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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?
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.
Well then she should at least know that the DAOC trial is NOT on the supported games list. There isn't even a forum for it. The full version of DAOC classic or DAOC gold runs just fine however. I installed it earlier today.
It didn't play for shit on a Geforce 2 but that's no shocker, it doesn't play for shit on a Geforce 2 on windows either. I can't think of any game with higher requirements. I popped in a FX5200 and away I went with a happy not laggy or buggy in the slightest DAOC experience.
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.
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.
(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...