>Seriously, though. You go out, you buy a WINDOWS game, you spend ages trying to get it running under Linux/Wine . . .
Ages?
Let's see I download the WineX 2.1 RPM, install it. Insert my Diablo II CD, run setup, swap disks, play game.
You're right, that extra 3 minutes it took me to download and install WineX is just a killer.:-D
Though I do agree about writing the developers and letting them know you're using Wine/WineX, and that a Linux port would be lots better. Wish I'd thought of doing that.
As a long suffering insomniac (which is why I'm up at 3:15am instead of snoozing) I have GOT to get me one of these.
Unless of course they're using it for some vile twisted Twilight Zone plot to convert all us insomniacs to soldier for some evil army. Of course one advantage is that we'd all tend to fall asleep at the worst possible times.
>Except in this case you are the only one around here that claims to have severe problems all the time
No he isn't. I gave up on it myself for the same reason, that and every time it crashed it scattered 20 or so.tmp files in my home directory.
> Linux only "just works" if you're prepared to wade through manuals and waste hours screwing around with config files. OS X isn't perfection incarnate but it beats to Linux in terms of usability by miles. A novice can use it and that's the point.
Good googly moogly. "hours" of reading manuals and scerwing around with config files?
I've edited exactly *one* config file on my current Linux system.
OS X is more poilshed than my Gnome system, granted (And for the $$$ it darn well should be), but you're *way* overstating the difficulty of installing and using a modern Linux dostro.
>Did you even read the complete article? Did she ever mention wanting to store MP3s on floppy?
>That is a size example of how most file formats today are bigger than what a floppy can hold.
38 pages, single space, Word 2K.doc file (written with cxoffice, thanks for asking) = 145k
You can fit a heck of a lot of text files on a floppy, even with Word. Personaly, I think she makes some good points, and it's a little sad to see geeks ripping her up based on her religion of all things.
> OSX works without having to know to hack configs and source,
I use Linux exclusively, and I almost never hack configs or source. The only exception that comes to mind is a simple edit of my XF86Config-4 file to install Nvidia drivers.
I've also used Macs extensively and found their 'ease of use' mostly a marketing myth.
>Your statement that WineX, a project dedicated to making games that run on Microsoft Windows, specifically those that use Microsoft's DirectX API, work on Linux has nothing to do with Microsoft confuses me.
Then I'm afraid you're easily confused. I'm running Diablo II under Linux with winex. As far as I'm concerned that has zero to do with Microsoft.
>I said that native ports are one of the goals we need to be striving for, instead of putting money in the hands of those that would have us stay beholden to Microsoft's software base. How does that not have to do with WineX?
As I replied to someone else in another forum, so what? So winex gives me accesss to a *small* portion of Windows software. How playing a game I already own under Linux damages Linux in anyway is, well just beyond me.
>And as for whether you'd rather have games now, no matter what the long term effects...well, I can't help you if you're a die-hard, short-term pragmatist.
What cost would that be? That I might be able to play a game that I actually enjoy instead of draging my self through yet another version of Angband?
Well sorry, but you're still just pushing 'OS Purity' as if it were a religion. Computers are for people to use. If you'd rather theorize and hope that someday, somehow, someone might magically meet your software needs then go ahead. I'll be using winex and playing Diablo II or Half-Life, or Black & White, or Civ II, or Kohan, or maybe watching Sorensen encoded movie trailers off the web, while you're wating. Hell I might even pull up a.doc file in Word just for grins.
And just to clarify, I've purchase plenty of Loki games, they mostly sucked, and they mostly sucked a lot. Quake 3 is so far the only commercial native Linux game that I've owned that's worth playing more than once.
>I'm amazed at how the supporters of Wine and WineX haven't just invited the Trojan horse into the walls of their city, but have actually helped build the horse in the first place.
And I'm amazed that one person can have such doggedly narrow vision.
>I'll agree with you that it's an important project, but I disagree as to why. It is important because it represents a potential danger to native software. Think about it: if Wine were so good that Office 97 ran flawlessly, why would anyone move to OpenOffice in the first place? Wine takes away the incentive to use free software projects and if everyone starts using Office 97 over OpenOffice then we're not any better off and haven't succeeded one bit in breaking the real deep roots of Microsoft's.DOC and.XLS monopolies.
You're confusing wine with WineX. WineX is about games, not about Microsoft, or.DOC formats or any of the other things you're complaining about.
>Yes, it is important, but must be eyed with suspicion and used wisely, always with an eye to the long time view that we are better off with native ports and open document formats and all the other things that come by leaving Microsoft and the non-free world behind.
