also expect most of the Ubuntu-based distros to launch new versions soon: Linux Mint, CrunchBang, Ultimate Edition, Easy Peasy, PC/OS, nUbuntu, MoonOS, Fluxbuntu, WattOS, OpenGEU, gNewSense, ZevenOS, BackTrack, gOS, and no doubt some others.

More interesting to me is the short time remaining until there are new versions of Mandriva (yesterday), openSUSE (due 12 November), and Fedora (due 17 November). I will be checking to see if there is an easy way to add a Wine repo to Mandriva, and if I find one, Mandriva gets added to the list of distros to try. Novell has launched a service called SUSE Studio. It does a lot of things, but the most interesting is letting users basically roll their own distro from SUSE. That sounds super cool, and I hope they don't charge for it. And I really hope that Fedora 12 includes a fix to let the kernel boot from an ext4 partition. That is what kept me from using Fedora 11.

Why My Guild Avoids Children

2009-10-12T01:15:00.005-04:00

Why does my guild have a general rule against children as members?

Without it, you wind up with a lot more behavior like this.

A Recommended Linux Guide

2009-09-23T21:43:00.005-04:00

I just ran across a recommendation for a Linux guide titled, "The Easiest Linux Guide You Will Ever Read" by Scott Morris. It is written for the competent Windows user. It is offered as a gratis PDF file. You can download it here. It is based on using openSUSE linux. It was written for openSUSE 10.1, which is now up to 11.1, with 11.2 well along the development pipeline. But most of the principles should still apply, especially finding help and using the command line. The installation screenshots look very much like what I saw with 11.1. If Scott Morris is as careful about explaining concepts as well as giving examples as he says, then the book will be very useful even if you are not using openSUSE.

Almost half the book is devoted to installation. This is not a bad thing, though. Like Scott says, in actual use Linux is very much like Windows most of the time. Installation is probably what is scariest for the new user. One piece of advice I wish he had given is, if you are setting up with dual-boot, MAKE BACKUPS FIRST. Of course, I have more suggestions as well. The risk of data loss is small but real.

The GUI use examples all are based on KDE 3.5.x, which is by now well behind the curve. Even Slackware has moved on to 4.2.x. I skimmed past that section pretty quickly. I do not remember much of my KDE experience from PCLOS. I did not get much into KDE with either SimplyMEPIS or Kubuntu, so I can't say how applicable it is. The command line stuff looks like it would help with any distro that uses bash, the Bourne Again SHell -- which is most of them.

Cataclysm: Follow-up

2009-09-12T11:39:00.003-04:00

Some random observations on Cataclysm that I should have put into my other three posts.

Gameplay

According to this chart, Dwarfs, Humans, and Worgen each get eight classes. Draeni and Night Elves get seven classes. Gnomes get only six classes, the least of any race. On the Horde side, Blood Elves, Goblins, and Trolls get eight classes, while Undead, Orcs, and Tauren get seven. So the Alliance gets one less race/class combination than the Horde, and only good looks to make up for it (so far). I'll have to see how the modified racials come out before I can say for sure. Not only that, but gnomes are the only race left in the game that cannot be played as hunters. The stubbies are snubbed again! T_T

On one hand, Blizzard keeps saying they don't want uniformity. They say that they are keeping each race and class different from all the others, while still keeping things sort of balanced. More race/class combos means that each race has more classes in common with each other. That seems like less diversity to me. But I suppose that this means each class will be more diverse, so play styles in each class will be too.

On the other, two things I see that are absolutely imposing total uniformity of gameplay are jousting and vehicles. The harpoon guns, the demolishers, the glaive throwers, the jousting, all of these things are exactly the same for everybody. And I think they are going to get more common, not less.

Ranked Battlegrounds

This is an idea whose time has come. From what I can see, people who do these ranked battlegrounds can get arena points and ratings out of it. That surely includes me. I don't really have anyone I can do arenas with.

Guild Leveling

This article is first of a six part series. The author has linked each part to all the others, huzzah! The last one will be up on 14 September. Everything my GL has heard, she likes. Blizzard is rewarding loyalty and activity. My GL has valued loyalty over nearly everything else for the eight years I have been in her guilds, both in UO and WoW. She is eager to see these changes come.

Cataclysm: Lore, Story, and Role-Play

2009-09-06T11:21:00.002-04:00

I have figured out why I like some of my toons more than others. Basically, it comes down to "Would I like myself if I was this guy?"

This is why I don't like playing elves. Night elves are uptight, self-consciously hip, and repressed. Seriously, make a male night elf toon (if only for a few minutes) and do his emotes. I am especially thinking of /laugh, /cry, /flirt (there are 5 or 6), and /silly (again, there are 5 or 6). Listen and tell me he's not repressed and self-conscious about his hipness. Then do his /dance and tell me he is not SERIOUS about his hipness.

Blood elves are mean and arrogant. Try one, male or female, and listen to their /silly and /flirt emotes. You will see what I am talking about.

Sorry, but none of that appeals to me. I like lame (like humans), enthusiastic (like dwarfs), or both (like gnomes). I don't play warlocks for about the same reason. I just don't think I would like myself if I used fragments of other peoples' souls to entice demons into doing my bidding. I guess I've just lost the taste for playing a warlock ever since I was on mine, helping another in my guild with a quest, and did /e holds a Soul Shard to his ear and smiles. "You can still hear the screaming...."

Thrall gets captured by humans (again) and rescued by a band of castaway goblins, the Bilgewater Cartel. They alone join the Horde. The Steamwheedle Cartel retain their sensible "profitable trade with all, entangling alliances with none" philosophy, and the Venture Company continues with "screw everybody but us."

It is going to be a great time to be an orc. Malfurion Stormrage returns to invest Thrall as the Guardian of Tirisfal. What could be more inspiring to an orc than that?

It will be a lousy time to be honorable Horde, unless you think honor begins and ends with conquest. Thrall will resign as Warchief, and appoint Garrosh Hellscream as his successor. Maybe Thrall thinks it will properly honor his dead friend Grom (Garrosh is Grom's son). Seriously, his throne room Grommash Hold, and Grom'gol Base Camp, are both named for Grommash Hellscream. Isn't that enough?

Maybe he doesn't think he has anyone better. I've seen people say Overlord Saurfang would be a better choice, but Saurfang is old and will die while King Varian Wrynn is still vigorous. Garrosh was a do-nothing in Burning Crusade, and is an arrogant hothead in Wrath of the Lich King. Saurfang pulls his nuts out of the fire at least a couple of times in each, and I do not see how Thrall can not know this. Garrosh is also going to murder Cairne Bloodhoof. But clearly he hasn't read the Evil Overlord List, because he lets Cairne's son Baine not just live, but take over Thunder Bluff. So, not just arrogant and hotheaded, but stupid too.

Greymane's Wall gets destroyed, and the human kingdom of Gilneas comes back out from behind it. They show the world that they are (sort of) dealing with the Worgen curse, and re-join the Alliance. The Worgen are supposed to have an edgy, Wolverine vibe. So the main RP element is going to be "fighting the beast within." No thanks. I like enthusiastic and lame. Self-consciously hip is bad enough, but edgy dramatics and internal torment are even worse. No fun at all. I could be wrong, but right now, it looks like the Alliance still does not have a druid race I am going to like.

As a side note, Nordrassil is regrowing, not to mention that Malfurion Stormrage is returning. If this means that Teldrassil will fall, I really hope it takes Arch Druid Fandral Staghelm with it. That guy is so full of himself, he just really needs to fail -- BIG. He does not have to die, as long as he learns he is not really the new god of the elves. Given Blizzard's usual treatment of arrogant heroes, he is far more likely to become a new villain -- probably the new point man for whatever evil infests the Emerald Nightmare. There has to be somebody once Deathwing is conquered.

Deathwing the Destroyer is the source of all the changes. He has recovered enough from the destruction of the Demon Soul to rise again. Since he was buried so deep, he naturally tears the world above him apart as he surfaces. This is the lore that Blizzard is using to explain their complete restructuring of Azeroth. I am okay with that. Of course, Deathwing is also a threat so grave and vast that Alliance and Horde must work together (or at least not against each other) to deal with him, even as their leaders get really hawkish with each other.

Blizzard does this all the time. It saves them a lot of development if the same threat can be used to menace both factions. They did this with Ahn'Qiraj, they did this with Outlands, and they did it with the Lich King. But it means they have to work two incompatible stories: the ceaseless conflict between Alliance and Horde, and the Vast Threat That Must (at least temporarily) Unite Them!

So I doubt Blizzard will be able to leave both Horde and Alliance with angry, bloodthirsty, hawks as leaders for too long. Sooner or later, they will have to put somebody cool in charge of each, again. I think King Varian has a decent chance of overcoming his anger and bloodthirst. Magni Bronzebeard, Brann Bronzebeard, and Jaina Proudmoore have all been able to work with the Horde, and he can't ignore them all forever.

Warchief Garrosh Hellscream will probably have to be ousted in a coup, or else assassinated. Vol'Jin could become the voice of reason, but I don't see the trolls as having much influence. Lady Sylvanas Windrunner is plenty bitter about humans already because of the Scarlet Crusade, and then Varian insulted her. The Blood Elves are overall very bitter about the entire Alliance. Baine Bloodhoof is young and untested, and Garrosh doesn't think much of him anyway. I think Blizzard is developing Garrosh Hellscream into somebody who will betray the Horde as bad as Arthas Menethil betrayed the Alliance.

Like many Big Bad Guys in World of Warcraft, Deathwing is totally psycho because he was a good guy who listened to the Old Gods and went mad from it. The Old Gods have minds so vast, so powerful and so malevolent that anyone who listens to them goes crazy. This is all obviously derived from H. P. Lovecraft.

I do not like H. P. Lovecraft. His basic theme is, "There are two kinds of people in the world. The supposedly normal people are actually delusional. Reality is actually controlled by intellects vast, distant, alien, and indifferent. These beings make reality totally suck because they Just Do Not Care enough not to do so. And there is nothing that anybody can do about it. The more you know the truth, the more totally bugnuts insane you get." How does anybody actually like this crap?

Then there are the thematic problems that this approach creates. After all, the Old Gods were too evil and nasty and cunning and powerful for the Titans, or the Dragons, or Cenarius, or Elune, or the Naaru, or any other more-or-less "divine" power in the World of Warcraft to deal with. But put together a band of 10, 25, or 40 mortals, at max level and with mighty, though mortal-made equipment, and they can do it! Sorry, but when that is how the story goes, my response is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I mean, seriously? Blech.

I never did Ahn'Qiraj but it turns out that this is the way it goes -- the final boss you defeat is an Old God, C'thun. He's sort of dead for now, but like any comic book villain, he will get better. It is Deathwing's story too. At least two or three times now he has been defeated, and the victors say, "Surely he is dead."

