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WineX Install Goes Sour for LinuxWorld Editor
jg21 writes "LinuxWorld's gaming industry editor apparently grappled with TransGaming's latest WineX release, now renamed Cedega 4.0, to such an extent that she "lost" half a day of her life. A trip to the Dark Age of Camelot site for a 7-day free trial ended in tears and installing Diablo II didn't go much better. Dee-Ann LeBlanc may have coedited Linux for Dummies, but she suffered more black screens than a multiplex during a power outage. Is the problem simply that she uses Fedora Core 2 - can't someone help her out?" Are these one-off problems, or symptomatic of a bigger issue?
A trip to the Dark Age of Camelot site for a 7-day free trial ended in tears and installing Diablo II didn't go much better.
This is why most women would make a bad CEO, president and leader. You can't go around bursting into tears and sinking your spoon into a crate of Ben & Jerry's every time you have problems installing a video game.
I'm completely embarrassed for this woman and her apparent inability to control her emotions. Be a man; swear a little bit, pound your fist and move on.
How crap Fedora is.. Everything on that version of Linux uses some sort of "we thought of it first" hacks.
Some may call it innovative..
Some say its easy to fix..
But you'd be guaranteed not to waste your time using Windows when needing the same quik-fix.
Go ahead, downmod me.. Speaking with decent business sence, its the truth.
Procrastination sucks.
That said, am I stupid for thinking that most people aren't going to switch to Linux primarily to play Windows games?
Sure, it might be nice to be able to play some games once you've already jumped ship (and you're probably either knowledgeable in Linux already or willing to work at it to make things happen, as with quite a bit else you might have taken for granted in Windows), but I'd think that by that time you've done your research and made a commitment to switch, you aren't about to run crying back to mommy because that mean Linux beat you up and took your quarter to play at the arcade after school.
As Othium says, 'Hard tasks need hard ways'. Cedega may be a commercial and Linux may be coming of age, but I'm a little surprised at the (lacking) level of effort here for something as complex and demanding as running recently developed games tailored for a completely different operating system.
Perhaps I unreasonably expect a seasoned veteran with ten years of Linux experience plus twelve books and over one-hundred articles beneath her belt to be made of a little sterner stuff and perhaps a touch more resourceful -- but what does a rube like me know -- I just post on the internet.
A few days ago I did the following:
1. Installed Debian i386 unstable in a chroot on my Debian amd64 unstable machine.
2. Installed Cedega in the chroot.
3. Installed the Nvidia 6106 x86-64 drivers and copied the 32-bit OpenGL libs to the i386 chroot.
4. Installed Battlefield 1942, including the Desert Combat and Forgotten Hope mods, using Cedega in the chroot.
It plays great on my Quadro FX 4000, not just vanilla BF1942, but also DC and FH -- pretty impressive considering it's running a 32-bit Windows binary using 32-bit OpenGL drivers using a 64-bit Nvidia driver on a 64-bit kernel. Kudos to Transgaming, Nvidia, and the Debian project.
I'd much rather see a native port of BF1942 to GNU/Linux, though.
Of course it's symptomatic of a bigger issue. The issue is that you've got a gaming industry editor for a Linux magazine trying to play emulated Windows games. Is there anyone who expected the process wouldn't be a giant pain in the ass?
When we play emulated Nintendo games on other consoles or our PCs, there's always some glitch. If the sound cuts out or a character's animation begins to loop, that's just the way it goes. Come back after the next revision and see if the emulator has been fine tuned to handle that specific game. She admits trying only two games with Cedega before writing the experience off as too frustrating.
I'm really happy to see her investigative journalism turn up the shocking truth about the industry: many games run Linux on their backends. But it's sad to see her expectations for the emulation of Windows clients are so unreasonable.
Seriously, if you want a hassle free Linux gaming experience, go back to playing Tux Racer.
Don't be surprised when I, as a fairly avid gamer, don't switch over to Linux any time in the near future. With Windows, you put in the CD, and it works. No fooling with emulation or anything. With Linux, in order for it to work, you have to tweak WineX, and maybe even then it won't work.
Fun story: A friend tried to run my copy of SkiFree through Wine. If he tried to use the keyboard (or maybe it was the mouse, can't remember), it would crash.
