I’m not running Debian currently, but it does have a special place in my heart. Debian was one of the first Linux distributions that I ran on a more permanent basis and my current Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is based largely on the work of the Debian community.
So, I guess what I want to say is a warm welcome to Debian Etch and a big congratulations to all the volunteers who made it happen.
Søndag installerede jeg (med onde tømmermænd – hvilken fest lørdag!) Ubuntu Feisty Fawn herd 4 på min bærbare. Siden har jeg brugt dette som mit primære styresystem. Der er (selvfølgelig) stadig bugs, men det virker godt – bl.a. kan nævnes de nye Desktop Effects, der (næsten) er klar til at konkurrerer med OS X’s Exposé. Der mangler dog lige den sidste finpudsning. Bliver spændende at se om Ubuntu når det før d. 19. april…
Med den nye installation har jeg også valgt at køre 64 bit (i stedet for 32 bit). Da jeg ikke køre nogle specielt ressource krævende er det nok mest for ‘blærværdi’ end noget andet, men det gav lidt problemer, da der ikke er understøttelse for java og Adobe Flash plugins til firefox 64 bit. Der er dog nogle tricks, så jeg kan nu både bruge min webbank nu og se alt det unge smarte flash. Alt i alt tror jeg Feisty Fawn bliver rigtig rigtig god, når den engang er helt færdig (selvom jeg af underlige årsager altid har svært ved at stave til det navn når jeg skal, men så kan man jo skrive 7.04 i stedet).
I just got home a few hours ago… I’m still dizzy, drunk (or both) from my fathers party last night.
I might at a later point come back to writing a little more about that, but right now I will blog about something else.
For some time I have been looking for a way to host some pictures. Both for this blog, but also just in general. I used to run my own gallery server, but that machine is turned off for the moment, I can’t run a gallery server at my current host… long story short, I have signed up at flickr and I must say I am impressed! I haven’t uploaded very many pictures yet (but hopefully will in time), but the features seem really cool, and most importantly, I now have a place to share pictures with the rest of the world.
My flickr profile is linked here (I think). Feel free to look around.
Last time I tried to install World of Warcraft under Ubuntu was probably more than six months ago. And a lot has changed since then. I installed it yesterday on my new laptop and the install process was really easy! The hardest part turned out getting the patches for WoW. After a fresh install you need to download approximately 1 GB of patches! And as Penny Arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/ has so artistically pointed out, this is not always a trivial task.
I followed the steps mentioned here
http://wiki.kaspersandberg.com/doku.php?id=howtos:wine:worldofwarcraft
and after successfully install also found this guide
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft.
Of course you need a pc capable of actually running World of Warcraft, and you need to have the right drivers installed (usually the 3D drivers for graphics cards are the hard part – this guide does however not cover installing right graphics drivers).
So my advice is to google for the patches you need as the first thing you do, start to download these, and then complete the setup of wine and base install of World of Warcraft while you get the patches.
The files you’re looking fore are
WoW-1.12.0-XXXX-patch.exe
WoW-1.12.x-to-2.0.1-XXXX-patch
where XXXX depends on your preferred language and what servers you play on. For me that would be enGB, as my WoW client is in English, and I play on the European English language servers. Just do a google search for these file names, and some mirrors or torrents should pop up.
So, while you’re downloading the patches you can start installing and configuring Wine. You need a newer version than the one in Edgy Eft. Luckily Wine provides us with a APT repository for the latest wine.
The line you really need is
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main
For details on setting up Synaptic (or by using the console) see http://winehq.com/site/download-deb.
You should now have Wine 0.9.27 or newer installed. From a console run
winecfg
and set under the Applications tab
under the Graphics tab
and under the Audio tab set
Although you can get by without it, WoW likes it if you have a html render installed. So installing Mozilla (for Windows) under Wine is recommended. As of this writing it can be done by issuing the following in a terminal:
wget http://download.mozilla.org/?product=suite-1.7.13&os=win&lang=en-US
wine mozilla-win32-1.7.13-installer.exe
But the Mozilla version might change. See http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/ for details on the current version.
Now you should be ready to start actually installing World of Warcraft. Copy the content of the four install cd’s into one directory, overwriting where need be, and run the installer:
wine Install.exe
Now, the installer should run without trouble and you should almost be able to run WoW now. However, you might want to do the following for better performance.
Edit the file ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf
As one of the top lines you will see SET gxResolution followed by a screen resolution. Here you can tell WoW your preferred (higher) resolution than the standard.
Also add the following at the end of the file
SET gxApi “opengl”
SET SoundOutputSystem “1”
SET SoundBufferSize “100”
Next, in a console run
wine regedit
And in HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareWine make a new key called OpenGL and in this key make a new String Value with the name DisabledExtensions and the data Value GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object. (If you have trouble figuring out how to add/change these things, just right click until you get it right.)
