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Help educate this neophyte re: Wine and WineX


Guest BruceG
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Guest BruceG

Okay, I've messed around with Wine a bit. Installed from Mandrake CDs. Installed the update, started messing with CVS, ... Found I can do some word processing in Wine, but not much games. Decided to try WineX and was able to play games the first go-around, but need to rebuild again if I decide to go that route.

 

Now, here is my dilemna - and I am NOT trying to fan flames, simply to educate myself as someone new to Mandrake Linux and trying to figure out the games thing.

 

Standalone wine versus using existing WIndows partition with read/write access: I messed up my install big time going with read/write access on my Windows partition. Just something about doing a chmod 777 Windows that's asking for trouble. Anyway - I did get the dreaded messed up WIndows installation by doing the above and starting IE, messing with Outlook Express, and trying Explorer for kicks and grins. Big mistake. Reinstalled Windows. Hacked up Mandrake. Reinstalled Mandrake.

 

So I am thinking - standalone Wine is probably a really good idea about now. How do I go about changing access back? I know I don't want 777. And if I do decide to go standalone, do I copy over all DLL's and fonts, or only a subset of DLL's? Do I re-install games under Wine (or WIneX) - or just copy over the directories?

 

The next thing I was concerned about is: I see a LOT of effort in Wine is coming from Code Weavers. When I pull the CVS, I think it's from Code Weavers. When I look at the CVS mailing list - I get a good idea of who is contributing. So ethically, do I stick with Wine, even though my games don't work yet? I'm not a programmer, I'm a network guy - so how could I give back if I decide to use the product from CVS?

 

And since WIneX seemed to work for games, do I just say the heck with it - and go for it via CVS? I can't see paying a monthly subscription to play WIndows games in emulation mode when I have a licensed copy of WIn95, WIn98 upgrade, WinME upgrade, and WinXP on a laptop. Something about that irks me, although I could see paying a one-time price and occasional upgrade price to play games in emulation - especially if the software group was giving back to the wine source (okay, that is just one person talking, Code Weavers - but still, I'd buy a games pack from you specifically because it is from you.)

 

And finally - my original thought on the subject was to try out open source games made for Linux, and maybe some commercial games made for Linux. Just do a pure Linux desktop and gaming system (off to Happy Penguin! Any other recommendations?) - and do the WIndows game when booted into windows.

 

I guess this goofiness comes with doing an English Lit major/Philosophy minor for 3.5 years, then swapping to CompSci. What do you guys do for solutions? Pure Linux? Commercial WIne or WIneX? Wine or WIneX from CVS? Wine from RPM? What works best for limited hassles?

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i have a dual-boot system so my preference would be this

 

1) Native solution

2) Run app through wine-cvs

3) Boot to windows (i havent used this option yet).

 

but to answer simply your other question "whatever works for you, go for it". :)

 

ciao!

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Guest JaseP
And since WIneX seemed to work for games, do I just say the heck with it - and go for it via CVS? I can't see paying a monthly subscription to play WIndows games in emulation mode when I have a licensed copy of WIn95, WIn98 upgrade, WinME upgrade, and WinXP on a laptop. Something about that irks me, although I could see paying a one-time price and occasional upgrade price to play games in emulation - especially if the software group was giving back to the wine source (okay, that is just one person talking, Code Weavers - but still, I'd buy a games pack from you specifically because it is from you.)

 

You don't Have to subscribe that long to get the WineX rpms. I did the 6 mos. minimum 1st time subscription ($35). That got me WineX 2.1 and 3.0. 3.0 won't stop working when my subscription runs out. If a better WineX comes along, I'll just re-up.

 

It's not just about having the ability to run a game on your machine. It's also about the ability to NOT run M$'s crap on your machine, and still run the games you want.

 

Besides, some things run better under WineX than they do natively. I have Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. It runs better under WineX with less problems than when I try to run it under Win98. I have a couple other games like that too.

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And finally - my original thought on the subject was to try out open source games made for Linux, and maybe some commercial games made for Linux. Just do a pure Linux desktop and gaming system (off to Happy Penguin! Any other recommendations?) - and do the WIndows game when booted into windows.

 

I guess this goofiness comes with doing an English Lit major/Philosophy minor for 3.5 years, then swapping to CompSci. What do you guys do for solutions? Pure Linux? Commercial WIne or WIneX? Wine or WIneX from CVS? Wine from RPM? What works best for limited hassles?

 

I'll tackle these two portions of your post.

 

For good opensource games, check out this list: http://icculus.org/~dolson/mdkxp/?c=games/freegames

It's not comprehensive by any means, but it does have a lot of links in one place to get you started.

 

As for commercial games, I recommend TuxGames (link in signature). If you're curious as to what a cool game is to order, I highly recommend LGP's recent port of Majesty. It's addictive, and in just the last week, I've played it more than any other Linux game I own, with the possible exception of RTCW. It's a great game, and I'm in the manual. :)

 

For a slightly outdated grid of commercial games, check this page out: http://icculus.org/~dolson/mdkxp/?c=games/tuxgames

 

If you want to read about what else there is out there, and get a lot of links, you can check out this article I wrote for LinuxHardware.org: http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?si...209&mode=thread

 

WineX from CVS can be a huge pain, especially if you check out when it's broken, which happens occasionally. If you need it, I have a tutorial for it here, but it may or may not work, and frankly, I'm not too worried if it doesn't work anymore. http://icculus.org/~dolson/mdkxp/?c=ttrls/winexcvs

 

If you don't agree with warezing WineX RPMs, then the subscription is the only way to get something convenient. If you use Debian, you can run apt-get install winex-lite if you have it in your apt-source, and that makes the CVS compiling go away.

 

In my experience, running normal apps works a lot better in regular Wine, and games almost sorta work in WineX. I tested 70 games with WineX 2, and about 7 worked with cracking and jumping through hoops. 10% isn't bad, but it sure isn't great either. I just don't use Wine or WineX now. If you want to run Windows, you could look into VMware. I've tried it in the last week, and it's impressive, to say the least. The only problem is that it doesn't have sound and can't run games. There may be a way to enable sound, but I haven't used it that much. I was just messing with it. It runs fast, and you can NAT network with your machine... It's really neat.

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Another way to handle the windows situation so you don't corrupt your installation is to copy it and use that. I have a partition where I just copied my win2k files into. Then I setup the wine config file to point to that. Codeweavers has one advantage of having a setup program but after using that I went back to wine. NO reasons really..

 

Regarding the games, use windows for the games, up to you. Use linux for your linux games.. If you are playing too much, you might want to re-evaluate your life :cheeky:

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Didn't realize there were so many games for linux. I'm checking out gunocide!

 

Heh. Yeah, a lot of people have no clue how many there are. That's mainly why I wrote that article, even though it covered only most of the commercial games out there.

 

I may write one about free games, but that is a lot trickier, since there are so many half-done games, and some that are relatively new. I'd forget a lot of them, and end up with a barrage of email about it, no doubt.

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Yeah, I haven't had time to check all the links lately.

 

Just go to www.simutrans.de

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Dolson,

 

Did you try VMWARE after I emailed you?

:oops:

 

Yeah, I did. Why? I tried the new version 4.x, pretty neat.

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