Just to ask, where have you seen this? As in, what city and district?
I was in several computer markets (as you know, "store" does not quite describe the situation in a Chinese building of small shops) last weekend. I saw no linux.
That is not only in my city; but in the many I visit. If there is an Ubuntu store or Kosk in Shanghai I would like to know where it is, just so I can visit it (I am not in Shanghai; but, it is only a few hours travel away). I will also be in HK next week, near Wan Chi, If there are any in that district I would also be interested.
I don't know where exactly, and even "thousands" scattered about China isn't particularly common. Admittedly, my information comes from statistics quoted in a presentation (alongside some pictures of the kiosks).
The Chinese government tried pushing Linux in the past, research “Red Flag” Linux. It was a failure. I only saw it once. I happened to be in a shop in Xian and I saw it on a computer. Before I could comment on it the sales man assured me that if I purchased the computer they would put a copy of Windows on it “so it could be useful.”
As others have commented, Linux is competing with free copies of Windows. Further, it lacks the games that the Chinese want (also free).
Free as in speech has no ring to the Chinese ear. The issue is broken down to choosing between two flavours of free beer.
You might be surprised to learn that there are already thousands of Ubuntu stores and Kiosks in China, selling laptops with Ubuntu preloaded. China was a natural fit for Canonical because it's already a bigger market for them than the US.
On one hand I do like the fact that this has potential to bring games out to the linux market that haven't been there, and to eliminate the viewpoint that there are no gamers on linux. On the other side of the coin, I'm not sure how useful this will actually be for current linux fans. Almost all valve games have gold or platnum wineHQ ratings, as do a huge portion of games on steam. Running steam on wine I can play left4dead, half life, portal 1+2, magika etc... As well as quite a few non-valve games, Skyrim etc... Now assuming valve fully devotes to the project and makes native linux versions of all of their games, it is unlikely that half of the games that can be played via wine, will be ported, making the official linux client, less useful than valves port. As a result many linux users will still be identified as windows users (since wine will identify as windows XP), the numbers for linux will still show as low, and linux support will stay very weak.
Wine is fairly simple to detect on Valve's end, at least as far as the hardware survey goes -- Wine will, for instance, report its audio drivers as something unique to Wine users. In the past Valve even shared hardware survey data about the percentage of Wine users on the Wine mailing list (something like 0.4%, but this was maybe 4 years ago).
Unfortunately at one point in the recent past Wine started crashing during the hardware survey. While this bug has been fixed it's quite possible Linux users have learned to not accept the survey and are thus systematically under-counted.
I'm surprised that they still recommend 32-bit for desktop instead of 64.
Programs probably just not quite ready for LTS on 64, but disappointing nonetheless.
We debated making 64-bit the recommended download this cycle, since now with multiarch there's no reason not to use it these days, but then we discovered that fully 25% of our hardware-survey respondents had machines that were not capable of running 64-bit.
Having a few users with modern computers who don't know what 64-bit is end up using the 32-bit is less bad of a problem than recommending a good chunk of users try to download something uninstallable.
Re:Make the switch from Dual Booting
on
Wine 1.2 Released
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· Score: 1
Well, after my initial problems with Vent I found Mangler and decided to give it a shot. I spent a couple hours trying to get it to even install, then decided figuring out my problems with Wine would be easier. Which it was.
If you were using Ubuntu it would be as simple as going to the Mangler PPA and copying the lines it shows into Software Sources.
Granted, that's still more work than it should be - it should just be in Software Center in the first place.
Re:Are IE 7 or 8 useable?
on
Wine 1.2 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Google ies4linux...
It's a bundle of wine designed specifically to run various versions of ie.
That said, can't you move to another bank? all the banks i've used here work fine with both safari and firefox (havent tried accessing them from anything else).
Don't do this, the correct way to run IE these days is to get winetricks and run it, then tick the box for either ie6 or ie7, and then run it with "wine iexplore"
Re:Make the switch from Dual Booting
on
Wine 1.2 Released
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· Score: 1
No idea about Steam, but I used to use Vent for WoW on wine without too many problems. Took a while to configure it properly, but it was more a problem of configuring audio on Wine than configuring audio for Vent (i.e. audio wasn't working for any apps). The fact that I have several soundcards didn't help...
I've experimented with this and I highly recommend just using Mangler (a native app) instead. On Ubuntu there's a PPA you can add to get it in Lucid -- I'll try and integrate it to the distro so we get it in 10.10 without going through an extra step.
Re:Every windows application
on
Wine 1.2 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think Wine needs a usability team. Some kind of gui/tooling to make things easier for newbies to Wine.