By now, hopefully the patches you started downloading have finished. So, copy the patches to the World of Warcraft directory
~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft
and now you should be good to go.
The installer might have left a shortcut for you on your Desktop and in the Applications -> wine -> Programs -> World of Warcraft menu. But if you can’t find those or the installer didn’t create them, just running
~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft$ wine WoW.exe
should do the job.
Hope to see you in Ironforge…
(Of course there are a lot of tweaking possibilities, optimizations etc. regarding graphics, sound etc. but this should get you started and show that Linux is in fact ready for (some) games!)
The number of computers in the living room has risen by almost 50% lately!
A couple of days ago Esben dragged home a old Macintosh and two days ago my new laptop arrived.
It’s fetching updates for Ubuntu as I write this. I haven’t had time to install the OS before now, because my hand ins for school have been taking up quite a lot of my time. But I got them done and handed in just in time.
So now is (almost) my Christmas vacation. I still have 4 hours of lectures on Monday, but when they are done it is truly vacation time for me.
Of course I haven’t had a opportunity to get a complete picture of what my new laptop can and can’t do. But I have been meaning to get a new one for quite some time now. My current / old one has (in retrospect) been equipped with to few ram from day one. The fact that the keyboard and the sound has been getting unstable and failing from time to time just made the decision to get a new one so much more easy.
Jeg bryder mig ikke om at ‘tvinge’ mig selv til at blogge. På den anden side er det også ved at være mere end bare et par dage siden jeg sidst har skrevet noget her.
Mine nye kurser er startet igen – jeg har nu været igang i en uge, og det er jo meget trygt og hyggeligt. Så ved jeg ihvertfald hvad jeg skal bruge (noget) af min tid på.
Tele2 er også blevet skiftet ud med Fullrate her i lejligheden. Overgangs perioden (5 dage uden internet) var selvfølgelig hård for en net-junkie som mig, men jeg klarede det. Jeg har endnu ikke rigtig haft brug for eller bemærket den forhøjede hastighed, men den skulle være der, og forhåbentlig kan besparelsen på internet og telefoni mærkes på et senere tidspunkt.
Tilgengæld har skiftet af udbyder (og opsætning med en ekstra firewall/modem) givet min freenet node nogle problemer. Den syntes at have svært ved at forbinde til andre. Men det kan være det bare er et konfigurations problem – jeg håber…
Yesterday morning (or what ever the time was around the time I woke up) I tried logging on to my web-bank. Not that I had any bank business like bills to pay, just to see if there was still money left in my account.
Instead of the usual log on screen I was greeted by a page explaining that the data center my bank is using has got a new security certificate, that needed to be accepted.
So far so good, I clicked to log on, got the dialog to accept the new certificate, accepted, and then the trouble started. The applet to choose my key, input user name etc. was not what meet my eyes.
So, after fiddling around a bit to see if it was a error on my end, I called the support hotline. After a short wait, I got through to some fellow and explained to him my problem. His response was that I was not the first person to report that problem today. So, that indicated that it was indeed not a problem on my end. His advice was for me to downgrade my java to 1.4.2. However when asked, he said that he would not directly pass on my problem to anyone ‘above him’. Maybe I just misunderstood him, but that seemed odd to me.
Anyway, although downgrading java on my Ubuntu Linux is not that hard, I decided to wait a bit and hope that someone somewhere would fix the problem. Later in the evening it all worked again…
I can only guess what happened and what was changed.
I have been quite happy with using Livejournal for my blogging so far, but have now decided to give WordPress a try. I have been working with it some time ago, but got away from it again.
Now I have WordPress running at my new web provider and after a lot (to many?) point’n’clicks I got all my old blog entrys transfered. So the new adress for my blog will now be http://compadre.dk/blog/, and this is the last blog entry on my old blog – but the first (real) one at the new one…
I hope WordPress lives up to all the good things I have heard about it.
Søren har lovet at passe på katten (og huset?), mens hans forældre er ude og rejse, og jeg er taget med for at “hjælpe” ham. Dvs. et par dage med intenst druk, sol, grill, video og computer-nørden.
Jeg har allerede brugt tiden på, bl.a. at kigge på VMwares nye gratis server og så har jeg endelig fået skiftet min tidligere udbyder, dht ud med unoeuro. Selvom jeg måske ikke bryder mig meget om deres navn håber jeg på at blive lidt mere tilfreds med deres service. Redelegeringen af name-servers er vist stadig i gang som jeg skriver dette, men nu er det vist bare et spørgsmål om tid. Jeg har også gået og overvejet at flytte min blog fra livejournal til mit eget domæne, men nu må vi se om jeg får taget mig sammen.
På det lidt mindre nørdede plan så tager søren og jeg nok til stranden snarest – vejret er jo lige til det! (Selvom det nu også er rart at side i en have med en trådlås bærbar og nørde og nyde livet.
Sommer er nu den bedste tid på året…