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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?
Fedora works fine - why dont you actually try it instead of super-imposing your impressions of RedHat 6 onto a wondeful distro...
Linux is partly about freedom and choice, and I am delighted with my choice. Surely unconstructive distro bashing should be a thing of the past by now?
Procrastination sucks.
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...
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.
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.
Your check is in the mail, Jon!
Author of "Linux for Dummies 5th Edition" and many other books articles, courses, and more