Is Blizzard banning Linux Users?

While some companies like Valve are working on porting their software to run natively on Linux, it appears some other large companies are going to the extreme to prevent users from running their software on free operating systems.

The company I am talking about? None other than Blizzard Games. Late last month users started reporting on the Wine APPDB page for Diablo 3 that their user accounts where getting banned simply for running their games using Wine! So this is me providing a fair warning to everyone else out there running Diablo 3 via Wine - don't. Unless of course you feel like having wasted 60$ spent to buy the game.

To quote some of the frustrated Linux gamers:

"Well I've had Diablo running on my FreeBSD machine now for a couple of weeks and have a level 53 Wizard.

I just got notice while trying to log in last night that I was banned, and when I checked my email, I hadn't received anything from Blizzard.

After I opened a support ticket with them, a short while later, this is what I received in email:

Account Action: Account Closure
Offense: Unapproved Third Party Software
A third party program is any file or program that is used in addition to the game to gain an unfair advantage. These programs may increase movement speed or teleport heroes from one place to another beyond what is allowed by game design. It also includes any programs that obtain information from the game that is not normally available to the regular player or that transmit or modify any of the game files.

I don't run any programs as described above.

I kite, I die, and then I repair. But hey it's fun."

And a second:

"I got banned last night as well. Other than running under Wine I can't imagine why. Level 30ish char and not so much as a gaming keyboard.

I also have a ticket open. We will see..."

And a third:

"Ditto. I suddenly got a banned email last night, and I'm more or less in the same position. I think they're getting a bit trigger-happy with this, considering I've been running WoW for years under WINE, too.

Ah well, ticket's up."

Please stop the madness Blizzard. You should try focusing your banning efforts on people actually cheating instead of those simply trying to play your games on their OS of choice. If you are looking for more information on this topic there is a fairly good write up about it here.

~Jeff

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HOWTO: Diablo 3 on Linux

Like many nerds around the world this evening I am prepping for what, odds are, will be the first of many all-nighters involving Blizzard's soon-to-be-released Diablo III (which releases tonight at midnight!). If you have been by my blog before then odds are you will know that I prefer to do as much of my gaming as possible on my operating system of choice: Linux. Something else you may or may not know is that I am also a large fan of the company Code Weavers that produces the commercial Wine software Crossover.

Want to know the reason I am such a fan of Crossover? A few weekends ago I spent about 6 hours trying to get Wine sources to compile with various patches to make the Diablo 3 open beta work on Linux. The result? I ended up hanging my head in defeat and just playing on my OSx86 system so I didn't miss the weekend event. At that point Diablo 3 didn't work OOTB on default Wine builds or Crossover.

This morning I dropped by #crossover on FreeNode to check in with the Crossover folks to see what their plans were for the Diablo 3 release due out tonight - were us Linux folks going to have to wait?

Nope!

The Diablo 3 release is something they had been very aware of and had been testing rigorously in-house. I was informed they had internal builds of Crossover where Diablo 3 was functional enough to play this very day. In fact within three hours of my speaking with them they had an "unsupported build" release that was functional with the Diablo 3 installer (note: if you are not a current Crossover customer that above link will not work for you).

I promptly installed the update and was on my merry way:

As of now if you are using Crossover 11.1 or newer Diablo 3 is now officially supported,

Now - if you are not interested in supporting Crossover - you can attempt to succeed where I failed and compile Wine with some of the patches listed on the Diablo 3 Beta AppDB page. Odds are if you wait for the next Wine developmental release or two, Diablo 3 will just start working by default - the Crossover folks are one of the lead contributors to the Wine project and most of their code improvements go upstream.

Trouble Shooting Tips:
If you are having issues getting it to run via the latest Wine builds it might be worth your while to use winetricks to install the "vcrun2008" package.

If your login attempt is hanging at the "authenticating credentials" step, exit Diablo, open a terminal and run:

echo 0|sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope

~Jeff Hoogland

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Thoughts on Wine Technology

If you have used a Unix operating system on a desktop computer for any extended period of time then odds are you have heard of Wine technology. In case you haven’t, Wine is an acronym that stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. In actuality Wine is a “windows compatibility layer”. To put it in laymen’s terms it allows you to natively run Windows binaries in a Unix environment.

Wine is software I both love and hate. I love the fact that Wine exists. I hate the fact that it is necessary for Wine to exist. Lord knows there are a good number of (typically closed source) applications that only produce binaries for Windows. Some of these (such as games and office software) still lack true open source alternatives (Before anyone else says it: Yes LibreOffice is good but, as much as it pains me to say it, colleges teach Microsoft Office. It is difficult - if not impossible - to complete a class about using Microsoft Office, using LibreOffice). I dream of the day when enough developers pull their heads out of their asses and start developing software fully cross-platform.

That all being said, the Wine project is doing is truly remarkable job of accomplishing an immensely difficult task. They are reverse engineering all of the core binaries for an entire operating system. The Wine developers are doing their best to hit a moving target. The windows operating system is still evolving (albeit slower than Linux) and the Wine developers must be constantly coding to keep up with things.

Does Wine run all Windows applications perfectly? Hardly. It does a heck of a good job though! The number of “gold” and “platinum” rated applications continues to increase with each release. Are there bugs or regressions sometimes? Sure. But using a commercial product such as Crossover (which Bodhi Linux is now an official reseller for) catches most all regressions that occur between releases. The Crossover developers are also some of the lead contributers to the Wine project, meaning purchasing their software is a way to give back to the Wine project. If you want to easily keep track of Wine news Wine Reviews is a great resource for doing so.