But none of that has anything to do with Trangaming. There are no, and never will be any, native ports of most of the games currently on the market. It's fine to be for native ports and 'open document formats' (which again have nothing to do with Transgaming). But the fact remains. I run Linux, I like games. Transgaming gives me games. I really don't care that these games don't meet someone else's notions of OS purity.
I switched from Windows to 100% linux and WineX had a lot to do with that.
>I do have an interest in linux's future, but linux on MY desktop already does eveything I want it to, and games are unimportant in the markets where I would hope to benifit from linux through my job. The linux I am looking for has a bright future already.
In that case I fail to see why this story interests you at all or why you're bothering to post. I personally bypass those stories that have no relavence or interest for me.
I'm pretty happy with Transgaming. I've played "Blue Shift" all the way through, "Half-life" most of the way through and I've started playing "Black & White" and "Diablo II", all without paying TG anything extra.
Personally I think I'm getting my money's worth. I also bought a bunch of Loki games too, but I ended up not really playing them much.
>Don't tell me: Kohan has it's own WineX executable ?!?
Yeah it does, but it's not something you ever see once it's installed. I downloaded two rpms, installed them and all I have to do is click on the the Kohan icon in my games menu.
It's the same way cxoffice, crossover plugin, and IBM's hpbuilder work. Once the 'winelet' is installed you never see it again. It's completely unobtrusive and a very different situation than have 4 web browser and 3 office suits installed.
Also I should note that they various versions of wine don't know each other exists so there's no interaction between them and no compatability problems.
Uhmmm so what? I don't have Windows on my system. The Transgaming version I bought works fine.
I also don't own a console.
I run Linux. Transgaming lets me run more games than I can without it.
And your math is a bit off. The original Kohan was $20 for me as a subscriber. That's certainly a lot cheaper than purchasing or upgrading and maintaining a whole other system just to run games.
>Yet, what self-respecting Windows gamer would really leave the relative comfort of Windows (2k|XP) where all of their hardware and games work great just to move to Linux, a system rife with hardware incompatibilities and filled with unfamiliar elements at every turn?
I did it. In fact I finally reinstalled Redhat 7.3 and whiped out my unused Windows parition just yesterday.
>There is no unhappy faction of Windows users that chafes so much under the Microsoft yoke that they'll give up everything they have already for freedom (in the sense of GNU).
All I can tell you is that that's exactly what happened with me. I see a Microsoft DRM dominated future and I have no interest in participating in that. I ran WinXP with no problems, it was stable and useable for me but the 'Microsoft yoke' was simply growing too heavy.
>It just isn't going to happen. (Note: WineX itself isn't even completely free, so that's not a very good example of freedom, is it?)
WineX gives me more games to play, and was one of the reasons I finally switched to Linux. So yeah, it does happen, at least once anyway.
As for 'half-working' Kohan has so far (in my limited testing) run flawlessly.
I decided to spring for the original version of Kohan. You pay your money and then get directed to a download site. You get what I'm assuming is a custom version of winex (4mb) and the game (158mb). The manual is available in both PDF and txt formats while the game files are available in rpm, deb and tgz formats (tgz files weren't available but will be shortly according to the site).
The internet connection is required because the first time the game runs it downloads a specially modified executable tuned to run only on your system.
That part doesn't bother me as I'm the only one I know running Linux and I don't pirate software anyway. However, I am a bit concerned that upgrading my system (I fiddle and reinstall pretty often), or making changes might cause the game to decide it's running on a foriegn system. We'll see.
>he Operating System is called BRiX, and it uses a language called Crush, which is woven tightly into the core of the OS.
Hmmm . . .
That's exactly what I had back in 1980 with Radio Shack Color Basic.
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Somebody's trying to start a rumor. I heard this same thing on another board a few weeks ago. Some freaky people have way too much time on thier hands.
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>that just makes you sound like a lazy sod
??!!
How do you figure that?
Not wanting to purchase a new computer and set it up just to play games makes me a lazy sod? What sort of bizzaro universe do you live in?
>Seriously, though. You go out, you buy a WINDOWS game, you spend ages trying to get it running under Linux/Wine . . .
:-D
Ages?
Let's see I download the WineX 2.1 RPM, install it. Insert my Diablo II CD, run setup, swap disks, play game.
You're right, that extra 3 minutes it took me to download and install WineX is just a killer.
Though I do agree about writing the developers and letting them know you're using Wine/WineX, and that a Linux port would be lots better. Wish I'd thought of doing that.