I understand that as the emulation gets better, or perhaps as Linux gains a critical mass of people and game developers start making their games such that they'll run on Linux natively, this will stop being an issue. That time is not now.
[Pre-emptive "but, but, but, dual boot" response: why bother? I have WinXP running, it's stable (I don't think I've *crashed* my system in about 6 months, and those were hardware problems), why should I reboot repeatedly to do things that I can do with Windows already?]
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
I'm sorry, but if you're crying over wasting half a day you're not cut out to be a Linux desktop user. I've been fighting with the Conexant modem driver for -- it has to be getting close to three years!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Seriously though, your descriptions of the raw power of Minux makes me want to go see what #cat /dev/urand /dev/mem does.
mods, do your worst.
So, I understand that they might be keeping you from switching to Linux, I don't think you're in very large company. Since Microsoft seems determined to have a fairly small update cycle of consoles (XBox Next released next year), gaming on PCs might soon be even more of a fringe thing than Linux. Which could be interesting--maybe the market for computer games revert to be more like that eighties or early nineties, when computers weren't so omnipresent.
Anyway, why should you switch to Linux? It's a somewhat nicer development environment, it's a vastly superior server environment, and it's an weird toy. If none of those sound interesting to you, and you don't have strange paranoias about Microsoft (which would probably be very rational paranoias to have if you happen to be, say, the Government of France, but not for American John Q. Public), then you're probably right to stick to a Windows or Mac environment, if you're willing to pay the minor additional software costs for either those.
*I don't think games are a big thing that holds very many people in Windows, just because so few people use computers to play games any more.*
that argument could have been used in computer vs. console arguments for something like 17 years already! give it up! nothing has really changed, only the devices have(well, pc gaming has gotten remarkably _easier_ in the past 10 years while console gaming has gotten more complex).
xbox next next year? in your dreams buddy.
Fact seems to be that most recent bleeding edge distros are very crippled as far as that gaming support hasn't caught up to them yet.
:(
Also, ATI just don't seem to have an Xorg driver yet.
Here's my experiences (I have a P4 with ATi Radeon 9700)
Red Hat 9/Fedora 1 - both burp when they see my onboard RAID. I don't get far at all. Don't get me started on lack of NTFS and MP3
Fedora 2 - I simply refuse to install that while that dual boot bug exists
Slackware 10 - Too much tweaking needed to get the ATI driver working... like recompile the kernel in a different GCC and change certain module functions. It's also missing a ton of libraries.
Mandrake 10 - ATI in there by deafult! Except that there's no sound!
Knoppix - Can't install the ATI drivers without having to convert the rpm to a deb, at which point that fails anyway
Gentoo - Now if I could only figure out the installation...
Damn there's just no decent and painless distros out there for my hardware to do gaming any justice.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I met Dee-Ann LeBlanc at a recent Linux conference and after a few minutes it became clear that (1) she is very much the stereotypical gamer and (2) she is very good at sounding like she understands the technical side of Linux.
It's very much like the candidate in a job interview who knows some basics but then starts throwing out terminology to give the appearance of knowing what they are talking about. To a non-technical person it all sounds very impressive but a real techie can see through it pretty quickly.
Someone who writes for a magazine with a technical audience like LinuxWorld should at least have some deeper understanding of the technical side of things. As an earlier comment said, this installation journal is written from the perspective of a recently switched Windows user who does not have a technical background. I doubt that's who Transgaming's main customers are.
She writes "If I have to do "Linux Guru" things to get a mainstream product working, then there's a serious problem." Sorry, but this is not a mainstream product in the conventional Windows-user sense. It is a mainstream product in the conventional Linux-user sense.
Linux desktop users tend to be technically oriented and those that aren't tend to be using it for basic things like Web, e-mail and office applications, not games. Games are among the most complex and demanding pieces of software anyone can run on a computer and some people are bound to have problems, especially when emulating Windows.
Too many of her complaints of a "wasted afternoon" are about Fileplanet and Gamespy, their download times and registration issues, which have absolutely nothing to do with Cedega.
Now I'm just wondering who the ghostwriter was that provided the technical information for the Linux books where she appears as the sole author. It seems obvious that her co-writers and the "et al" on some of those books are the source of the technical information they contain.