That is exactly why Codeweavers makes money. And it is not even that expensive...
Yeah it's basically me and the Vineyard author working on Wine usability at this point (Hopefully I can get Vineyard more or less finalized for inclusion in Ubuntu 10.10)
Wow, brings memories of the pre-1.0 phase. Do you remember when only the most basic apps would run in WINE and required a lot of tweaking? Nowadays I can run most apps but Game Maker (Like Hydorah, Spelunky, etc) based games. Even painting and music apps, or games like Touhou or other doujin arcade games work practically out of the box (mostly requiring directx 9 runtimes). I don't play much mainstream, but I have been satisfied with my indie/arcade gaming needs and WINE.
This is only going to get better with time, and I am kind of happy about it. Years ago I had to use virtualbox or use my laptop to run simplistic apps reliably, and it's not the case anymore (in my use case at least, you know, generalizing, anecdotal evidence, your mileage may vary, etc)
Spelunky should work now, I specifically remember testing it a few months ago when I was rolling out packages and people kept pestering me about that game.
[The system] also is a server and e-mail platform for several county agencies, including the Sheriff's and County Attorney's offices and the Superior Court.
Just as the Sheriff's Office is concerned about civilians' access to records, county management is concerned the Sheriff's Office now has access to information from other county agencies it is investigating, such as the Superior Court. State appellate courts have rebuffed Arpaio's attempts to obtain privileged court e-mails, which would be accessible through the system.
I'm wondering. What if there's incriminating evidence in those e-mail exchanges the Sheriff needs and wants to protect from tampering? It sounds a little like a Hollywood movie, but how do we know. Maybe he knew someone was going to remove that data and he needs it to expose corruption higher up.
I don't know anything about this Joe Arpaio, never heard of him, so it may be obvious this is not the case. But just exclaiming "Fuck you" didn't help me find out either.
The incriminating evidence the sheriff wants to secure is almost certainly against him.
Why link to the outdated version of Mathew Paul Thomas' article when he wrote a much newer one here: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability
Appropriately, it's titled: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it
Another long-standing issue is "Bug 6971: Mouse "escapes" window or is confined to an area in the full screen program", which affects A LOT of games out there.
The developers in charge insists that it could only be fixed by making changes in the code all the way down to X.org layers and perhaps even in the kernel mouse handling. However, this is demonstrably false, because: A) there is no such issue in Wine's fork Cedega; and B) some "outside" developers pointed out that there is a way to deal with this problem without asking for personal favors from X.org and the Linux kernel, namely, to use the DGA subsystem to achieve the required mouse behavior. But that's not going to be accepted either, because someone somewhere decided that DGA was "deprecated" and never mind that the deprecation was ONLY concerning its graphic component.
The bug was reported almost three years ago, and it's almost like it's kept "in" on purpose, so that Wine never works properly with many games, and so that users will always have a need for the proprietary Crossover Games product.
XInput 2 is coming to the next X Release, and the support for relative mouse movements means that this bug will be fixed "the right way" shortly thereafter. There are already Wine devs testing out the latest X alphas to make sure XInput2 does what we need.
This is all exaggeration by the submitter. At worst, I'll be integrating the DIB engine at the packaging level rather than getting Wine pure from upstream.
No one in the Wine project has threatened a fork, not even Chris Howe.
The Mac WoW client is written from the ground up as a Mac app - it responds properly to standard keyboard commands, behaves properly when crashing, and runs very well.
This Transgaming junk, or whatever the current flavour of the month shortcut that they're using is a *world* apart. I also play a little EVE Online, and the Mac client is essentially the Windows client bundled up with Cider to make it work on the Mac. It crashes a lot, it causes other applications to behave oddly (mainly with odd visual effects, long after the app is quit - you have to relog/reboot to fix this), it gradually gets more and more laggy (usually the sound distorting is the first clue) if you play for a while, forcing you to quit it and restart. If you ignore it getting laggy and sound-distorty, it'll just crash on you. It crashes to desktop with no proper feedback.
So, to say that porting a Windows game over to the Mac in this manner would be better? No way in hell. The native app is much, much better.
Look at it this way, I am really starting to enjoy EVE, but I thought I could put up with the fact that I would have to restart my Mac after playing for a couple of hours, since if I don't all the windows of my other apps will have visual display issues (either show as plain white, scroll bars move but the contents don't, or windows just plain don't show up after you've hidden them). I don't think I can live with it, however, and will be cancelling my account when the paid time is up.
If Blizzard ever went this route, I guess I'd have much more free time on my hands, since I wouldn't be playing any more.