And Blizzard will want to ramp up the threat level of the ultimate raid boss every so often. Sooner or later they're going to get tired of just sending lieutenants and minions of the Old Gods and have each of the Old Gods step in themselves, to handle us. War Against the Gods storylines have always left me cold. The more Blizzard relies on this sort of thing, the less I am going to like World of Warcraft.

Cataclysm: Graphics

2009-09-03T22:27:00.003-04:00

Landscape

Ever since Burning Crusade, people have begged to fly their own mounts in original WoW. Blizzard always said, "Nope. A lot of the world is really just backdrops and facades, like a movie set. If you could go anywhere, you could see the shortcuts we took and we don't want that. We would have to rebuild the world from the ground up and now is not the time."

With Cataclysm, now is the time. Blizzard pretty much took Azeroth apart and put it back together, prettier and without shortcuts. Now you can fly anywhere. I haven't heard one way or another, but I hope that one of the things they are improving is the models of the original eight races. They look pretty dated next to draeni and blood elves, and no doubt there will be further improvements when they add goblins and worgen. If they do, they may give out re-customization. I sure hope so.

Also, Blizzard rearranged which zones are what level, to make the level grind/questing path more intuitive and easier. If this means that sales of leveling guides fall, more power to Blizzard. How rich you are shouldn't make that much difference in how well you play.

But it does. Some raid leaders now do gear checks on your character AND your PC. And it will get worse. Blizzard is also improving the graphics, especially water. There will be actual waves, not just ripples, and it will actually reflect whatever is in the environment -- sky, landscape, toons, mobs. As the game gets prettier, it gets more demanding. I will probably have to replace my graphics card, a PCIe GeForce 7100 with 128MB RAM. It was behind the curve when I got it four years ago, and it probably won't cut the mustard with Cataclysm.

I may have to replace my whole rig. I have an AMD Socket 939 motherboard. AMD has not made any socket 939 processors in I don't know how long, so they are very rare by now. I have a single core 64 bit 2GHz CPU. That's not quite as bad as it sounds. I just run WoW pretty much alone, no need for multiprocessing. Newer processors tend to have more cores instead of more raw speed. I think my processor was introduced in 2003 and even now, the fastest AMD processors are only up to about 3.9 GHz. Their system busses are probably a lot faster though.

If Blizzard comes out with a 64 bit client for WoW, that won't actually help very much. While Linux has had 64 bit kernels for years, the Wine project has a long way to go before there is even an alpha 64 bit version of Wine. The 64 bit client would make Microsoft very happy. Almost everybody playing WoW in Windows XP would have to upgrade their OS, and that would mean buying a new computer to go with it.

RAM could be another issue. The best that my mobo can handle is DDR400, aka PC3200. I only have 1.5GB of RAM right now, and it's enough for WoW and #! Linux. But if WoW gets a lot bigger, everything will have to go. I will have to get a new motherboard, a new CPU, a new GPU, and probably a new hard drive. I'll also need more power, so a new power supply. That means more heat, and probably a new case for more cooling. If I have to replace my system, I will probably spend around $600 and wind up only a couple years behind the curve -- again.

Cataclysm: Gameplay

2009-09-02T18:05:00.003-04:00

One of Blizzard's core values is "Gameplay First!" Let's start with that.

Characters

New races, new race/class combinations. All classes can be played by at least two races of each faction. This feeds my altoholic discontent.

I like to play all races and all classes. You can't build enough toons on one account to play all combinations, at least not at once. But it helps to understand from experience how all the racial abilities work, and how all the classes work.

Orcs get to be mages, yawn. Undead get to be hunters, yawn again. Tauren get to be Holy Cows! Both Priests and Paladins. This makes tauren the number one tank race in the game, the only one able to play all four tanking classes: warriors, druids, death knights, and now paladins. They are also the only race able to play all four healer classes in the game: druids, paladins, priests, and shamans. Finally, I can play a paladin for the Horde without having to play a blood elf!

Trolls get to play druids! Whee! I love trolls. I expect to find a troll druid just plain more fun than a tauren druid, and of course, MUCH more fun than a night elf. I think it would have fit the lore better if they got warlocks instead. Lore says that warlocks are corrupted mages or shamans. Trolls get to play both of those, but not warlocks. But the Horde has to have a second race that plays druids, and trolls are the least bad choice. This is going to make the night elf lore nuts totally wig out over the entire night elf/troll connection.

Blood elves get to play warriors. Yawn, yet again.

Goblins get to play eight of the ten classes, everything except druids and paladins. For the moment, I feel that mage, warlock, and rogue are the best fits for them. Some of their racials are pretty bizarre. They get rockets they can use every two minutes, either shooting them or using them to jump. They get 20% discount on everything, all the time. They can access their bank box anywhere, once every 30 minutes. They get a 1% haste bonus to all spells and attacks. People will favor goblin healers AND DPS for raids because of this. Goblin alchemists get a 15 point skill bonus, and extra mana and health from potions they can make. It sounds like a goblin hunter will be the ultimate grind-o-matic.

On the Alliance side, humans get to play hunters. Whoop te doo. Dwarfs get to play mages and shamans. I like that. If the Horde gets a second race for paladins (once only playable by Alliance), then the Alliance should get a second race to play shamans (once only playable by the Horde).

Some of the high elf mages return to Night Elf society. This upsets some people, who think it doesn't fit the lore at all. There are night elves still living who remember how the Highborne mages totally screwed night elf society and the world as a whole. A lot of people will be jerks, and some will be cool. I think lore is something to enjoy, not a straightjacket to put on the developers.

Gnomes only gain one class: priests. Finally, gnomes get to heal. Draeni gain no new classes at all, but that's not surprising. Druids, rogues, and warlocks have never fit them and I don't think they ever will.

Worgen also are able to play eight classes. They are excluded from being paladins and shamans. The Alliance has to get a second druid race, and there really aren't any great fits. I have seen lots of complaints that the Worgen are really just humans, and no way, no how, should humans get to be druids. I could argue that the worgen curse comes from the Scythe of Elune and so worgen have a sort of night elf connection. But I do not care enough to really get any further into it. Worgen get a 1% damage bonus, reduced duration to all disease and curse effects, a skinning bonus (faster and +15 to skill), and a sprint ability. This will make worgen rogues the kings of 19 & under Warsong Gulch.

The new races seem to have better racials than the current races. Blizzard says they intend to revamp all racials for Cataclysm, so we will see how that works out. Gnomes could get a racial weapon, like orcs, trolls, dwarfs, and humans. Daggers would be really cool. Every class that gnomes have can use daggers.

Blizzard also intends to revamp the entire statistics scheme and all magic items. They want to make it simpler to optimise, with less need for theorycrafting. That's a good idea, I don't like theorycrafting. But on the down side, this also means more cookie-cutter characters. And Blizzard is forgetting why they made it so complicated in the first place.

People have always whined about game imbalance. Every time Blizzard tried to fix it, they usually added a new stat to the system instead of adjusting an old one. Or they would change a problem stat's mechanics, and then decide to add a new stat with the old one's mechanics. What Blizzard is doing here is basically restarting this process. Eventually, things will get complicated again.

Classes

Hunters are getting a HUGE change in gameplay. They will no longer have mana. Instead, they will have focus, like their pets. It is going to work a lot like energy does for rogues. I saw one opinion that this will reduce hunter burst damage, but I don't know. Rogues do very serious burst damage.

Warlocks will not have to carry around a bag of soul shards any more. This will make inventory control simpler for them. Instead, they will have three soul shards with cooldowns, sort of like Death Knight runes. The mechanics for soul gems and health stones will also have to be changed. I have no clue how Blizzard will handle that.

Altoholism in Action

So here's what I would like to play, knowing what I now know. Obviously I could change my mind as I learn more about how things are going to work in Cataclysm.

Horde:
Death Knight: Tauren
Druid: Troll
Hunter: Troll
Mage: Goblin
Paladin: Tauren
Priest: Troll
Rogue: Undead
Shaman: Tauren
Warlock: Blood Elf (the class I like least, and the race I like least. Talk about a toon made to be neglected!)
Warrior: Orc

Alliance:
Death Knight: Human
Druid: Night Elf
Hunter: Worgen
Mage: Gnome
Paladin: Human
Priest: Human
Rogue: Worgen
Shaman: Draeni
Warlock: Human
Warrior: Dwarf

The biggest reason I default to human is because of the Diplomacy and Every Man For Himself racials. For me, the easy way to gear up for endgame is with a lot of rep grinds.

Toons on my main server: 80 troll rogue, 62 human warrior, 59 tauren death knight, 55 orc hunter, 40 orc warlock, 25 orc shaman, 23 blood elf paladin, 22 undead mage, 22 tauren warrior, 17 troll priest. If I can afford it (unlikely) I'd like to reassign the rogue to forsaken, and the warrior to orc. What I will probably do is delete the shaman (or maybe the mage) and reroll him as goblin, delete the paladin and reroll him as tauren, and leave the rest be.

Props to Blizzard

2009-08-28T19:11:00.006-04:00

I could have titled this "More on Patch 3.2."

There were two things Blizzard changed in Patch 3.2 that I think deserve mention, that I did not. Both cut down on how much of a jerk some players can be.

One sort of jerk is the Ninja Looter. Now, when a character receives "Bind On Pickup" loot, he can now trade it to any other character eligible to loot the item. He has until two hours pass or he enchants the item, whichever comes first. This does not COMPLETELY prevent ninja looting, but now the ninja looter is promptly exposed when he refuses to trade the leather armor he looted on his Death Knight to the rogue or druid.

The other sort of jerk is the Honor Farming Premade. This is a group of highly twinked people who join Warsong Gulch together, capture the flag twice, and pick it up a third time, but refuse to capture it. They then go out and slaughter the Pick-Up Group players on the enemy team. The PUG players are far less equipped and really don't stand any chance. Their only choices are fleeing the battle or waiting until the honor farmers get bored. It can be (or feel like) hours of battle, just to get your one Warsong Gulch Mark of Honor.

Blizzard has finally added to Warsong Gulch something that every other Capture-The-Flag game I have ever seen has: a time limit. Now, there are no battlegrounds in World of Warcraft that can be indefinitely prolonged.

So, for these thing, Blizzard deserves their props.

CrunchBang Lite 9.04.01

2009-08-26T11:23:00.005-04:00

CrunchBang Linux 9.04.01 Lite Edition

I have been interested in CrunchBang Linux (aka #!, which I'm going to use throughout) for some time. I saw it in the news column at Distrowatch, read a review by Red Devil, and said, "I should try that one of these days." It is another Ubuntu-based distro, this time with a very lightweight custom interface. The project page says not to use it if you cannot bear to see your system go, "Crunch! Bang!" Total bug elimination is not a priority for the #! project.