It also makes me wonder what the value of those Red Hat certifications she has are.
Are these one-off problems, or symptomatic of a bigger issue?
yes.shouldnt
Okay dude, do you remember what video game retail stores looked like back in 2001? Now compare them to how they look in 2004. See any difference? Oh, yeah--the stores in 2001 had nearly half their shelf space dedicated to computer software, and in 2004 you'd be lucky to see even a single shelf in the back dedicated to PC games. Seventeen years my ass. Perhaps games have become somewhat easier in the past 10 years, but they haven't in the past 5--for God's sake, they still sell multi CD games when consoles have gone DVD for quite a while. For the past 5 years both consoles and PCs have stayed the same in usability terms (consoles way the fuck easier to use than PCs), but the consoles are nearly caught up with PCs in terms of power. (Strangely, that still seems true even though the consoles came out years ago)
The article is about Cedega being a PITA. Yet, she never tried the Cedega product as a standalone package. She had problems with Point2Play, according to her article. I had quite a few problems. I tried Point2Play, Cedega, CVS WineX. After about two days of installing, uninstalling, downloading, compiling, tweaking, and hand editing in vim 100 or so times...I had the game run (although not playable). My vid-card wasn't fast enough is the conclusion. I will be purchasing an Nvidia card soon to resolve this problem. Point2Play's system tests even claimed my card was fast enough to run games. One of the most frustrating things was the wine config was rewritten after every time I edited it, and I never figured that one out. Even after playing around with find and grep, I never figured out where it was writing this config from.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Is the problem simply that she uses Fedora Core 2
Of course it is. And if she were using Mandrake, that would "simply be the problem". And if she were using RedHat, that would "simply be the problem". And if she were using [insert name of distro here], that would "simply be the problem".
I first read her as a Lockergnome Linux newsletter subscriber. Let us be kind here and say that I was underwhelmed by her knowledge of linux. To not be kind - there is a reason she wrote Linux for Dummies
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Are you blind?
I have been a PC gaming snob for many years. Only recently have I begrudgingly started playing consoles more.
Walk into any gaming store. Software Etc. used to have entire walls dedicated to PC games. Niche genres like flight sims, other military sims, point-and-click adventures, hex-based strategy, etc, used to live quite comfortably.
Today, PC games have almost no shelf space. Entire genres are dying out.
If you're sitting there saying nothing is changing, you are truly deluding yourself. PC gaming has taken major, major hits.
Because I know Dee, she's a smart person and this kind of review is exactly the kind of thing I like to see.
The lesson: Fedora core 2 and Cedaga don't play well together. And here's why, with every step along the way. Clear, detailed, and with some personality to it, even.
I don't have infinite amounts of time to screw around with half-baked code that doesn't get the job done. If I'm going to plan out a Linux machine, I want to know, does this work, right out of the box, or does it require minor tweaking, or does it require sacrificing a chicken in the light of the full moon?
This article told me exactly what I needed to know.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
There is a such a huge bias against female techies. She reports that she had difficulties getting a couple of games to work, and the male chauvinists shoot their mouths off. She might not be the most knowledgeble Linux user in the world, but she's written several books, many articles, and taught some Linux courses. If she was a dumbass, she would be out of a job. There are far too many skilled Linux users out there fo LinuxWorld to waste time with someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Shit like this happened when Eugenia from OSNews.com wrote an unfavorable review of Fedora Core 1. Any time a complaint was made about the way something was implemented and the little boys jump in, denigrating the female as being stupid and not knowing what she was doing. You would hope that you wouldn't see this kind of immaturity in techies, considering that the majority of them are intelligent and well educated, but it persists even today.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
As much as people love consoles, I just don't get off on them.
My hands hurt after using the controller for too long.
My tv is high def, but still isn't as nice as my computer screen.
the graphics just don't compare to what my computer can do.
I have more options for multiplayer online games, such as mogs , etc that i don't have with the console.
I don't have a keyboard with my console to communicate with (though, xbox live is a nice step in the right direction).
Also, i like going 'away' somewhere in my computer room to escape the madness for an hour or two to blow things up.
i guess it just comes down to culture or what your used to, i just can't see myself abandoning my windows games either to an xbox anytime in the near future, unless the landscape of the games change dramatically.