>There will be almost no way for wine to be able to get accepted into those servers unless transgaming makes a deal with valve.
I believe that's already been done.
> I could be wrong....but if you want to play WINDOWS games, why don't you just run windows?
Because I don't have a Windows partition on my system. And I have no interest in setting up an entire additional machine to play games, that's why.
>Codeweavers [codeweavers.com] has their own page which contains ~200 games and lots of apps.
But that's not a list of working programs, it's just a list of games people have tried, most of which don't work.
As a long suffering insomniac (which is why I'm up at 3:15am instead of snoozing) I have GOT to get me one of these.
Unless of course they're using it for some vile twisted Twilight Zone plot to convert all us insomniacs to soldier for some evil army. Of course one advantage is that we'd all tend to fall asleep at the worst possible times.
Simple, this is the first time through the loop.
>Except in this case you are the only one around here that claims to have severe problems all the time No he isn't. I gave up on it myself for the same reason, that and every time it crashed it scattered 20 or so .tmp files in my home directory.
And the opinion of someone who evaluates another person based of whether they use a floppy drive or not, is worth a hell of a lot less.
> Linux only "just works" if you're prepared to wade through manuals and waste hours screwing around with config files. OS X isn't perfection incarnate but it beats to Linux in terms of usability by miles. A novice can use it and that's the point.
Good googly moogly. "hours" of reading manuals and scerwing around with config files?
I've edited exactly *one* config file on my current Linux system.
OS X is more poilshed than my Gnome system, granted (And for the $$$ it darn well should be), but you're *way* overstating the difficulty of installing and using a modern Linux dostro.
>Where OS X may appeal to Linux users is as a second machine, to replace that Windows machine they use for MS Word.
eeeeep . . .
Cheapest eMac $1,100
Crossover Office $55
I use Linux (Redhat 7.3 with Gnome) for everything, and I still almost never edit config files. I've edited exactly one that I can recall.
>Did you even read the complete article? Did she ever mention wanting to store MP3s on floppy?
>That is a size example of how most file formats today are bigger than what a floppy can hold.
38 pages, single space, Word 2K.doc file (written with cxoffice, thanks for asking) = 145k
You can fit a heck of a lot of text files on a floppy, even with Word. Personaly, I think she makes some good points, and it's a little sad to see geeks ripping her up based on her religion of all things.
> OSX works without having to know to hack configs and source,
I use Linux exclusively, and I almost never hack configs or source. The only exception that comes to mind is a simple edit of my XF86Config-4 file to install Nvidia drivers.
I've also used Macs extensively and found their 'ease of use' mostly a marketing myth.
>Your statement that WineX, a project dedicated to making games that run on Microsoft Windows, specifically those that use Microsoft's DirectX API, work on Linux has nothing to do with Microsoft confuses me. Then I'm afraid you're easily confused. I'm running Diablo II under Linux with winex. As far as I'm concerned that has zero to do with Microsoft. >I said that native ports are one of the goals we need to be striving for, instead of putting money in the hands of those that would have us stay beholden to Microsoft's software base. How does that not have to do with WineX? As I replied to someone else in another forum, so what? So winex gives me accesss to a *small* portion of Windows software. How playing a game I already own under Linux damages Linux in anyway is, well just beyond me. >And as for whether you'd rather have games now, no matter what the long term effects...well, I can't help you if you're a die-hard, short-term pragmatist. What cost would that be? That I might be able to play a game that I actually enjoy instead of draging my self through yet another version of Angband? Well sorry, but you're still just pushing 'OS Purity' as if it were a religion. Computers are for people to use. If you'd rather theorize and hope that someday, somehow, someone might magically meet your software needs then go ahead. I'll be using winex and playing Diablo II or Half-Life, or Black & White, or Civ II, or Kohan, or maybe watching Sorensen encoded movie trailers off the web, while you're wating. Hell I might even pull up a .doc file in Word just for grins.
And just to clarify, I've purchase plenty of Loki games, they mostly sucked, and they mostly sucked a lot. Quake 3 is so far the only commercial native Linux game that I've owned that's worth playing more than once.
>I'm amazed at how the supporters of Wine and WineX haven't just invited the Trojan horse into the walls of their city, but have actually helped build the horse in the first place.
And I'm amazed that one person can have such doggedly narrow vision.