I chose the Lite edition because my needs are really minimal. Wine, Firefox, a word processor, a text editor, and I'm about set. I use the GIMP only every couple weeks, tops. I haven't needed it since installing #!. I almost never listen to music. I haven't started Pidgin in months. Firefox is my email client. And I would nearly always rather go get software I need when I find out I need it, than have a bunch installed willy-nilly.

Interface and Desktop Environment

The cool thing about #! is the interface. The #! panel is called Tint2. It is 92% of the desktop's width, centered. The blank desktop space on the left and right ends of the panel are so you have a place to right-click and bring up the menu. It has a clock and a network manager icon on the left, and the rest is a two-panel task manager/desktop switcher. Each desktop gets a panel of its own, and each window gets an icon in the panel of its desktop. It works really well for me.

The menu is really well thought out, too. If you're willing to navigate through it, you can go just about anywhere.

But I hated how it looked. The default wallpaper is black with white text: "#! CRUNCHBANG LINUX" in a lightweight Helvitaca sort of typeface. The default interface elements -- menus, checkboxes, dialog boxes, button bars, status bars, title bars, and so forth -- are all either dark gray on medium gray, or medium gray on dark gray. That's just hard to read. I like either light text on a dark background, or dark text on a light background. So all of it had to change after install.

The desktop includes a Conky by default. It includes host name, uptime, RAM usage, Swap usge, disk usage, CPU usage, and a list of 15 super handy keyboard shortcuts. I love these shortcuts. Twelve of them are mapped to use either Windows key (called a Super key). For example, Super-w launches Firefox, super-e launches Leafpad, super-f launches PCmanFM file manager, super-m launches VLC media player, super-x the logout/shutdown dialog, and super-space the same Openbox menu you get by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop. Super-d isn't in the list. It clears or restores the desktop. This is a shortcut I used in Windows for many years and I am glad to have it back.

Installation and Configuring

Installation is with Ubiquity. It's the same as in Kubuntu and Linux Mint, described in over a million Ubuntu reviews.

The window manager is Openbox. Windows do not normally have any side decorations. I actually like this. I can play WoW in a 1280x960 window on my 1280x1024 desktop without it resizing as much. The play area loses 6-10px of width in Gnome. The #! menu has both a GUI configuration tool and shortcuts to the config files. There are lots of window decoration themes but the main differences between them are colors. I found some color arrangements I kind of like. But that only fixed the titlebars and the base bar.

The user interface settings get their own entry in the Preferences submenu. It took me a little while to find them, but again I was able to pick something I kind of like. Unlike Gnome, there is no GUI to set theme colors. I had gotten used to setting the interface widgets theme to Clearlooks-Compact and setting the colors to what I like. In Openbox the only way to change the Clearlooks color theme is to edit the files yourself. Default themes are in /usr/share/themes and custom themes can be saved to ~/.themes

I wound up going into rc.xml (the main Openbox config file) to disable alt-left-drag to grab and move windows, by adding the comment tags  around the section:

<mousebind button="A-Left" action="Drag">
        <action name="Move">
      </mousebind>

I also disabled mousebind button="A-Right" action="Drag" because I have alt pressed while mouse-driving in autorun even more than when mouse-looking. Now, I can hold down Alt in preparation to using Berserking or Preparation while mouse-driving or dragging my view around without dragging or resizing the window.

I mentioned in the 3.2 Patch post that I have set vm.swappiness = 0 in #!. I did this in Mint 6 Felicia also, and at least once I used all my RAM and locked up instead of using swap. In all previous distros where I played WoW, RAM usage is sloppy enough that it does not return to what it was in resting state. It doesn't quite do that in #! either. But killing all apps always returns RAM usage to about 110 MiB in #!.

Conky has almost nothing in it by default. The Conky config file is right in the menu (Preferences > Conky Config > Edit .conkyrc). I added some code I have from previous conkys. I now have graphs for CPU usage and bandwidth, both up and down.

Applications

Like the interface, #! applications are light weight. Sometimes they really cut down by choosing a terminal-based app. System updates are fetched and installed with an apt-get script (started by super-u). The default feed reader, email client, music player, bit torrent client, and IRC client all run in the terminal. Other terminal apps in the menu are Midnight Commander (file manager), elinks (web browser), Vim (text editor), htop (system monitor), and naim (AIM client). You give up eye candy to get more performance. I think that is a good trade. I also think it is a good idea to get used to terminal apps. You can't always have X, especially if you want to install Arch Linux.

If I remember correctly, #! is a British distro. This means that the American and Japanese rules that forbid including patented software in the actual distro are not binding on the project. So they happily include patented codecs and the Adobe FlashPlayer.

World of Warcraft

Installing up-to-date nVidia drivers is just like it is in Linux Mint and Kubuntu. Open the main menu to System > Restricted Device Manager. The Ubuntu tool that installs proprietary video drivers pops up, asks which one you want to install, and installs it.

Installing Wine is the same as I've done it in Linux Mint, Mepis, and Kubuntu. I use the directions on the bottom of this page for installing Wine using the terminal.

As usual, I copied WoW over from the distro where I had been playing it (Ubuntu 9.04) instead of reinstalling. WoW plays better in #! than any other distro I have yet used. I don't know how much of that is the recent server-side hardware upgrades and how much is #! being better than Ubuntu. But right now, #! is my choice. When I rearrange my hard drive so WoW has its own partition for all distros, I will use #! for my "quick & easy" distro.

Conclusions/Summary

#! is a great distro. It is a little hard to set up and a little hard to get used to, but it plays WoW better than all the others I have tried. And I really like the keyboard shortcuts.

Next up: analysis and opinion of the Cataclysm announcements.

Patch 3.2

2009-08-16T14:37:00.003-04:00

Patch 3.2 is here. I haven't tried out much of the new content. Mostly I noticed they changed a couple of the Argent Tournament dailies. No more stacking up dailies to kill 10 Icecrown Scourge, 15 Icecrown Scourge, and 20 Ymirheim Vrykul all at once. Oh well.

They have changed the requirements for mounts again. You can read about it on this WoWWiki page. There is a lot more content than there was at first, and the leveling process takes a lot longer than it did back when World of Warcraft launched. So I think it is reasonable.

I think the information about free riding skills is inaccurate. At least, when I took my level 40 warlock to the trainer, he could not learn Dreadsteed from his trainer because he did not have 150 riding. Nor could I get the quest that, once upon a time, allowed a warlock to learn apprentice riding at level 40. I heard that they had intended to reintroduce it for journeyman riding at level 40 but I have not seen that. EDIT: I opened a ticket, and got an email from Blizz, saying that the quests are not in the game.

I gave up on quivers and ammo pouches a few patches back, when they changed the ammo stack size to 1000 rounds and moved faster shooing from being a quiver/ammo pouch thing to being a hunter thing. So I needed to add ammo tracking to my interface, because it wasn't on the bags with my ammo in it any more.

The first thing I found at WoWInterface was Broker_Refills. You can set it up to autobuy reagents or other consumables when you visit any vendor that sells them. I had not done this. I mainly wanted it to remind me when it was time to make more bullets. Unfortunately, when the patch hit, some thing in it broke. And when I took my level 23 Tauren warrior to go get a mount, it bought 20 Brown Riding Kodo for him. And when I got on my 80 rogue, it tried to buy some plate armor from a token vendor in Dalaran. I deleted it.

I also found StatBlock_Ammo. It does what I need.

My server got some new hardware. For the first time ever, I could run full speed in Dalaran at peak usage. Later, while flying around the Tournament grounds, I started using swap space and my framerate dropped to 4. When I returned to Dalaran it was back around 3. I checked and I had not set vm.swappiness yet in CrunchBang 9.04.01. This time I have set it to 0. I do not use swap at all, under any circumstances. I also monitor memory usage, and shut programs down before RAM usage goes much past 1GB. If I let RAM usage get to 100%, the system will lock up. I have 1.47 GiB according to conky, and use about 95MiB at rest, after logging in.

Anyway, now that I am (apparently) able to run at a tolerable framerate with lots of premium content on screen I will be trying out more raids than I previously have.

Cutup Fan Update

2009-08-15T12:00:00.004-04:00

I have been a big fan of Cutup ever since I first found it on WoWInterface. It puts up timer bars for Slice and Dice, Rupture, Hunger for Blood, and poisons on your target. But it has not been updated since October 2008 and the Hunger for Blood timer has been broken ever since they changed it from a 30s buff you stack 3 times to a 60s enrage that you can not start unless your target is bleeding.

Today I searched for it on WoWInterface and a Fan Update appeared! If you are an assassination rogue who likes this addon (and why wouldn't you?) this is very good news.

It goes to show, it is worth your while to check out favorite addons that are not being updated. ColdDoT, the update author, put up a comment on Cutup linking to his new version.

Hunter Fun

2009-07-30T19:55:00.003-04:00

One of the oldest ways for Horde hunters to annoy Alliance players in early battlegrounds was to show up with a Strigid Owl from Teldrassil. It has never been easy, but it proved you had already invaded Alliance territory.

It is nowhere near so hard for a young dwarf or night elf hunter to make his way to Durotar or Mulgore and find a pet with a unique skin, so the Alliance could not tweak the noses of the Horde in the same way, until The Burning Crusade came out. Then young Alliance hunters could prove their mettle by grabbing a Springpaw Stalker or one of the Ghostclaw lynxes.

But those only upset the enemy in the very youngest battlegrounds. You want them upset and thinking poorly in all battlegrounds. How can selecting the right pet do this?

By combining it with the right name.

With the right name, you can say to the Alliance, "Varian Wrynn is a vile serpent! Prophet Velen is a scrofulous pig! Magni Bronzebeard is a lowly worm! High Priestess Tyrande Whisperwind is a diseased dog!" This is very fitting for a blood elf hunter. Blood elves are supposed to be haughty, arrogant, spiteful, vengeful, and very bitter toward the Alliance.

You can't use the exact names of the NPCs. The game won't let you. But you can get pretty close if you want to.

Of course the Alliance can get in on this fun too. You can call Lor'themar Theron a two-faced buzzard, Sylvanas Windrunner an old bat, Cairne Bloodhoof a big chicken, or Thrall a cowardly hyena. Mocking your enemies this way fits in pretty well with being a dwarf.

Don't go thinking my own suggestions are the only good ones. I'm sure you can come up with better. Just leave your ideas in the comments.

Now is the winter....

2009-07-27T17:07:00.004-04:00

I think both my distro-hopping and my altoholism come from the same two things: discontent and wanting to experience everything.

