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Well, after a week or so happily playing World of Warcraft it became time to give EVE a spin. Now as some of you might be aware of, EVE actually supports Linux. So getting this game to work on Linux is a very hopeful task. Or so you might think.

The way EVE supports Linux might not really appeal to you it involves Cedega. While Cedega is a fine solution for people that want to get robbed from their money so they can be lazy, I found that I better spend that coin on something else and run EVE in what Cedega was taken from : Wine.

Assuming you have Wine already installed (latest stable version of course), there is a few things you ought to know before diving in head-first : EVE uses Microsoft True Type Core Fonts. That said, it won’t work if you don’t have those on your Wine environment. So the first thing you need to do is fire up the Synaptic Package Manager and install the msttcorefonts package. This package contains the ttf core fonts from Microsoft that are free for distrubution and use. Read more

[a more recent article on this subject is posted here]

World of Warcraft. Or WoW in short. Probably the most played game on this entire globe today. And I can understand why. The game is really mesmerizing and is able to suck you into it’s own world and offers a lot for a variety of folk out there.

But… It’s a Mac and Windows only game.

Fortunately being also for Mac means that it supports OpenGL as well and therefore there is no real reason why it shouldn’t be able to run natively on Linux as well. Seeing that there are more Linux users than Mac users (I think), the reason why there isn’t a native Linux client for WoW really is beyond me, but is also beyond the scope of this blog. What we want to do is play WoW, and on our Linux desktops no less. Read more

If you run either Debian or Ubuntu (which is Debian based) you might have ran into the problem that for some software, there is no .deb package available, only .rpm.

Seeing as they are both similar packages, you might wonder if there is a way to make a .deb from a .rpm. And in fact, this is a very real option by using alien.

This however requires you to use the commandline, so for you people used to your windows, this might be an odd operation, but stick with me for a moment as you are going to love the power of the shell in a while anyway. So first thing you need to to is fire up your shell and try if you have alien installed :

$ alien -V Read more

Yes ! It’s very well possible to run Windows games on Linux these days.

There is one downside to this good news : Not all games run as well as some do and some don’t even run at all. That said, there are 2 games I like to play at the moment, being World of Warcraft and EVE. Both quite different and both quite Windows.

Now EVE actually has Linux support, being that the game is able to be ran with something called CEDEGA. Well, I looked up on CEDEGA, and it’s a WINE spinoff that became closed source and you have to pay a subscription fee for it. That’s not so bad if the support of the software is great and it runs anything you want. Truth is, that is not the case and there is many disgruntled less-technical users out there that would be happy to get rid of CEDEGA and switch to the free, opensource solution for it, WINE. There are even (multiple) stories of CEDEGA not responding at all to support requests and only getting into action when said subscriber cancelled his subscription. That was it for me, no way am I going to pay for a shitty service using a software package that has it’s roots ‘loaned’ from an opensource project.

So, obviously, with users experience with CEDEGA in mind, and seeming WINE is also the harder path of choice, I naturally chose to run my 2 favorites with WINE and see how far i can go with it.

By the end of this blogline i hope I will have provided you with enough knowledge to run your games under Linux and enjoy getting it there as much as I did. Read more

Hi there.

Lately I have made the transition from Windows to Linux, meaning my reasons to leave Windows became numerous enough to try my luck with something else, and of course, Linux being as appealing as it is, it became my choice. The Ubuntu distribution to be exact because it offered the smallest download and looked the easiest to begin with.

I have tried many different flavors of Linux before in the past 15 years, and up to now, none of them quite cut it for me, but it seems Ubuntu looks promising enough (or dumbed down enough) to look usable and provide a reasonably clean ride to the linux world as a former windows user.

The main reason why I kicked Windows off my disks ? Well. It’s not that Windows isn’t a good OS, it’s just that I got fed up with it for a long time now and it was time to try something different. Let’s just leave it at that.

So, when you are ready, come along for my joyride with tux on my side. This blog will cover anything i ran into, enjoyed, hated etc and maybe you too are ready to make the switch at some point.