>I'll agree with you that it's an important project, but I disagree as to why. It is important because it represents a potential danger to native software. Think about it: if Wine were so good that Office 97 ran flawlessly, why would anyone move to OpenOffice in the first place? Wine takes away the incentive to use free software projects and if everyone starts using Office 97 over OpenOffice then we're not any better off and haven't succeeded one bit in breaking the real deep roots of Microsoft's .DOC and .XLS monopolies.
.DOC formats or any of the other things you're complaining about.
You're confusing wine with WineX. WineX is about games, not about Microsoft, or
>Yes, it is important, but must be eyed with suspicion and used wisely, always with an eye to the long time view that we are better off with native ports and open document formats and all the other things that come by leaving Microsoft and the non-free world behind.
But none of that has anything to do with Trangaming. There are no, and never will be any, native ports of most of the games currently on the market. It's fine to be for native ports and 'open document formats' (which again have nothing to do with Transgaming). But the fact remains. I run Linux, I like games. Transgaming gives me games. I really don't care that these games don't meet someone else's notions of OS purity.
I switched from Windows to 100% linux and WineX had a lot to do with that.
>I do have an interest in linux's future, but linux on MY desktop already does eveything I want it to, and games are unimportant in the markets where I would hope to benifit from linux through my job. The linux I am looking for has a bright future already.
In that case I fail to see why this story interests you at all or why you're bothering to post. I personally bypass those stories that have no relavence or interest for me.
*shrug*
I'm pretty happy with Transgaming. I've played "Blue Shift" all the way through, "Half-life" most of the way through and I've started playing "Black & White" and "Diablo II", all without paying TG anything extra.
Personally I think I'm getting my money's worth. I also bought a bunch of Loki games too, but I ended up not really playing them much.
>Don't tell me: Kohan has it's own WineX executable ?!?
Yeah it does, but it's not something you ever see once it's installed. I downloaded two rpms, installed them and all I have to do is click on the the Kohan icon in my games menu.
It's the same way cxoffice, crossover plugin, and IBM's hpbuilder work. Once the 'winelet' is installed you never see it again. It's completely unobtrusive and a very different situation than have 4 web browser and 3 office suits installed. Also I should note that they various versions of wine don't know each other exists so there's no interaction between them and no compatability problems.
Uhmmm so what? I don't have Windows on my system. The Transgaming version I bought works fine.
I also don't own a console.
I run Linux. Transgaming lets me run more games than I can without it.
And your math is a bit off. The original Kohan was $20 for me as a subscriber. That's certainly a lot cheaper than purchasing or upgrading and maintaining a whole other system just to run games.
>Yet, what self-respecting Windows gamer would really leave the relative comfort of Windows (2k|XP) where all of their hardware and games work great just to move to Linux, a system rife with hardware incompatibilities and filled with unfamiliar elements at every turn? I did it. In fact I finally reinstalled Redhat 7.3 and whiped out my unused Windows parition just yesterday. >There is no unhappy faction of Windows users that chafes so much under the Microsoft yoke that they'll give up everything they have already for freedom (in the sense of GNU). All I can tell you is that that's exactly what happened with me. I see a Microsoft DRM dominated future and I have no interest in participating in that. I ran WinXP with no problems, it was stable and useable for me but the 'Microsoft yoke' was simply growing too heavy. >It just isn't going to happen. (Note: WineX itself isn't even completely free, so that's not a very good example of freedom, is it?) WineX gives me more games to play, and was one of the reasons I finally switched to Linux. So yeah, it does happen, at least once anyway. As for 'half-working' Kohan has so far (in my limited testing) run flawlessly.
I decided to spring for the original version of Kohan. You pay your money and then get directed to a download site. You get what I'm assuming is a custom version of winex (4mb) and the game (158mb). The manual is available in both PDF and txt formats while the game files are available in rpm, deb and tgz formats (tgz files weren't available but will be shortly according to the site). The internet connection is required because the first time the game runs it downloads a specially modified executable tuned to run only on your system. That part doesn't bother me as I'm the only one I know running Linux and I don't pirate software anyway. However, I am a bit concerned that upgrading my system (I fiddle and reinstall pretty often), or making changes might cause the game to decide it's running on a foriegn system. We'll see.
Some of us are *still* waiting to play that game that most of you finished two months ago.
*Stares at unused $60 box on shelf*
*gumble* *Linux client* *grumble* *kick bioware* *grumble*
>he Operating System is called BRiX, and it uses a language called Crush, which is woven tightly into the core of the OS. Hmmm . . . That's exactly what I had back in 1980 with Radio Shack Color Basic.
Somebody's trying to start a rumor. I heard this same thing on another board a few weeks ago. Some freaky people have way too much time on thier hands.