I have been using Ubuntu 9.04 since about mid-late June. At the end of July, Jaunty Jackalope is halfway to Karmic Koala, and snappy, it ain't. There is a noticable lag between hitting the menu button on the gnome panel and the menu appearing, and sometimes it's a few seconds before the icons get filled in. So now I am looking for something with less cruft. Both Ubuntu and Gnome have repuations for lots of cruft. I think I will try CrunchBang Linux (aka #!) next -- it's Ubuntu but with a very light interface. For example, it uses the same window manager and file manager as LXDE. That will help isolate the Ubuntu bloat from the Gnome cruft. Another thing to do is go through Synaptic and see what I can get rid of in Ubuntu.

I'm not ready to repartition my hard drive yet. It took 3 or 4 days to download the 3.2 patch and I want it installed and the patched version of WoW archived before I blow everything. That means that Arch and Fedora are out of the picture until then. But I may decide to do a Debian 5.0 (Lenny) netinstall and see if I can figure out how to set myself up with LXDE, the latest nVidia proprietary drivers, and the development version of Wine.

Speaking of the 3.2 patch, there are a couple of changes that leave me discontented with my main, Aiztabju the 80 troll rogue. The original concept was "Slice and Dice + Berserk = So much spell pushback I can slay casters with impunity!" Well spell pushback has been limited to 1 second per cast for some time now. I think the orc racial is a better fit for the giant burst damage I like from a rogue. And now they are changing a couple other things to make orcs an ideal race for a raiding rogue.

First, the orc racial axe bonus is going to also apply to fist weapons. Right now Combat Fist is one of the top two raid specs, mainly because the best end-game melee DPS weapons are nearly all fist weapons. Second, Sword Specialization is going to be renamed "Hack and Slash" and the effect will be for both swords and axes. Combat Swords has always been the favored leveling spec for its free extra main-hand hits. This could make orcs the easiest-to-level race for rogues.

I like having a companion out. I am really looking forward to getting a Sen'jin fetish, but right now my favorite is the Argent Gruntling with the Sen'jin banner. He's just funnier than the rest. But companions don't stealth, making stealth almost worthless in battlegrounds. This feeds my overall rogue discontent.

I won't delete Aiztabju to make room for an orc rogue, though. I have put too much work into him. But I may start playing an orc rogue I started on another server a while back after the patch hits.

A Guide to the Helpsites list

2009-07-26T10:52:00.006-04:00

Allakhazam has hosted lots of info on MMORPGs since Ultima Online. The link is to their WoW section.
Be Imba! is an automated auditor. Import your level 80 character from the Armory, and Be Imba! will suggest changes to gear, enchants, gems, and perhaps talents for better PvE.
Blizzard's Official WoW Forums get TONS of traffic, on nearly every topic. Proper use of search is vital. Also, Blizzard doesn't care if people post stupid advice, as long as they follow the Forum Guidelines.
Curse is an addon site for many MMORPGs. I once got a Warhammer Online addon when looking for a World of Warcraft addon. Pay close attention to what you download.
Elitist Jerks forums also get tons of traffic, and they are better about removing cruft and stupid than Blizzard.
Gem Finder, a spreadsheet of all WoW gems that lets you apply almost any filter you can imagine.
Shadowpanther.net is an excellent Rogue resource site.
Shadowpriest.com is specialized, but deep.
TankingTips is a blog written by a devoted Protection warrior.
TankSpot has plenty of info for tanks of all types. The "Guides" link at the top is especially helpful.
Thottbot is a a searchable database of nearly every mob, NPC, item, spell, talent, and quest in the game, all with comment sections. They get more comments than WoWHead, but I think WoWHead gets better comments.
The US Realms Armory, Blizzard's official database of characters, guilds, arena teams, and gear.
Warcrafter is a searchable character and guild database; I think they base their gear score on PvP.
WoW Interface is my favorite addon site. They list the size of downloads and mark obsolete addons.
WoWHead has my favorite talent calculators. They also have a searchable database of nearly every mob, NPC, item, spell, talent, and quest in the game, all with comment sections.
WoWWiki has articles on many, many aspects of the game. It's probably the best lore site there is. I especially like the Realms by Datacenter page. With it, I can figure out which realms will have the best pings.
Zehara's Hunter DPS Analyzer will estimate your hunter DPS based on gear, shot priority, pet, buffs, and talents. You can rearrange stuff to see how to increase DPS.

Zygor's Guides

2009-07-26T10:20:00.004-04:00

I used to resell Zygor's Guides. I think they are an excellent addon. I don't any longer, because they violate Blizzard's World of Warcraft Addons policy: Zygor still charges money.

I've added a widget with some of my favorite gameplay resources.

The DEFINITIVE WoW Webcomic!

2009-06-30T11:01:00.002-04:00

It's this particular episode of Starslip Crisis. Read it and LAUGH.

Then go and check out Beyond the Tree. It's absolutely beautiful, and utterly character-driven. The creator has (sort of) admitted that s/he has created and maintains a story so that the core duo of the series has a reason to go places and talk to each other. Because the first emphasis is on character interaction, plot advancement is a reduced priority.

I vote for Beyond the Tree every day at Top Web Comics.

Follow Ups

2009-06-20T11:52:00.002-04:00

Gfx

Gfx is now known as Leatrix Gfx. She has made the latency scripts into a separate addon. From reading the comments, it looks like my graphics bugs have also affected some Windows users. She identified an issue with transparency and fixed it. It has fixed my issues as well.

Desktop Wars

Choosing your desktop is a matter of personal preference. I think you should use the one you like best, no matter if it's KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment, FluxBox, or even just the Tab Window Manager with no panel. The two that are most popular, that you are most likely to encounter, are Gnome and the K Desktop Environment (KDE).

The K Desktop Environment

Here are some things I like about KDE, in no particular order. I like Konversation, the IRC client. I like Kopete better than I used to; the Meta-contact idea looks like a good one. I like the single-panel, single-menu interface. I like having Konqueror as a backup and lightweight web browser. I like that it is by default Mono-free. I like that you can page through tabs of most desktop application with Ctrl-. and Ctrl-, so you don't have to pick the tab you want with the mouse.

I like the whole "K" naming theme used for most integrated apps: KOffice, Kmail, Konversation, Kopete, Kate (K Advanced Text Editor), AmaroK (the media player), Konsole (the terminal emulator), Akregator feed reader, K3b (K Burn Baby Burn, the CD & DVD burner), and so on. It gives the desktop some unity.

Of course, there are things I don't like. I don't like the color configuration tool, or much else of the appearance management tools. I don't like that the Kubuntu 9.04 (KDE 4.2.2) desktop uses about 20Mb more than the Mint 6 Gnome (2.24) desktop. I don't really like Plasma, or the Plasma widgets. I don't actually like any of the default window decorations. And Kate is far more advanced than I need.

Gnome

Here are some things I like about Gnome, in no particular order. I find it easy to configure, and make it look how I want. I like the window decorations. I really like the Gnome Art tool. I like the Gnome Games suite, now that I've found and installed it. I like that it's lighter than KDE. I like Firefox best of all web browsers. I like that Gedit allows multiple tabs in one instance.

I don't like the two-panel, three menu interface, and always change it. I don't like the random application naming scheme. I don't like that Gedit and Nautilus have no keyboard shortcut for paging through tabs. I don't like the chore of removing Mono. (The post has instructions for removing and blocking Mono with APT, yum, and ZYpp based package managers, a little ways before the comments.) I don't actually have any use for any of the Mono applications I've ever seen.

So why do I use Gnome? Mainly because I don't like Plasma and I only have to remove and block Mono once. I change my desktop several times a month.

Fedora 11

Fedora 11 uses the ext4 filesystem by default. The liveCD's default installation is with a swap partition and an ext4 partition for /. That's how I would want to do it.

But Fedora cannot boot from an ext4 filesystem. This is a serious flaw in the Fedora kernel. You have to create three partitions: one for /, one for swap, and one for /boot. The /boot partition only needs to be 100MB or so, but it must be ext3.

Blech.

I'm not ready to fool around with that yet. I already have 4 physical partitions on my disk. I don't want to resize or delete one so I can set up an extended partition and logical partitions right now.

I don't know if I can do it, but I would like for WoW to be on its own partition. Then I would set up fstab to mount the WoW directories in the correct ~/.wine subdirectories of each distro. If I could, that would save me a lot of hassle. I want to know if I can (and how) before repartitioning.

Kubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope"

2009-06-09T17:41:00.006-04:00

Kubuntu is the KDE implementation of Ubuntu. I used KDE exclusively for a couple of years, when my distro of choice was PCLinuxOS. I don't remember which KDE 3.x version they used for it. MEPIS also uses KDE 3.5.x. Kubuntu uses KDE 4.2.2, and some things are different.

KDE is mostly configured with Plasma, which adds widgets to containers. Both the desktop and the panel count as containers. The desktop and the panel each have a "cashew" that you use to add widgets to them. Desktop widgets tend to be pretty big. I think all the data feed and monitoring widgets I use could probably be done better with Conky. I didn't find one to track RAM usage. EDIT:There is one in the list of widgets to download, but it failed every time.

KDE uses 2 default apps that I didn't like very much. I prefer Firefox to Konqueror for web browsing. Firefox plugins, like Adblock Plus, Adobe Flashplugin, and Flash Blocker, make a big difference, and I don't know if there are equivalents for Kubuntu. Kubuntu no longer uses Konqueror as the default file manager. They are using Dolphin instead.

And I liked Pidgin MUCH more than Kopete. Back in KDE 3.5, Kopete would add a really fat graphic in between each line of chat. It still does, but at least now I have figured out how to disable that. Go to Settings, select Configure. Pick Chat Window out of the left-side list, and choose Gaim in the style tab. This makes Kopete a lot more usable in my book.

The default IRC client for Kubuntu is Quassel IRC. It is new to me but not so different from, say, X-chat. I don't really like the default layout (wasted space again) but it works and changing it is easy, once you figure out that some of the dividers you grab and drag are invisible. I don't know why they gave up Konversation. The Kubuntu default office suite is OpenOffice.org 3.0, instead of KOffice. That's ok, I would rather get rid of either and use Abiword instead.

One of the differences between KDE and Gnome is that KDE has a lot more casual games integrated in the desktop. These are nice to pass time while waiting for a raid to get going. Kubuntu includes none of them on the live CD.

KDE uses a lot of pretty, flashy desktop effects and animations. The active window has a pale blue glow around the edge. Windows become translucent when dragged. The switcher shows full windows instead of icons. These can be shut off. I look at all this stuff and all I see is wasted system resources. KDE is not my kind of desktop. I mean, I'm a fan of LXDE based on its minimalism and standards-compliance without ever having installed it. Glitz and eye candy are not my style and are not going to be any time soon.