That's pretty paltry. Anyone I've ever talked to basically learns all their knowledge about linux installing things. =) ie. Oh! That's why it doesn't start X, I accidentally installed the unstable xlibs and screwed the pooch!!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
That said, am I stupid for thinking that most people aren't going to switch to Linux primarily to play Windows games?
No. But, maybe they won't switch at all because they can't play games on Linux?
With Windows, you put in the CD, and it works.
Hmmm... yesterday I installed Ground Control 2, it installed okay, ran, started the tutorial and it froze dead. Apparently I need the new drivers for my card. So I go and grab the new drivers, install them, GC2 works.. So later I play Thief 2... only I don't because it won't work with the new drivers until Ichange a directive to a text file to tell it to ignore the texture memory use. And don't even get me started on the amount of messing around it takes to get Thief 3 running properly.
That's "it works" eh?
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But the article isn't directed at them -- it seems, more than anything, to be directed at the proverbial dummy-who-just-switched. The snake is eating its own tail.
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Boycott winex! Transgaming: destroying Linux gaming $5 at a time!
there is a reason she wrote Linux for Dummies
... just the same way linux users are seen now - as freaks.
if you ever tried to teach anything to anyone, you know that it takes great knowledge to be able to explain it in simple terms so that linux illerates like me can understand (i have her book)
I read somewhere above you that the linux community was somewhat composed of male chauvinist. I largely agree with that but I think its a necessary evil for the community in general to mature. Dee-Ann is one of the first to get shot at but as linux will gain popularity, it will attract several types of persons, not only hardcore parameter-freak linux users but also illiterates like me for instance.
Just remember how computers began, how geeks at the time were see
then it will evolve...
I feel sorry for Dee-ann but I can only tell her to hang in there, it will change
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
There's been a lot of talk on the Transgaming forums, which are not open to the public, about the games which are "supported" by Cedega. The key point with Cedega is that some games work perfectly, some games have problems, and some games don't run at all. If the games you play don't run on Cedega, it's not worth paying $5 for the package.
Though some people bitch about this fact, I have no problem with it. It's simple business: if their games work, people will pay for it. If they don't, well, they won't. Unfortunately, emulating a convoluted system is difficult in the first place, and they can really only try to get these games working on a game-by-game basis. Some games are simply impossible to get working. At least half of my favorite games work in Cedega, however, so I'm going to stick with it. The way I see it, seeing as there is no alternative, I should be grateful to have at least this much support, especially since I don't have the coding prowess to contribute myself.
The complaints that have surfaced on the forums lately, however, are about the games which are listed as "supported." Like I said, I have no problem with the fact that Transgaming is not capable of getting every single game made working. However, when they say that a game is supported, or give it a 4/5 working rating, when it really isn't, that's when people are starting to get irked. Though I love Transgaming and Cedega, I think they need to stop toting their product as the ultimate do-all Windows/DirectX emulator, and accept its role as the somewhat-decent, works-for-a-lot-of-cool-games Direct3D driver emulation layer.
Man, if I had a quarter for every website and article I've read lately that says, "Cedega lets you play DirectX games in Linux." It's misinforming. Cedega lets you play SOME DirectX games in Linux.
more over if you need help
...ask...
Here, have my email take out the ask away, I make a living out of helping computer users (salary
In short - I teach, she writes books.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
(check's in the mail, Transgaming...) and I can see where she's coming from.
My biggest gripe is the fact that the emulation has a problem with breaking copy protection. Best I can tell, the first thing you have to do to get a WineX game working is go find a no-CD crack. (Make sure your cookie and pop-up shields are up; you're gonna need 'em...) Since most folks think of no-CD cracks as evil pirate stuff, no "legitimate" board would ever serve them (hey, Transgaming... your product kinda _requires_ 'em, why not chase 'em down and make 'em available to subscribers?) and they seem to be tough to find. Google for a civilization III no-CD crack and most of what you get are forum posts asking where to get one...
But even before you run into that problem, you find that you're still missing parts-- Installshield, ferinstance, uses parts of DCOM98, which aren't emulated by WineX. That's OK; you can get your hands on those directly from Microsoft.