I am sympathetic to Linux gamers, (hey, I play on a Mac - I get just as much stick as you guys) but the wrapper-around-a-windows-client crap just isn't the way to go.
You're right: Transgaming is junk. That's why I suggested using Wine: it has far fewer bugs like the one's you're finding in EVE.
There's no reason a native app has to be better - indeed, any difference at all between native and Wine is a bug in Wine that, once fixed, won't be a problem for that or any future port.
The impression I got of their internal development process was not so much that they were "porting" from PC to Mac, but rather that they were developing the game assets cross-platform, and writing an engine that was mostly cross-platform, with a few platform-specific bits safely sequestered away in their own code modules.
Based on that understanding (which might be wrong), it would seem that moving to Wine would change the current development model. It would also eliminate Mac-specific features, and make any game developed this way integrate less well with the OS.
The only real benefit here would be for Linux users -- assuming Blizzard even chose to support Linux. (Based on what happened with Spore, this is far from a foregone conclusion.) There is cost related to changing the development model.
OS Integration is not an intractable problem, especially with a game that generally runs full screen and doesn't use native widgets.
It would definitely change the development model, however that doesn't necessarily mean higher costs - there could be significant savings in no longer needing to do the "Mac-specific" parts.
That said, it's also an option to keep the development model the same, and then simply "bless" a Linux port powered by Wine. Such an arrangement could even be done at no direct cost; Codeweavers, doing almost all the work, would instead get a share of Linux revenues.
Linux users have been able to run WoW very successfully using Wine and Crossover. While Linux represents a small share of total WoW users, Crossover works equally well on Macintosh. Using Wine completely obviates the need for expensive Mac porting, whether it's done by rewriting libraries or through a framework like Transgaming's. Transgaming, at this point, is widely regarded as technically inferior to the free Wine, even for running games like World of Warcraft. Wine, however, works very well, and some users even report superior performance than under Windows.
Has Blizzard considered porting their games to Mac using a Wine-based solution supported by Codeweavers? A Linux port comes as a free bonus from doing this, and if the game already runs well in Wine the entire port can be done at very little cost.
I just went to the Wine site, paged through until I found the page with Ubuntu instructions. Guess what? Either they don't know what they're doing (I know I sure as hell don't, which is why I had to look it up) or there are typos in each of the commands. Won't run in my Terminal. Hi, I wrote that page and make the Ubuntu packages. Copy/pasting the commands works just fine, so I'm really curious as to what exactly you're doing wrong. "Won't run in my terminal" is a very strange thing to say; are you getting some sort of error message?
Unless you're mistyping something or using an account without administrator permissions, I can't figure out what could be wrong.
You're not alone, by the way. I hate having the terminal instructions, but without built-in support for third party repositories there's not much choice for the current release of Ubuntu.
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Just to ask, where have you seen this? As in, what city and district?
I was in several computer markets (as you know, "store" does not quite describe the situation in a Chinese building of small shops) last weekend. I saw no linux.
That is not only in my city; but in the many I visit. If there is an Ubuntu store or Kosk in Shanghai I would like to know where it is, just so I can visit it (I am not in Shanghai; but, it is only a few hours travel away). I will also be in HK next week, near Wan Chi, If there are any in that district I would also be interested.
I don't know where exactly, and even "thousands" scattered about China isn't particularly common. Admittedly, my information comes from statistics quoted in a presentation (alongside some pictures of the kiosks).
The Chinese government tried pushing Linux in the past, research “Red Flag” Linux. It was a failure. I only saw it once. I happened to be in a shop in Xian and I saw it on a computer. Before I could comment on it the sales man assured me that if I purchased the computer they would put a copy of Windows on it “so it could be useful.”
As others have commented, Linux is competing with free copies of Windows. Further, it lacks the games that the Chinese want (also free).
Free as in speech has no ring to the Chinese ear. The issue is broken down to choosing between two flavours of free beer.
You might be surprised to learn that there are already thousands of Ubuntu stores and Kiosks in China, selling laptops with Ubuntu preloaded. China was a natural fit for Canonical because it's already a bigger market for them than the US.
On one hand I do like the fact that this has potential to bring games out to the linux market that haven't been there, and to eliminate the viewpoint that there are no gamers on linux. On the other side of the coin, I'm not sure how useful this will actually be for current linux fans. Almost all valve games have gold or platnum wineHQ ratings, as do a huge portion of games on steam. Running steam on wine I can play left4dead, half life, portal 1+2, magika etc... As well as quite a few non-valve games, Skyrim etc... Now assuming valve fully devotes to the project and makes native linux versions of all of their games, it is unlikely that half of the games that can be played via wine, will be ported, making the official linux client, less useful than valves port. As a result many linux users will still be identified as windows users (since wine will identify as windows XP), the numbers for linux will still show as low, and linux support will stay very weak.