I am cautiously hopeful about the Lubuntu project (Ubuntu + LXDE). I know both from experience and comparisons with Debian Lenny + XFCE that Xubuntu is worse than Ubuntu in almost every way. That includes system resource usage -- one of XFCE's strengths. This is why I am so far only cautiously hopeful. I am also looking forward to U-lite. The U-lite community wants to provide an Ubuntu respin that uses LXDE to reduce footprint. I ought to go read up on whether the U-lite community is planning to participate in the Lubuntu project.

Installation

Kubuntu uses the Ubiquity installer developed by Canonical, and used in nearly every Ubuntu-based distro available. It is excellent and easy to use. I decided I would try the ext4 file system for this install. It is supposed to be faster than ext3, though there are still some conerns about reliability.

Kubuntu uses KPackageKit as the front end for APT, instead of Synaptic. They have it set up a little differently from in openSUSE 11.1. The left pane has three icons, Software Management, Updates, and Settings (configuring your repositories). There is a search box and a couple of pop-down menus to filter, one for status and one for sections. I like that you can select all updates which is something Novell didn't do in openSUSE. But Novell makes it easier to find software with their status buttons and sections list. One thing I find I miss about Synaptic when using KPackageKit is that Synaptic would tell you that your changes would result in so big a download and either use or free so much disk space.

As with Mint, I found it easiest to install Wine using the instructions at the bottom of this page, listed under Alternative Command Line Instructions. The command line instructions worked flawlessly.

Gameplay and Use

I copied the game files over to the Kubuntu Jaunty partition from the Mint 6 partition. The game seems to work either about the same or sometimes a little bit faster. I am still using the vm.swappiness = 100 line in my /etc/sysctl.conf file, and the SET gxAPI = "OpenGL" in the ~~/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf file.

I also installed Ventrilo. It installs, and it works, except that I cannot make any input. I added the microphone to the mixer menu and found out it was muted. I fixed that but it did not help. One of the setup options is for a hardware input mixer. It has 3 dropdown menus: Mixer, Mux, and Line. Of these, Mux and Line are blank. Mux SHOULD have only one entry, and Line should have all sound input devices enabled. I don't know what is missing in Wine that keeps these from being properly filled in.

Conclusions

Everything seems to work just fine. I just don't like how KDE works or its configuration controls. I'm used to Gnome and prefer it, at least once Mono is locked out. If you like the new K Desktop Environment, then Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is probably a good choice for playing World of Warcraft under Wine.

In other news, Fedora 11 has been released today. I want to look at that one next.

Stumbling Block

2009-06-05T23:44:00.003-04:00

I have hit a nasty stumbling block. My guild has recently leased a Ventrilo server. But Ventrilo doesn't support a Linux client at all. There is a third party script but I have not tried it yet. The latest test results uploaded to the WineHQ AppDB for the Ventrilo client was rated Bronze -- it installed, but nothing actually worked. I am not surprised. TeamSpeak works well in Linux and has most of the Linux community.

But Linux is not the only possible answer. There are three other FOSS operating systems to consider.

First is BSD Unix. While it has been around the longest, it also gets the least usage. I do not expect any of the BSD distros to run either World of Warcraft or Ventrilo any time soon. Even if they do, it will probably require Wine, and I expect Wine to work better in Linux.

Next is ReactOS. The goal of the ReactOS Project is to provide a FOSS OS that is 100% binary-compatible with Windows XP at every level. They also intend to emulate the WinXP user interface.

This is probably going to be the best possible solution. The FAQs on the site suggest that they will have far less of the security issues that are prevalent in WinXP.

ReactOS is currently in the alpha stage of development. I won't be able to use it any time soon. In fact, our current Ventrilo lease will probably expire first.

PureDarwin is also in the alpha stage of development. The PureDarwin project is starting with the Darwin source code, which is the base of the Macintosh OS X. There is currently a developer preview of PureDarwin Xmas available, which is based on Apple's Darwin 9 source code, as well as other FOSS projects like X11. It is configured to run in a VMWare Fusion 2.0 virtual machine on a Macintosh.

Darwin is a subset of OS X "Leopard". Since Darwin does not include everything that Leopard does, Darwin cannot run everything that Leopard can. It is far too early to tell if Darwin will be able to run the Macintosh versions of World of Warcraft and Ventrilo, but I have reason to hope that it will.

There is no way to tell which of these will be useful first. But I think both of them are worth watching and supporting.

A review of Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope is on the way. Have patience!

openSUSE 11.1

2009-05-16T21:22:00.005-04:00

openSUSE is one of the elder distros. I tried SuSE 5.3 back in the late 90s, when Red Hat was the height of user-friendliness in Linux. It actually booted (and perhaps was even meant to install) from a 1.44Mb floppy. I never got it to work. These days, openSUSE 11.1 is a product of Novell. I downloaded the 64-bit install DVD ISO from this page via bittorrent.

There is currently some controversy about SUSE. Novell has made a deal with Microsoft that some people find very upsetting. The deal is pretty involved, and I don't want to explain it here. I think this Novell FAQ, this blog post from a Microsoft employee, and browsing Boycott Novell lets you get all sides of the controversy pretty well. I leave it to you to make up your own mind.

For my own part, I think Steve Ballmer is an idiot for threatening the FOSS community. But Microsoft is just too big to have only idiots, or even only idiots in charge. I think Microsoft will accommodate FOSS, or die. FOSS development is too transparent and too well-documented for them to put together a bogus lawsuit. And FOSS code is too robust and too well-dispersed to get rid of.

I do not pay Novell a red cent for openSUSE. In fact I am a drain on their resources. I use their bandwidth for downloads and to read their documentation and they do not even put banners in front of me. I am no developer. And I add nothing to their documentation either.

And finally, if I decide that using openSUSE is too risky, it is easy to change to another distro.

Installation

The install DVD gives you more options than the LiveCDs. But a live tryout environment is not one of them. With the DVD, you have to install openSUSE to try it. SUSE uses YAST2 for installation. YaST was originally Yet Another Setup Tool. YAST2 is a very nice graphical installer. It was completely unfamiliar to me, but I had no real problems. There is a list down the left of the steps to take and each opens a new screen. The partition editor was probably the most confusing. The help button on each and every screen is very helpful if you use it. I should have used it more.

At first I had hoped to start with only a console and build from that, like in this tutorial on Distrowatch. But not being able to read it during the installation made me chicken out. I decided to try the minimal graphical installation with only TWM and almost no software. I couldn't figure out the TWM interface enough to get at online documentation, so I reinstalled with Gnome 2.24. The other choice was KDE 4.1.1 and I had heard that KDE 4 only really got stable around 4.2. I will probably try the 4.x series KDE next time I have a distro that uses it.

After you are done making all your installation choices, you are shown an overview screen. I clicked "Software" and was taken into a package manager called PackageKit. It is a lot like Synaptic. This gave me very close control over which packages I would install. I eliminated Bluetooth, Beagle, and a few other things. I only use wired ethernet, so one of these days I am going to do without a network manager entirely.

One thing I really like about openSUSE is that they use GRUB 2.0 instead of GRUB legacy (0.94 or something). It is much more advanced and has some options that legacy does not.

Updating took almost an hour. In my experience, APT downloads all the packages, and then installs all the packages. ZYpp downloads and installs each package separately, one at a time. ZYpp takes longer, but the intermittent downloads cause my household less frustration. PackageKit is a frontend for ZYpp. Synaptic lets you sort either by status {All, Installed, Installed (Updateable), Installed (autoremovable), Uninstalled, Uninstalled (Residual config)}, or else by sections (too many to list). PackageKit lets you sort by both section and installation status at once. ZYpp also lets you know (and requires your approval) when it has to change almost anything in order to resolve dependencies. It also requires you to accept EULAs for any proprietary software. I accepted the one for Adobe's Flash plugin, and rejected the one for Microsoft's Mono. I think all of these are actually improvements over APT. One thing it could use that Synaptic has is a "Mark all upgrades" button.

openSUSE has an automatic update checker, too. It seems like it has to check the repository lists every 30 minutes. That is way too often. It ruins latency. I had a hard time getting a handle on this, which is one reason I won't be using openSUSE.

Whatever you want to change in openSUSE, the answer is in YaST. In this case, it was in repository management. Disabling the update repository shuts down this whole process.

Video Drivers and Wine

Installing up-to-date video drivers is super easy. I went to this page, and clicked the 1-click install button for openSUSE 11.1. A dialog box popped up, I followed the prompts, and I had nVidia 180.44 drivers installed. ATI also has one-click installation.

The list of Wine repositories is on this page. Instructions for adding repositories is on this page. I thought the directions were very clear. Then I started the package manager and searched for Wine. There is a little pop-up in the lower right corner which lets you choose which version to install. I went with the latest development release. The latest stable and development release version numbers are posted at http://www.winehq.org . You can get the daily build, but I don't suggest it.

World of Warcraft

I copied my World of Warcraft directories, ~/.wine/dosdevices/C:/Program Files/World of Warcraft and ~/.wine/dosdevices/C:/Program Files/Common Files/Blizzard Entertainment over from my Linux Mint 6 partition. Either Wine or Gnome is configured differently in openSUSE from how it is in Mint. When I double click the Launcher.exe icon in Mint, it starts the launcher, which then launches the game client. In openSUSE, it tries to open it as an archive. You must use the terminal, using the command "wine launcher.exe" or "wine wow.exe". Make sure you include the line set gxAPI "OpenGL" in the /World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf file, or else launch the game client with "wine wow.exe -opgngl".

One convenient trick I only recently figured out is to bookmark the World of Warcraft directory in my file manager. This saves me having to navigate my way to it every time I want to play.

I could not tell any difference in gameplay between Mint and openSUSE. I got the same framerate issue when using swap space, so I added the line vm.swappiness = 100 to /etc/sysctl.conf again. Framerates were comparable. I got around 7 in Dalaran and around 30 in Orgrimmar. Gfx caps my framerate at 30 to hold down temperatures in my GPU core.

I may try openSUSE again later, but right now it is not a keeper. One reason is the trouble I had getting control of the update process. The other is purely subjective. Everyone my wife ever knew whose name was pronounced, "soo-zee" annoyed her. So it annoys her every time I say "SUSE" or "openSUSE" aloud in her presence. But I can recommend it to you, especially if you don't have my bandwidth issues or trouble unlearning Ubuntu/Debian habits and knowledge.

Adventures in Addons

2009-05-02T17:43:00.006-04:00

It turns out that I have to go and check WoWInterface to see when my favorite addons there get updated. When I log in, there is a little button on the very left of the horizontal menu, "My Favorites." Clicking that brings up my favorite addons, with the ones I haven't downloaded since their latest update listed in bold face.

My new favorite addon is Gfx. It was written by Leatrix out of desperation. Like me, she wished she could get World of Warcraft to run in 16 bit color with 16 bit depth. Unlike me, she did something about it. She wrote this addon.

