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How To install Neverwinter Nights on Linux
Joe Barr writes " As soon as I saw the news that BioWare released a beta of a Linux client for its popular and successful Neverwinter Nights title, I downloaded the beta (registration required) and went shopping for the prerequisite retail Windows version of the game. Before I proceed, let me offer this brief warning: Neverwinter Nights is the mother of all timesinks. Do not follow my path unless you have nothing important you want to get done for the next week or so."
Finally... Not a post regarding the new RFC and IP stuff. Thank god 4/1 is over! (And this could be 1st post, i doubt it though)
Insert Sig Here
I'm scared to read the article. Is April fool's over yet?
Haha. Like the Never Winter Nights Linux client will ever come out.
What's next? How to install Duke Nukem Forever on Linux?
You're kidding right? You're posting to slashdot claiming that some game is the mother of all timesinks? Hah!
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
A quick check of the NWN modules section on Bioware's site shows over 2000 player created ones. Carry on then. I don't anticipate I will be seeing you around here much from now on. :)
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
The reason I speak out against these kinds of public servers is that, first and foremost, you'll be playing against the biggest most idiotic cheaters ever. That and nine times out of ten it's just the servers admin fucking around and killing everyone because he's made his character into a dragon. So play with your buddies, you'll have a more enjoyable experience and it's easier to track a cheater down and punch him in the face.
Just my 2 gp.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Hmmm... Linux, D&D, can it be any nerdier?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Unfortunately this had to be posted today of all days...
:) and the game is a blast. It's also good to see that news of the installer is getting out, as there are many people who don't know about it.
Anyways, the Linux Client really exists (you can even check the packets coming from Bioware, the 'evil bit' is set to 0!
-Colin
.rpm, .deb, and .ebuild (gentoo) are AFAIK all script-based, or at least have scripting capabilities, so there's no such thing as an "application that can't be packaged". If the app couldn't be packaged, then you couldn't install it by hand, either. (Debian even supports asking the user for input as part of the install process.) .rpm and .deb, by convention more then anything else, are supposed to be binary-only packages. There's nothing technically stopping them from compiling source code (except perhaps that you aren't supposed to need a compiler on such systems).
.rpm and .deb, if not essentially impossible.
Ebuilds, on the other hand, embrace compiling source to the near exclusion of all else, so for those packages that can't be wrapped into a nice binary that will work for everyone, an ebuild can still be created. In fact it is common practice to make such wrappers, and ebuilds for other uncommon situations as well.
For instance, Sun no longer allows automatic downloads of its Java distribution, so Gentoo has an ebuild that asks you to download the Sun-provided tarball and put it in a particular place, then proceeds to open the tarball and put it in the correct place, also allowing you to have full packaging system support for uninstalling it. This is harder to do with
Ebuilds are a superset of binary packages, such that they can package anything you could install by hand, simply because they are a higher level. (This is where the sandbox support comes in real handy, since you don't have to specify what files were installed and what files to uninstall; the sandbox picks it up automatically and I expect all packaging systems to pick that up eventually.) Of course, there's a price to pay for that in compile time, since virtually by definition it's impossible to have this flexibility and still distribute binaries*, so it's not like it's a absolutely superior method in all cases. Tradeoffs just like anything else.
*: People keep talking about having a "package repository" for Gentoo which would function as a giant multi-person cache of Gentoo compiled packages, which you could then grab instead of compiling. Nobody AFAIK has made any progress beyond suggesting it, because even with just the obvious configurations (the four or five main processor types, the three or four good optimization settings from conservative to ultra-aggresive, the three or four obvious USE settings from conservative to everything) mulitplied by 10 or 20 gigabytes for a pure install means that nobody can afford to host it, and people would still find it too limiting.
Let non humans be paladins, and they crumble at the first temptation. Stupid traitor Aribeth... ;)
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