Wine is fairly simple to detect on Valve's end, at least as far as the hardware survey goes -- Wine will, for instance, report its audio drivers as something unique to Wine users. In the past Valve even shared hardware survey data about the percentage of Wine users on the Wine mailing list (something like 0.4%, but this was maybe 4 years ago). Unfortunately at one point in the recent past Wine started crashing during the hardware survey. While this bug has been fixed it's quite possible Linux users have learned to not accept the survey and are thus systematically under-counted.
I'm surprised that they still recommend 32-bit for desktop instead of 64. Programs probably just not quite ready for LTS on 64, but disappointing nonetheless.
We debated making 64-bit the recommended download this cycle, since now with multiarch there's no reason not to use it these days, but then we discovered that fully 25% of our hardware-survey respondents had machines that were not capable of running 64-bit. Having a few users with modern computers who don't know what 64-bit is end up using the 32-bit is less bad of a problem than recommending a good chunk of users try to download something uninstallable.
Well, after my initial problems with Vent I found Mangler and decided to give it a shot. I spent a couple hours trying to get it to even install, then decided figuring out my problems with Wine would be easier. Which it was.
If you were using Ubuntu it would be as simple as going to the Mangler PPA and copying the lines it shows into Software Sources. Granted, that's still more work than it should be - it should just be in Software Center in the first place.
Google ies4linux... It's a bundle of wine designed specifically to run various versions of ie. That said, can't you move to another bank? all the banks i've used here work fine with both safari and firefox (havent tried accessing them from anything else).
Don't do this, the correct way to run IE these days is to get winetricks and run it, then tick the box for either ie6 or ie7, and then run it with "wine iexplore"
No idea about Steam, but I used to use Vent for WoW on wine without too many problems. Took a while to configure it properly, but it was more a problem of configuring audio on Wine than configuring audio for Vent (i.e. audio wasn't working for any apps). The fact that I have several soundcards didn't help...
I've experimented with this and I highly recommend just using Mangler (a native app) instead. On Ubuntu there's a PPA you can add to get it in Lucid -- I'll try and integrate it to the distro so we get it in 10.10 without going through an extra step.
That is exactly why Codeweavers makes money. And it is not even that expensive ...
Yeah it's basically me and the Vineyard author working on Wine usability at this point (Hopefully I can get Vineyard more or less finalized for inclusion in Ubuntu 10.10)
Wow, brings memories of the pre-1.0 phase. Do you remember when only the most basic apps would run in WINE and required a lot of tweaking? Nowadays I can run most apps but Game Maker (Like Hydorah, Spelunky, etc) based games. Even painting and music apps, or games like Touhou or other doujin arcade games work practically out of the box (mostly requiring directx 9 runtimes). I don't play much mainstream, but I have been satisfied with my indie/arcade gaming needs and WINE.
This is only going to get better with time, and I am kind of happy about it. Years ago I had to use virtualbox or use my laptop to run simplistic apps reliably, and it's not the case anymore (in my use case at least, you know, generalizing, anecdotal evidence, your mileage may vary, etc)
Spelunky should work now, I specifically remember testing it a few months ago when I was rolling out packages and people kept pestering me about that game.
I'm wondering. What if there's incriminating evidence in those e-mail exchanges the Sheriff needs and wants to protect from tampering? It sounds a little like a Hollywood movie, but how do we know. Maybe he knew someone was going to remove that data and he needs it to expose corruption higher up.
I don't know anything about this Joe Arpaio, never heard of him, so it may be obvious this is not the case. But just exclaiming "Fuck you" didn't help me find out either.
The incriminating evidence the sheriff wants to secure is almost certainly against him.
What about artists who don't want to charge money for their work?
You have no choice. MSN charges to host the song, so they will want their money. Same for Harmonix. I suppose you can give your cut to charity.
Ok, so why can't I cut MSN and Harmonix out of the loop and download the song directly from the internet and then put it in using a CD?
Why link to the outdated version of Mathew Paul Thomas' article when he wrote a much newer one here: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability Appropriately, it's titled: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it
Usually they profile the windows versions, and don't profile the linux ones.
Why? No clue.
