Howto's, experiences and more

Some of you might have guessed it already when you arrived at this page and me mentioning yWriter. Yes, I am a writer. That means, I am what i like to call a spare-time writer. As you might guess this implies that I am not a professional writer but someone who writes for his own pleasure in his spare time.

Of course, every profession has it’s own set of dedicated software tools (or at least should have) and the writing profession isn’t much different from that. So next to the obvious programs we have at our disposal, like the Office suite from a particular commercial softwarehouse from Redmond USA, or the more friendly and free Open Office suite, there is also something called yWriter. Read more

I have been toying and searching a lot lately on the net and with EVE itself, and i think i found the solution for it. That means, someone else already has found a working solution and I just reinvented the wheel (story of my life) and I am just reposting it and explaining it here.

(update : There is even an official bugreport and solution in the comments here. It’s not where i picked it up, but this whole story seems to be there as well. Thanks for providing me with a link Dan !)

For the record, I want to state again that the CrossOver project, which is the commercial frontend of Wine, and Wine itself are 2 amazing projects, and all i can say is that the coders, planners, executives, CEO etc, have my sincere respect. Up to now, things have worked flawlessly and I encourage anyone out there to just spend that little stash of coin on CrossOver. It’s a one time donation if you don’t want the support year after year and the money goes straight into the project, which is well worth it, and you buy yourself a whole lot of -ease of use- and manageability for it, plus timely and polite support that actually knows how to fix your problems. Ask any CrossOver user and they will tell you the same.

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Since installing and running EVE with CrossOver was such a success, i decided to ditch the standard Wine installation alltogether and switch entirely to CrossOver. So that meant byebye .wine folder and start completely over again.

World of Warcraft is also a supported application, so i figured i just download the webinstaller again and use that as the setup to run in CrossOver. So, to put down the steps : I fired up ‘Install Windows Software’ from the CrossOver Games menu and told it I wanted to install World of Warcraft. For the setup file i chose the one i downloaded from the internet, and well whatd’ya know, it fired it up nicely and i could click the install button. Read more

I ran into some trouble with EVE running under plain Wine, meaning that i experienced some freak lockups of the game, of course usually in the heat of battle and not safely in a station. Can someone please shoot Murphy while we are at it ? Thank you !.

Anyway, since I recently (few hours ago actually) obtained a license to use Crossover Professional and Crossover Games, I thought i’d give it a swirl and see how the installing process of EVE goes in that. Looking at the whole installation process under plain Wine and the effort it took to get it running and working out all the quirks, I’m guessing that it can be a much more trivial task, but hey, let’s have a look at it shall we ? Read more

After some happy surfing, i kept running into people saying they used something called ‘Crossover’, and after a while i got curious about what that Crossover thing actually was. Well, to my surprise, it seemed to be another commercial Wine spinoff.

After being initially put off seeing the mention of ‘Commercial’, ‘Open Source’ and ‘Linux’ in one sentence, i decided to put aside my prejudices and actually read what they had to say for themselves. In short it came down to this : Crossover is a commercial project that is built upon the opensource project Wine. When you buy Crossover you get a really neat and nifty user interface for wine and a lot of neat and nifty ways to run Windows Applications. Plus : You get support and all their developments go straight to the Wine project as well. So there you have it : Opensource benifitting from commercial solutions ! Eutopia -does- exist ! Read more