Gfx has no configuration interface. Like Arch Linux, you configure it by editing a text file. Gfx.lua is very well commented, and it is easy to see what every option does and how you should set your values. I use it all the time, but I wonder if maybe the 16-bit color and depth are the cause of intermittent visual glitches like these:

And, as this screenshot shows, it's not because my graphics card is overheated. (Leatrix wrote Gfx in order to reduce the load of her graphics card, to reduce its operating temperature.)

The latest version of Gfx includes a couple of scripts. By default, Windows sends out packets one at a time, and waits to get the receipt from the other machine for each before sending out the next. One of these scripts disables this behavior, and the other re-enables it. This cuts latency way down. Needless to say, Leatrix did not test this in Wine. So now I am.

First, I back up my entire ~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files directory on my data drive:

EDIT: if you look closely, you will see that I am actually running a reversion of World of Warcraft from /media/disk-1 to /home/learner. OOPS!!

I really like grsync. It's actually an X window front end for rsync. Rsync is a command-line remote synchronizing utility. It runs a diff on the source and destination directories, compresses the actual changes, and then sends them from source to destination. It is so much faster than just copying the whole thing! It really cuts down on network loads.

Then I double-clicked the first script, Disable TCP Acknowledgment (reduced latency, faster gameplay).vbs without looking at the extension. It opens up in gedit instead of running. I guess .vbs means Visual Basic Script. I don't think I can run those. Off to the WineHQ App DB. I search for Visual Basic, and get 2 entries: Visual Basic, and Visual Basic Community Runtime. Visual Basic 2008 Express (free edition) is Garbage. Visual Basic Community Runtime is Platinum! It is available for download from this thread on a German-language Visual Basic forum. The first post and installer are both written in German and English. Dankeschön!!

I extracted the installer and copy it to the Wine Program Files directory, and ran it.
It installs without a hitch. I double checked permissions on the Disable TCP Acknowledgement script. Oops, didn't enable execution. Oh well, if it turns out that was my mistake, somebody let me know. I don't plan to uninstall VBCR to find out. I ran it, but I didn't get a popup notice like the documentation says I should.

Due to the fact that I accidentally reverted WoW by a patch or two instead of backing it up, I now had to run an update. Problems arose.

I ran the WoW repair tool as advised, and got the same message each time I tried to update. Eventually I got sick of it. So I went and blew everything. I completely uninstalled Wine, and deleted my ~/.Wine folder. Then I reinstalled Wine, reconfigured it, and copied ~/.Wine/dosdevices/C:/Program Files/Common Files/Blizzard Entertainment and ~/.Wine/dosdevices/C:/Program Files/World of Warcraft over from the failed SimplyMEPIS attempt.

I am not interested in going back to see if the updating problems are from VBCRE or the Gfx scripts. But I would be happy to hear from anyone else who tries.

SimplyMEPIS 8.0, x86_64

2009-04-24T12:27:00.008-04:00

Background

SimplyMEPIS 8.0.00 is, at its heart, Debian Lenny (5.0). It is preconfigured with KDE 3.5.10 and a few custom configuration tools, and it has a custom kernel. It has some patented codecs and other non-FOSS software enabled. I decided to try the 64-bit version. I have discovered that there are enough differences between Debian and Ubuntu to decide that this counts as experience in two distros. I had decided that once I get Wrath of the Lich King working in two different distros, I would reformat and repartition my main hard drive to do away with Windows 2000 entirely.

Installation

The most annoying thing about the Mepis LiveCD is that screen resolution defaults to something absurdly low, like 620x300. I hit F3 in the boot menu to select something more useful, before selecting the default boot option. This mounts everything in read-only mode. KDM (the K Display Manager, which lets you select your desktop environment and log in) shows up with two default users, demo and root. Both use the username as password. I did not want to change my partitions, so I found the install straightforward. I assigned MEPIS to the partition where I had put 64-bit Mint. It went without a hitch. One of the installation options is to disable guarddog, PPP, bluez (bluetooth), and cupsys (printing) daemons. I disabled bluez and ppp. And yet, watching the boot sequence, I see a line saying bluetooth is enabled. I don't get it.

Other reviews agree that the MEPIS system configuration and administration menus are redundant, clunky, and confusing. It's much better to use the icons on the Kicker panel. In order, those are Kmenu, clear desktop, system, home, firefox, and synaptic. MEPIS defaults to 4 desktops, but Kicker doesn't have a desktop pager enabled by default. It can be added by right-clicking the Kicker, and selecting Panel Menu => Add Applet to Panel... and take "Desktop Preview and Pager" from the dialog box.

Next I installed the latest edit: stable nVidia drivers. The MEPIS X window assistant (System => MEPIS => MEPIS X Window Assistant) automates this process, installing the nVidia 177.80 drivers.

The K Hardware Monitor and Conky both showed my 2GHz processor running at 1GHz. I don't understand that either. But it may be stepped down by power-saving services.

World of Warcraft

I copied the ~/.wine/dosdevices/C:/Program Files/Common Files/Blizzard Entertainment directory and the ~/.wine/dosdevices/C:/Program Files/World of Warcraft directories from my Mint 6 partition to the 64-bit MEPIS 8 partition. I confirmed that the line SET gxAPI "OpenGL" was in /WTF/Config.wtf. I opened the WoW directory and clicked "Wow.exe". Nothing Happened. I hit F4. In Nautilus (Gnome), nothing happens. But in Konqueror (KDE), it opens the Konsole terminal emulator in the same directory. I typed wine wow.exe An error dialog popped up:

Searching on "dual TMU support" and following links led me to this page. My card has dual TMU support, as long as I have v. 178.24 + nVidia drivers installed. WoW works with my card in Linux Mint 6. But in Mint I have a 180.xx driver, installed by the hardware driver tool at Menu => Administration => Hardware Drivers. The MEPIS X Window Assistant only installs 177.80. I could probably install the latest nVidia drivers myself, but not with ease. I think the repo where MEPIS keeps nVidia GPU driver binaries and maybe the MEPIS X Window Assistant would have to be updated.

At some point I will find a second distro that Just Works with World of Warcraft. But right now, MEPIS 8.0 is not it. Debian Lenny probably isn't it either. Maybe antiX, with the smxi script, will be able to do it.

Reading on WoWWiki

2009-04-10T11:25:00.004-04:00

I was trying to decide what I should use for my next World of Warcraft host distro. I was led to this page on WoWWiki. It is kind of stupid of me, that I never looked for it before.

One of the suggestions on the WoWWiki page for playing WoW from Windows was to open /World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf and add the line

SET gxAPI "OpenGL"

which sets the default graphics API to OpenGL instead of DirectX. This way, I do not need the -opengl flag (or the command line to invoke it).

When I played WoW in Win2k, I always preferred 16 bit color with 16 bit depth for better performance. But those settings never stuck when I applied them in the game's graphics config interface in Mint. I had to live with 24 bit color and depth, and the performance hit they caused. I have better framerate than I did in Win2K, but I always want more.

While reading the Config.wtf file, I found a couple of settings:

SET gxColorBits "24" SET gxDepthBits "24"

I changed those 24 values to 16. It didn't make any difference. The game was set to 24-bit color and depth when I logged in. I don't know what it will take to get them to persist. It may be that Wrath of the Lich King requires 24-bit color and 24-bit depth.

I have had to set view and object distance to minimum in some areas. And even then, sometimes my framerate drops into the high single digits and stays there.

I am still looking for more ways to improve performance. I will post anything I can figure out here.

KNOPPIX 6.0

2009-04-05T23:21:00.005-04:00

I saw a new release of KNOPPIX (6.0) on Distrowatch a while back, and decided to look into it. KNOPPIX is responsible for the whole LiveCD revolution in desktop Linux. Reviews touted KNOPPIX for its accessability, its excellent hardware detection, and the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. LXDE uses the OpenBox window manager. OpenBox was written first for standards compliance. Decisions about how it would draw windows came later. This is a reversal of the usual development process for window managers. LXDE uses PCmanFM for its file manager, and I had heard many good things about it as well. It also has its own terminal emulator and panel.

I have been looking for a lighter weight distro than Mint 6.0 Felicia for some time. Like most Ubuntu-based distros, Mint is feature rich (or, as some might say, bloated). With KNOPPIX, I would be getting a lighter desktop environment and the stability of a Debian base. I am interested in reaching beyond the Debian family (Ubuntu is based on Debian unstable), but familiarity breeds confidence. So I decided to make KNOPPIX my next test distro.

I downloaded KNOPPIX 6.0 via torrent, burned it onto a fresh reusable CD, put it in the boot CD-ROM drive, and started it up. Another review mentioned that Compiz effects were enabled on the Live CD, but they never did anything I could see.

INSTALLATION

Installation is hidden in the LXDE menu, under System Tools -> KNOPPIX HD Install. There is also Install KNOPPIX to Flash Disk. I started the installer, and got a warning about losing data. I went on to install method. I wanted to install to the partition where I currently have Mint 6 x64. No dice. I started the partition editor from the installer. Nothing Happened. I am pretty sure that the problem was that all the partitions on my computer were already mounted, but I figured that out after the fact. I saw a help option, and it said that KNOPPIX requires a reiserfs partition to install.

I went to the KNOPPIX wiki and read up on whether KNOPPIX absolutely had to have ReiserFS to install to HD. Instead, I found warnings that installing KNOPPIX to hard disk is not recommended. The reason for this is pretty involved.

KNOPPIX is based on Debian. One of the design assumptions of Debian is that you will get all of your packages from the same version's repositories. In other words, mixing binaries from Debian 5.x and 4.x usually causes things to break.

If I read right, KNOPPIX disregards this. Klaus Knopper and his team spend a lot of time tweaking packages from different versions of Debian and adjusting everything so that it will all work together. A system update would undo that and break lots of stuff.

So what this boils down to is that I am not going to install KNOPPIX. I'm glad to have the LiveCD. It is a very powerful tool. But I figure if I want to install Debian, I will install base.

USE

KNOPPIX is kind of sluggish. Live CDs are always sluggish, so this is no surprise. As far as I know, KNOPPIX uses default LXDE. I like this desktop. If I ever do a choose-your-own network install, I will probably use LXDE. In KNOPPIX it has the OpenBox window manager, PCmanFM 0.5 file manager, Leafpad 0.8.13 for text editing, and LXTerminal 0.1.13. KNOPPIX also has a lot of popular desktop software, including full OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, Iceweasel 3.0.6 (some of the menu items were in German), Icedove 2.0.0.19, Pidgin 2.4.13, Linphone 2.1.1, gnome-mplayer 0.9.4, and the GIMP 2.4.7. Notably absent was X-chat. It looks like they intend you to use Pidgin for IRC instead.