Because GCC is throwing weird errors when we try to enable PGO building on Linux https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418866
Another long-standing issue is "Bug 6971: Mouse "escapes" window or is confined to an area in the full screen program", which affects A LOT of games out there. The developers in charge insists that it could only be fixed by making changes in the code all the way down to X.org layers and perhaps even in the kernel mouse handling. However, this is demonstrably false, because: A) there is no such issue in Wine's fork Cedega; and B) some "outside" developers pointed out that there is a way to deal with this problem without asking for personal favors from X.org and the Linux kernel, namely, to use the DGA subsystem to achieve the required mouse behavior. But that's not going to be accepted either, because someone somewhere decided that DGA was "deprecated" and never mind that the deprecation was ONLY concerning its graphic component. The bug was reported almost three years ago, and it's almost like it's kept "in" on purpose, so that Wine never works properly with many games, and so that users will always have a need for the proprietary Crossover Games product.
XInput 2 is coming to the next X Release, and the support for relative mouse movements means that this bug will be fixed "the right way" shortly thereafter. There are already Wine devs testing out the latest X alphas to make sure XInput2 does what we need.
This is all exaggeration by the submitter. At worst, I'll be integrating the DIB engine at the packaging level rather than getting Wine pure from upstream. No one in the Wine project has threatened a fork, not even Chris Howe.
If you were getting serious performance hits in Wine due to driver bugs you would be getting the same performance hits in another client as well.
Related: are there any practical hypermiling techniques that you've found for people not ready to purchase a new car, nor give up driving generally?
Drive downhill.
The Mac WoW client is written from the ground up as a Mac app - it responds properly to standard keyboard commands, behaves properly when crashing, and runs very well.
This Transgaming junk, or whatever the current flavour of the month shortcut that they're using is a *world* apart. I also play a little EVE Online, and the Mac client is essentially the Windows client bundled up with Cider to make it work on the Mac. It crashes a lot, it causes other applications to behave oddly (mainly with odd visual effects, long after the app is quit - you have to relog/reboot to fix this), it gradually gets more and more laggy (usually the sound distorting is the first clue) if you play for a while, forcing you to quit it and restart. If you ignore it getting laggy and sound-distorty, it'll just crash on you. It crashes to desktop with no proper feedback.
So, to say that porting a Windows game over to the Mac in this manner would be better? No way in hell. The native app is much, much better.
Look at it this way, I am really starting to enjoy EVE, but I thought I could put up with the fact that I would have to restart my Mac after playing for a couple of hours, since if I don't all the windows of my other apps will have visual display issues (either show as plain white, scroll bars move but the contents don't, or windows just plain don't show up after you've hidden them). I don't think I can live with it, however, and will be cancelling my account when the paid time is up.
If Blizzard ever went this route, I guess I'd have much more free time on my hands, since I wouldn't be playing any more.
I am sympathetic to Linux gamers, (hey, I play on a Mac - I get just as much stick as you guys) but the wrapper-around-a-windows-client crap just isn't the way to go.
You're right: Transgaming is junk. That's why I suggested using Wine: it has far fewer bugs like the one's you're finding in EVE.
There's no reason a native app has to be better - indeed, any difference at all between native and Wine is a bug in Wine that, once fixed, won't be a problem for that or any future port.
The impression I got of their internal development process was not so much that they were "porting" from PC to Mac, but rather that they were developing the game assets cross-platform, and writing an engine that was mostly cross-platform, with a few platform-specific bits safely sequestered away in their own code modules.
Based on that understanding (which might be wrong), it would seem that moving to Wine would change the current development model. It would also eliminate Mac-specific features, and make any game developed this way integrate less well with the OS.
The only real benefit here would be for Linux users -- assuming Blizzard even chose to support Linux. (Based on what happened with Spore, this is far from a foregone conclusion.) There is cost related to changing the development model.
OS Integration is not an intractable problem, especially with a game that generally runs full screen and doesn't use native widgets.
It would definitely change the development model, however that doesn't necessarily mean higher costs - there could be significant savings in no longer needing to do the "Mac-specific" parts.
That said, it's also an option to keep the development model the same, and then simply "bless" a Linux port powered by Wine. Such an arrangement could even be done at no direct cost; Codeweavers, doing almost all the work, would instead get a share of Linux revenues.
Linux users have been able to run WoW very successfully using Wine and Crossover. While Linux represents a small share of total WoW users, Crossover works equally well on Macintosh. Using Wine completely obviates the need for expensive Mac porting, whether it's done by rewriting libraries or through a framework like Transgaming's. Transgaming, at this point, is widely regarded as technically inferior to the free Wine, even for running games like World of Warcraft. Wine, however, works very well, and some users even report superior performance than under Windows.
Has Blizzard considered porting their games to Mac using a Wine-based solution supported by Codeweavers? A Linux port comes as a free bonus from doing this, and if the game already runs well in Wine the entire port can be done at very little cost.