Tag: ubuntu

Wish me luck…

Wish me luck, as I reinstall my OS. The partition setup of my laptop has been sub optimal for some time now and today I will try to make it more optimal.

If all goes well my /home/ partition should be safe all the way through and after the reinstall I should be up and running but experience shows that there is alway some little thing that messes up. I’m just hoping that little thing won’t ruin to much.

Incidentally after the reinstall / repartitioning I should have space to install and experiment with extra OSes. Maybe it is time that I give BSD or Gentoo a spin, just to see what the fuss is all about. But first, let me just get through this reinstall…

Dell to Offer Ubuntu

Dell to Offer Ubuntu

Som ovenstående link fortæller så har Dell og Canonical (firmaet bag Ubuntu) indgået en aftale om at levere Dell desktop og laptop pc’er med Ubuntu styresystemet præ-installeret (i modsætning til at levere dem med Windows). Som jeg læser det er det indtil videre forbeholdt Dell’s kunder i USA, men fra mit synspunkt er det helt sikkert et skrit i den rigtige retning. Specielt hvis Dell ligger sig i selen for at sikre sig at der faktisk er fuld driver understøttelse under Linux på de solgte systemer. Det andet springende punkt bliver hvor stor besparelse der bliver for kunderne ved at vælge Ubuntu frem for et Windows styresystem. Men alt det vil tiden vise.

ps. På denne side (fra Dell) kan man se et interviews med Mark Shuttleworth (Canonicals stifter). Halvejs inde i interviewet er en dame ved at gå ind i lokalet. Sådan noget kan selvfølgelig ske, men det var nok ikke sket under et interview med Steve eller Bill…

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released

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.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

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).

World of Warcraft on Ubuntu Edgy Eft (a howto)

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

  • Windows Version: Windows XP

under the Graphics tab

  • Allow the window manager to control the windows
  • Vertex Shader Support: Hardware
  • Allow Pixel Shader (if supported by hardware)

and under the Audio tab set

  • OSS Driver

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!)

computers++

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.

Sunday with hangover…

I had a nasty hangover this morning. Got a few beers to many last night.

Thursday I went with Rasmus to see Dronningen af Malmø. It started out a bit to slow for my liking, but picked up pace as the story started evolving. All in all a good night. When I came home, my laptop had finally fetched all the packages needed for upgrading from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy Eft and had started the actual update. The update took a long time, but went rather smooth. I still have a few things I need to change but all in all I’m happy with the new Ubuntu. The F-Spot photo manager is one of the new things I really like, and think I will use quite a lot. Also, the Amarok player seems to be a bit more willing to play music without to much lag (generally a good thing for a music player), than it was before I updated.
The new fast and improved start up system doesn’t really impress me much yet, but maybe that’s because I don’t really know what to look for.