Once you've got that working, part of the nature of the beast is that the error messages are going to be cryptic. Back to the Civilization example, when I'd run
cvswinex c/Program\ Files/.../Civilization3.exe
it crashed horribly, basically telling me "Hey, you should probably fire up a debugger..." Not WineX's fault, mind you, how is it supposed to know that your current working directory needs to be the same place as the Civilization executable, and Civ crashes if it ain't? Oh, and when you ran it before the no-CD crack, it was happy to actually hand you a window that said, "Hey, I refuse to run in a debugger because I think you're trying to break my copy protection!" So you're thinking the no-CD crack is broken up front, which sends you barking up the wrong tree.
None of this, mind, is documented in the Civ forum on Transgaming's site, aside from the need for a no-CD crack.
Now that it's running, it works pretty well (I've found one minor broken feature), but it was a chore getting it that way...
Maybe he already had the video card before trying to move to linux.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
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Avid game players use their computers mostly for playing games. If they can't do that in Linux, there's no point in switching to begin with. There's definitely no point in spending months to become adept enough to play the same games they were playing in Windows.
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
I completely agree with that statement. I feel sorry for your friend, who presumably saw an opinion about Linux being more stable than Windows somewhere -- maybe even here on Slashdot -- and assumed this meant Linux runs the same applications as Windows which of course, it does not (except perhaps 20-30 applications which run near-perfectly under WINE or CXO, and of course whatever games Cedega now supports).
My point is still as strong as ever: What was the target audience of this article? It clearly wasn't written for your friend either, because they don't know what Cedega/WineX, Wine, or CXO are, and besides didn't do any reading or asking questions before they rashly installed what they thought would be the solution to all of their OS woes. This article wouldn't have helped them -- a more educated, cautious and planned approach to a major software migration is what was required here.
I actually attended one of Dee-Ann's training courses recently on Linux. The course material was fine, but she did point out that it was prepared by someone else. The one thing I didn't like was the fact that she didn't provide any detail on the subjects outside of what was in the training material. Anyone can read along each bullet point in a slide to the class, part of teaching should be providing some context as for why you're touching on a particular topic.
Most infuriating to me was that when someone did ask a question the answer from Dee-Ann was invariably, "That's in the man or info page." Sure it might be, but if that's your teaching style what is the point of having an instructor at all? Especially when one of the labs is, "Configure and build a new kernel." with absolutely no information about what kernel configuration options a system needs. There wasn't a single person in the class who was able to get a fully booting kernel, and the responses were (paraphrased), "You didn't select the right configuration options." but no suggestion as to where to look, and, "See it's hard to do, so you shouldn't try to install your own custom kernel. Just use what the vendor installs."
A teacher? By profession, sure. I did not feel there was a depth of information being taught however. Just someone repeating bullet points that someone else prepared.
I wouldn't expect knights in shiny armor on slashdot (like there are any), but, hey, that's a little too radical.
We're here, but we're enlighted, so we give the woman a chance to defend herself first.
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I repeatedly point out where to find the information about what hardware you have on your system (like in /proc). In that class, most people simply don't want to take the time to figure it all out, and rather than torture them I try not to force it. The information can't really be prepared ahead of time, either, to include in the course materials since we can't know what computers will be in the classroom--so I don't know exactly what every piece of hardware is in the system, myself, unless I take the time to go through it. Even if we've used the room before, we could end up in a situation like I did in one class where the computers had been replaced 2 weeks ago.
I'm sorry you didn't like the class.
Author of "Linux for Dummies 5th Edition" and many other books articles, courses, and more
why should I reboot repeatedly to do things that I can do with Windows already?
Reboot repeatedly? That sounds like something you must be very familiar with. Linux doesn't need to be rebooted every time you need to install or reinstall something.
lots of happy customers i see...
I'm running Gentoo Linux, and I have a ATI Radeon 9800SE that has never given me any problems. When I play Americas Army at 1024x768 and the higher detail settings, I regularly get 60+ fps.
The only problem I ran into at all was needing to comment out the default line in my hosts file to connect to tcp/ip games on the lan.
Game play is excellent, battlenet and local network games work fine. I've played it all the way through and just restarted on Nightmare level. Since I don't play DAoC anymore I can't speak to that other than to say that the full version seems to work fine for other folks.