I decided to see if YouTube would work. It didn't. I fired up the "Install Components" tool. The menu had less than a dozen items on it, all activated with checkboxes. I selected Kaffiene and flashplugin-nonfree for installation and clicked "apply." Nothing Happened. At this point I got annoyed enough to give up on KNOPPIX as a desktop. KNOPPIX may give you a lot of control over your computer, but it's pretty hard to take further control of KNOPPIX.

IN SHORT

KNOPPIX is not a distro for playing World of Warcraft. It is not meant to be installed to hard disk. I cannot imagine trying to get Wine-unstable to work with it. I almost decided not to post this review once I found that out. Then I thought, "I put too much work into trying KNOPPIX to not tell anyone what happened." Besides, there is no point in anyone else trying what I have found out cannot work.

Framerates

2009-03-14T12:31:00.001-04:00

I have had an issue with framerates regularly dropping from around 25-30 to around 9-12, and refusing to go back up again until reboot. I was not sure what caused it, or how to fix it.

One idea I had was that a lighter interface would make things go better. To this end, I went to art.gnome.org to download and install the Clearlooks Compact theme from http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2 -- the download was less than 10 kB, while others tended to be well into the MB size. I was not (yet) interested in getting a file manager, window manager, terminal emulator, etc. with smaller memory footprints, mainly because I don't know how to make them the default for the system. I have been looking at both Arch Linux and this blog post for ideas, but they will go into another post.

I had been using Gnome's System Monitor panel applet, and launching the window to more accurately track system usage. Eventually I noticed that the problem always started when I first used swap space. I am an instant-gratification junkie, so I went to #winehq on irc.freenode.net to ask, instead of searching for an answer.

Three suggestions were made: first, use top in the terminal as my system monitor, instead of the GNOME panel applet. Second, double check that I am using MDA or UMDA instead of PIO for disk access. So, off to the terminal to run

sudo hdparm -i /dev/sda

It turns out I'm using UDMA5, the only mode marked (afterward) with an asterisk*. That wasn't the issue. The next suggestion was to set the vm.swappiness variable to 100 in the /etc/sysctl.conf file. So, in terminal, gksu gedit /etc/sysctl.conf to open and modify the file. There was no line setting vm.swappiness so I added it:

vm.swappiness = 100

The variable sets how much priority the system gives to using swap space. The system sets the value dynamically, but also tends to keep it around 60. The lower it is, the more reluctant the system is in both writing to and reading from swap. That is what was ruining my framerate.

Reboot was required for the change to take effect.

The issue is now resolved, more or less. Graphically demanding zones and events still reduce my framerate to single digits or tweens, but now they recover.

Addons Again

2009-03-07T12:54:00.000-05:00

UberQuest Reborn Again has been abandoned. I went looking through WoW Interface for a replacement, and I found QuestMods. It does the thing I want most from UberQuest Reborn Again, namely, it splits the quest log into two panes. And also, it's way lots lighter than UQRA or DoubleWide.

I've found a new mod to track all characters, even across multiple realms and accounts. I have yet to try Altoholic, but it looks like something right up my alley. I'll have to see how its footprint compares to BankItems. It looks like it has more features, and takes more space.

Addon Installation and Use

2009-03-01T20:27:00.000-05:00

It's time for that long-promised post about addons.

Addons change your interface. That doesn't sound like much. But "interface" means just about everything you do that controls the game, and all the information the game shows you. So addons can make huge changes in your game experience.

There are many sites with compressed addons you can download and install. My favorite is WoW Interface. WoW Interface hosts hundreds of addons and scores of interfaces -- customised collections of addons to suit a particular purpose. I prefer to build my own.

Save your download to a working folder (I use /home/learner/Projects) and extract it. Nearly all addons should be extracted, copied or moved to your addons folder, normally at /home/username/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Interface/AddOns.

There are a few exceptions, especially those involving sound. For example, EarPlugs is installed to the /World of Warcraft/Data directory instead of /World of Warcraft/Interface/AddOns. These exceptions will have special instructions either on the download page, in the compressed file, or both.

As an aside, EarPlugs makes playing a hunter that uses guns MUCH less unpleasant, by reducing the loudness of the gunshot sounds by 10 dBa.

One of the addon projects I like best is LibDataBroker. LDB addons are separated into displays, feeds, and launchers. The feeds and launchers plug into the display, and cannot work without it. I like it because the plugins and displays are completely modular and much lighter than for TitanPanel or FuBar.

I use Cladhaire's NinjaPanel as my LDB display. It's light, sits at the top, and does not need any configuration to show what I want all on one line. Other LDB displays include ButtonBin, Carousel, Fortress, ChocolateBar, DockingStation, and StatBlockCore. Make sure you get StatBlockCore and StatBlock_(plugins) and NOT the very similarly named StatBlocks, which are not LDB compatible and are not maintained. There is also CargoShip, but it is configured by editing the LUA code.

My LDB plugins are zBrokerPerformance (shows latency and FPS), picoDPS (shows DPS), BasicAttitude (shows angle of ascent/descent), StatBlock_Memory (shows memory used by addons), ccSpeed (shows speed relative to normal running speed), and TomTom (shows co-ordinates, and replaces the TomTom coordinates block). I also have launcher buttons for BugSack, Omen3, and GFXToggle2.

Other addons I use are

CastTime -- adds a countdown timer to cast bar, VITAL for fishing
Cellular -- an IM-style window for tells
Skizo's ChatTimeStamps (there are two ChatTimestamps addons I know of, and this one is MUCH better)
CombatStats -- detailed combat and healing tracking
Cutup -- Countdown timers and bars for Rogues (read the comments on WowInterface)
DurabilityStatus -- track equipped durability, popup box when you can repair
ForgottenMail -- keeps a grey minimap mail icon when you have old mail in your mailbox
Gatherer -- this is actually 3 addons from Norganna, to help track and gather herbs, ore, and chests
LoadIT -- allows you to load and disable addons from inside the game
MobInfo3 -- game data about all mobs reported to your tooltip and target frame
Mundunugu -- 4 panes that let you click to spawn shaman totems and buffs
OmniCC -- puts countdown timers on all your hotkey buttons and effects you cause
Postal -- helps you open and send mail en masse
RedRange -- your hotkey buttons are red if you're out of range, or blue if you don't have enough mana/ rage/ energy/ runic power.
ShowGuildList -- hitting 'o' will bring up your guild list by default, instead of friends list.
StatusBars -- a HUD with bars & text showing both you and your target's health, energy, mana etc; also your combo points if applicable. Causes screen flash when you're low. Configures with text commands only. StatusBars2 is very similar, with GUI configuration.
TasteTheNaimbow -- assigns a unique, bright color to every name in chat
tekJunkSeller -- sells all your greys when you open a merchant interface
tekKompare -- when you mouse over equipment (icon or link), it shows tooltips for both the item and also the items you have equipped in the same slot as the one you're mousing over
tekMapEnhancer -- shrinks the map, and allows you to control while it's up
TomTom -- provides location coordinates, and a HUD arrow that points at the waypoint you select
UberQuest -- turns the Quest display into 2 panes, a list and quest text
UFE -- Trav's Unit Frame Extensions, shows target class, adds text to target health and mana /rage /energy /runic power.

Here's a screenshot of my interface, showing as many of these addons as possible:

Making It All Work

2009-02-02T20:30:00.000-05:00

Mint 6 is easily the fastest-booting OS i've used thus far. I'd say about 1/2 to 2/3 of the software in Windows 2000 is Windows 2000 hotfixes or Microsoft Security hotfixes, which doubtless bogs its boot down a lot. Mint also launches things much faster than Win2k. It also seems just a little bit faster than I remember PCLinuxOS 2007 being, but PCLOS was definitely on a slower drive.

One of the reasons Mint is so fast is that I'm sufficiently familiar with Linux and Synaptic to remove packages that I don't use or like, such as Compiz-Fusion, ATI packages (I use an nVidia graphics card), and ndiswrapper (I use a cabled ethernet). However, I don't suggest blowing packages willy-nilly to my target audience of total Linux newbies. At the very least, get a couple of confirmations from the Mint Linux IRC channel (#linuxmint on irc.spotchat.org).

World of Warcraft had installed just fine, but wasn't running quite right. There were grave sound issues, as well as a few relatively minor graphics bugs. I decided to update Wine from 1.1.11 to the most recent version (then 1.1.13). Because I didn't want to regularly fool with manual installation and removal, that meant adding the Wine Repository to Synaptic's list of repositories. Neither Debian nor Ubuntu (a Debian fork based on Debian's unstable repositories) has up-to-date versions of Wine.

This page had excellent instructions for those using base Debian or Ubuntu 8.x distros. However, the interface for adding repos in Synaptic is a bit different in Mint 6. Here's a screenshot:

It separates the single line in the list of repositories into pieces, and I wasn't sure which parts of the line ought to go into which parts of the dialog box. I knew that the point was to add that one line to the appropriate configuration file. I went to the IRC channel. The folks there were enormously helpful with all of my technical questions. It took almost no time at all to find out where the file was, invoke the terminal, and enter the command

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

One day, when I learn to use Nano, I'll do this sort of thing with sudo nano instead of gksu gedit or kdesu kate. This is not that day. With the examples of the other repositories, it was easy to figure out that the # character marked comments and how to add Wine's repository to them.

EDIT: I would have been better off scrolling down to the bottom of the page and using the instructions under Alternative command Line Instructions for Installing Wine. It would have really simplified adding the APT key to make the Wine repository a trusted one.

Updating to Wine 1.1.13 fixed the sound issues, but the graphics bugs remained. The minimap worked fine outdoors, but was messed up in cities and inside buildings. That was annoying, because I am used to navigating by minimap in those areas. Much more annoying was that I didn't have a colored circle on the ground around my target, or the green targeting circle for my area spells.

This screenshot is clearly a Linux screenshot, not a WoW screenshot, which is why it shows a Linux mouse cursor, instead of the WoW mouse cursor.

It shows the complete lack of a targeting circle around my target, Overlord Runthak. You can see I've selected Rain of Fire (S-8) but I don't have a targeting circle. I've highlighted the part of the minimap that's actually showing with yellow. You can see the Orgrimmar bank to my Northwest, and that it's in the very Southeast corner of my minimap frame -- it's not even inside the minimap border.

So I went back to the World of Warcraft page on WineHQ and studied it. Mint had made a handy-dandy Wine menu, and World of Warcraft was in it, so I had always clicked that, and it launched the launcher, just like in Windows. I knew the game was supposed to work better in OpenGL, but the launcher options (which ALSO were a pain to get at) did nothing to fix the issues. I had to do things differently.

It turns out I was invoking the game wrong. The proper thing to do is open a terminal and enter

wine wow.exe -opengl

which got me this response:

wine: could not load L"C:\\windows\\system32\\wow.exe": Module not found

Grrrr. I tried making my way to the World of Warcraft directory in the terminal, and couldn't. Bash doesn't recognize file or directory names with spaces in them, like "Program Files", which is where Wine had installed World of Warcraft. I went back to that handy-dandy Wine menu and clicked "Browse C:\ Drive". That opened up Nautilus (2.24.1, if it matters) in Wine's C:\ directory, and allowed me to browse to the World of Warcraft directory. Then I selected File > Open in Terminal, and tried the command again.

It invoked the game client, rather than the launcher. Apparently this is necessary because the -opengl switch probably isn't passed on from the launcher to the game client.

Since my taskbar was looking cluttered, I decided to kill the term I'd used to launch the game. Whoops, that killed the game too. It's clear that you need both.

Incidentally, browsing the .Wine/dosdevices/c: directory is also how to install addons. More on them, next time.

Installing Linux Mint 6 "Felicia"

2009-02-01T10:03:00.002-05:00

On to the actual business of this blog -- rating various Linux distributions in light of their ability to ably run World of Warcraft in Wine.

I started by heading over to the WineHQ Application Database and looking up World of Warcraft. Windows applications are rated Platinum (hitchless), Gold (some configuration required), Silver (not all features work), Bronze (sort of works, I suppose; the site doesn't make that really clear) and Garbage. They keep reports of recent installs, including distro, version of Wine, and rating. The first platinum rating for World of Warcraft was with Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) and Wine 1.1.11. I'd read some reviews of Linux Mint that described it as "Ubuntu done right." So it was my first pick for this blog.

Let's start with my Test Bed:

Processor: AMD Athlon XP 3200 2.0 GHz (socket 939).
Motherboard: Abit KN8 Ultra 1.1
Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 7100 with 128 Mb of Video Ram
RAM: 1.5Gb DDR400 RAM (2x512Mb, 2x256Mb)
HD: 120Gb SATA, 40Gb EIDE.

I built this thing about 4 years ago, from cheap parts just a couple generations ahead of obsolescence. I had set up the SATA drive with Windows 2000 Professional SP 4, and the EIDE, salvaged from a Compaq I'd bought in 2001, with PCLinuxOS 2007, as my boot drive. I resized my windows partition, and made two new ones from the freed space, about 25Gb and 30 Gb. My intention was to use the swap partition from the EIDE, one partition for root, and the other for home.

EDIT: If you have any salvage that would enhance my machine, or any blank CD-Rs, I could really use them. Send offers to linux1earnr AT gmail DOT com.

Then I installed. GRUB totally failed to work. It couldn't find any of my partitions. The only way I could get anything to work was to boot my GPartEd/Clonezilla CD, and pick boot main disk, which would get me into Windows.

I decided the problem was that the Mint Installer configured GRUB with the presumption that it was on the boot drive. If I'd known enough about GRUB, I no doubt could have configured it properly, but I didn't. I removed the EIDE drive and reinstalled, adding a fourth partition of 2Gb to use as swap. That put me on the Installation Happy Path, following all of the developers' assumptions. Success!! I could boot into Mint.

EDIT: It may be that I never removed the boot flag from the EIDE drive when I formatted it to remove PCLOS. For whatever reason, it seemed to me that the BIOS considered the EIDE drive the sole boot drive.

Installing Mint was a snap. It uses the same installer as Ubuntu, widely praised, including GParted. But there is a difference between the GParted interface with the live CD and the one in the installer: the one in the Gparted liveCD includes how much space is used in each partition, while the one in the Ubuntu installer does not. It's a good idea to write down how much free space you have before resizing or creating partitions. edit Even better is to run Gparted from Menu -> Administration -> Partition Editor. At least that way you can grow partitions, which the interface in the installer cannot do.

Because I'd read reviews, I knew it was a good idea to totally remove the flash player plugin for Mozilla and install the latest from the repository, so I did. I also used the MintUpdate utility to update all the obsolete packages and install the latest nVidia proprietary drivers. It checks installed packages against repositories automatically. It was absurdly easy.

I noodled around on WineHQ site and found the .deb package for Wine 1.1.11, downloaded it, and installed it -- that only required a double-click on the downloaded file; the package installer did the rest.

Next: Installing and running World of Warcraft

Choosing Your Linux Distro

2009-01-28T21:57:00.001-05:00

One driving motivation behind the FOSS movement and Linux has always been the desire for more freedom and autonomy in computing. Lots of people have taken up FOSSware so they could change their programs to suit their needs, a no-no with most, if not all, proprietary software. One result of this is that any time a developer thinks he needs something from Linux that no current distribution (distro) has, he goes and makes one that does have it. As a result, there are hundreds of distributions out there. Lots are specialized: some just run web servers; some turn legacy hardware into ersatz Cisco routers; some are specialized to create graphics, or play media, or recover lost data, or partition and copy hard disks. It really helps to know what the design goals of a distro are when evaluating it.

I'll be concentrating on desktop distros, with emphasis varying from highly automated distros that require little knowledge to install and configure, to lightweight distros that seek to improve performance, especially on older machines. This article is a great introduction to ten of the most highly-regarded distros.

Some of the top desktop distros are Fedora (supported by Red Hat), OpenSuSE (supported by Novell), Mandriva (supported by Mandriva), Ubuntu (supported by Canonical), and Debian (supported by a worldwide community of users and developers).

There are many smaller (less-used) distros that are derived from these or, in a few cases, worked up from source. On my list of distros to investigate are Linux Mint, TinyMe, PCLinuxOS, Damn Small Linux, SimplyMEPIS, AntiX, U-lite, Sabayon, Granular, Dreamlinux, CentOS, Vector, CrunchBang, Zenwalk, KNOPPIX, PC/OS, DesktopBSD, Scientific, and Pardus. All of these can be searched for on Distrowatch.

I don't intend to fool around with source-compile distros like Slackware, Gentoo, Crux, and Linux From Scratch, no matter how popular they may be, or server/embedded distros of any type. I know it's possible to hack such things into a desktop distro, but really, I have better things to do. The closest I am likely to get to anything like that is Arch Linux.

Pre-Linux Preparation

2009-01-24T10:58:00.000-05:00

Most people who are trying Linux for the first time use the Dual-Boot option. They divide their hard drive into two partitions, one for Windows and one for Linux. There are a lot of things you can do to make this less trouble-prone.

First, look at your hard drive. Microsoft recommends that Windows have at least 1/3 of its disk space empty to work well, but I've seen it work just fine when the empty space is around 15%. If you intend to install a typical desktop Linux distribution and use it to play "Wrath of the Lich King" you will need about 30Gb of disk space for its partition.

To see if you have enough free disk space, right-click on your c: drive in My Computer, and check Properties. It will show you how much space your hard disk has, how much space is used and how much space is free.

Multiply Used Disk Space by 1.2 (1.5 if you want to follow Microsoft's recommendations) and add 30 Gb. If the result is more than your total disk space, you probably don't have enough room to play "Wrath of the Lich King" under most full-featured Linux distributions. It may be possible with some of the lightweight distributions, but those are usually more difficult for the beginner.

You want as much free space as you can stand. The utilities I recommend are all giftware.

To increase disk space, run the Disk Cleanup accessory, and get rid of unused Windows system services. Use the Add/Remove Programs tool in the Control Panel to get rid of unused programs. The Fine Uninstall and nLite utilities can help.

There are a lot of things where Linux software is better than what you can have in Windows. For examples, take a look at this list.

Second: once you have enough disk space, run a registry cleaner. I like RegSeeker, but Registry Repair also looks good. Whichever one you get, run it twice.

edit: I suggested Registry Repair to a friend who was having issues with RegSeeker, and she liked it better.

Third: Defragment and optimize your hard drive. This puts your files at the front of the drive. Files that are on the actual disk space where your Linux partition will go have to be moved and copied, which has a certain small amount of risk. Using Auslogics Disk Defrag should eliminate any need for that.

edit Auslogics Disk Defrag only defragments your disk. It doesn't optimize it, and will leave the defragmented files pretty much wherever they end up. It does the same job as Microsoft's disk defragmenter, but faster.

Fourth: Download and install Ext2 IFS for Windows. This is an extremely handy tool. It will allow you to use your Linux disk space while you are in Windows.

Fifth: As much as you can, compress and archive your personal files before starting, on some storage device OTHER than the one with Windows on it.

I'm also adding a link list.

Definitions

2009-01-22T21:00:00.000-05:00

I'm a miser, and I like not having to pay for stuff. That includes software. But "Free Software" means different things to different people.

People in the GNU/Linux community differentiate between "Free as in Free Beer" and "Free as in Free Speech." I find the way they put it annoying and confusing.

Any software you don't have to pay for, they call "Free as in Free Beer," but I call "giftware". You may be giving up all sorts of rights in order to use it (see the Zwinky EULA, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy for a truly egregious example of this), but you don't have to pay. Some software that is advertised as "free downloads" don't fit my definition of giftware. These include gimpware (for example, a virus scanner that doesn't remove viruses), tempware (a program that will only run for a limited number of days or times), and nagware (which asks you to register and/or pay every time you start it up until you do). There is a surprising amount of giftware available for Windows. My favorite place to look when I need something is Nonags.com. They certify all software is free of nags, gimps, and time or usage limits.

"Free as in Free Speech" means you have control of your software and access to the source code, and are free to do with it as you wish. But that's not so much free speech as it is having a property right to it. After all, you can require somebody to pay you before you transfer it to them, so it isn't automatically "freeware". Such software is released under a free software license such as the GNU Public License. Because these nearly always require that the source code be open, I call this stuff "FOSSware" (for Free/Open Source Soft Ware).

Linux users have two significant choices for running games written for Windows. One is WINE, which is freeware and FOSSware, and the other is Cedega. You have to pay for Cedega, and I can't find any info about its license.

edit: there is also Crossover Games from Codeweavers, the corporate supporters of the Wine project.

First Post

2009-01-22T20:20:00.000-05:00

Linux isn't for everyone. I've been using it, mostly off but occasionally on, since 1998. My reasons are various.

You (usually) don't have to pay for Linux. (For me, that's a BIG one.)
When you get a copy of Linux, you also get a copy of the Source Code, so you get to see what the software really does. (see the GNU Public License.)
You don't have to use a Rube Goldberg contraption of an operating system, locked inside a black box. (And with Vista, Microsoft has added booby traps.)
You don't have to worry about the Next Generation Secure Computing Base or Digital Rights Management preventing you from having control of your computer, the way End-User License Agreements prevent you from having full control of the software you use.

Much of what I hope to do here is help others do the same. I plan to give tips for switching over to Linux, reviews of the distributions I try, and whatever helpful tips and tricks I come across. There will also be occasional ruminations on the Free Software Movement and playing World of Warcraft.