Since I have taken all the Microsoft Office classes I’ll ever be required to sit through, I no longer use Wine for office software. I do however still use Wine for playing Starcraft 2 and several other Windows games.

What are your thoughts on the Wine project? Is it something you use? Does it work well for your needs?

~Jeff Hoogland

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Crossover, Bordeaux, Cedega VS Vanilla Wine

A question I have fielded more then a couple times in the Wine section of the Ubuntu Forums is

What is the difference between commercial Wine products and vanilla Wine?

There are three main commercial Wine products: Bordeaux, Cedega, and Crossover. There are a few distinct differences between the commercial Wine products and the FOSS Wine.

Support:
One of the largest benefits to using a paid for Wine product is that not only are you paying for software, you are also paying for support of said software. What this means is that if an application that is suppose to function, doesn't work properly - You will have a real live person to help you debug the issue. While support for Cedega is somewhat lacking, Bordeaux and Crossover have fantastic support staff.

GUI/Automated Installer:
All three of the commercial Wine applications provide a GUI/automated installer for installing applications. This makes it much easier for new users (and faster for experienced users) to configure applications properly under Wine. Time is money as they say.

Added Application Support:
Commercial Wine products have added pieces of code that allow some applications to function better than they do under vanilla Wine. Notably under Cedega is a superior DirectX API that allows for better FPS under a few titles (as well as running Crysis). The primary piece of code Crossover adds to Wine is their custom HTML engine. This adds better functionality to Internet Explorer, Steam, and other web-based Windows applications. Bordeaux builds Wine with a few extra patches to fix bugs, as well as support for the pulse audio sound server.

Regression Resistance:
Ever had an application working perfectly under the latest beta Wine release and then have it magically stop working for some reason or another when Wine updates? That is called a regression. Commercial Wine products are tested to ensure that all of your applications that already work, will continue to do so with future releases.

Cost:
Ah, and now the the primary reason that is always brought up whenever someone mentions any sort of commercial Wine product: The Cost. I must say, my absolute favorite response is something along the lines of:

"Why would you pay for software to use on your free operating system! That goes against the very nature of Linux!"

You know what else goes against "the very nature of Linux"? Trying to run Windows applications. Odds are you paid for that Windows application as well, so if you are going to support application development on a platform you no longer use - Why not support it on your platform of choice as well? None of the products are terribly expensive. Bordeaux starts at 20$, Crossover at 40$, and Cedega starts at 15$ (but is subscription based).

If perhaps I have persuaded you to invest one of these products and you are confused on which of the three is best for you, check out my Cedega VS Crossover comparison and my Bordeaux 2.0.4 review.

~Jeff Hoogland

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Bordeaux helps support Wineconf 2010 and FreeBSD

Projects die without dedicated people to manage them and having funding for an FOSS project allows for those dedicated people to spend more time devoted to the project itself (instead of working that silly "day job"). If you have been by my blog before then you know I write about Wine software every so often and on a few specific occasions about Bordeaux, a commercial Wine product.

Now through October 3rd, 2011 Bordeaux is running a special donation promotion to help out a couple of important open source projects. The first of these is the annual Wineconf, that is to be held in Paris, France this year. The second is FreeBSDNews.net, a good news source for what is going on in the BSD community. The third and final project is the FreeBSD foundation itself, which is a non-profit organization.

As long as the donation sale is going on 50% of the cost of Bordeaux, which is only $25.00 at most, will be donated to one of these projects. Linux and Open Solaris copies sold will donate to the Wineconf and Mac, FreeBSD, and PC-BSD sales will be donated to the BSD projects listed above. Bordeaux is also the only commercial Wine solution to offer support and "official" builds for the BSD and Open Solaris platforms.

If you are unsure what Bordeaux is/if it is right for you be sure to check out my hands on review of Bordeaux 2.0.4 If you already have already purchased Bordeaux (or another commercial Wine software) then remember - you can always just donate right to one of the above project anyways.

~Jeff Hoogland

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Thousands Play Starcraft 2 on Linux

I play Starcraft 2 on Linux and apparently I'm not the only one. At the end of last month I wrote a brief guide for getting Starcraft 2 working under Linux using Wine. In the last ten days that guide has gotten nearly nine thousand views and currently has ninety comments.

Now I've talked before about why I think there is a market for creating games for Linux and I think my above statistics only reinforce this idea. Don't believe me? Think about it this way - lets assume half of the people (4,500) who have checked out my guide have purchased the game and would prefer to play it on Linux. The game currently retails for 60$ USD.

4,500*60$ = 270,000$

That would be over a quarter of a million dollars from Linux gamers (in just over a week of the game's release). Are you telling me it would cost more than a quarter of a million dollars to bring a game, that can already run 100% using OpenGL, to the Linux operating system?

I doubt it.

I know more than a few Windows users who would drop the OS in a heart beat if they could play their Blizzard games under Linux and I know there are plenty of Linux users who would start buying Blizzard games if and only if they started creating native Linux installers.

So what do you say Blizzard? Comon - give us a native version of Starcraft 2 on Linux! It is 2010, people are using more than just Windows and OSX on their personal computers!

~Jeff Hoogland

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Wine vs Native - 3D Performance Benchmarks

In the past I've done Wine on Linux versus native Windows 7 benchmarks for 3D applications. Source engine games are some of my favorite benchmarking applications. Since Valve ported Steam to OSX earlier this year and I recently acquired an OSX PC I figured this would be an opportune time to see how Wine performance measures up to a native client, not only on the same hardware - but on the same operating system.

My benchmarking tools this time around will be Counter Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2, as they both run native on OSX. For Wine software I used the recently released Crossover Games 9.1

Scores:
Counter Strike: Source

• 1680x1050, Wine - 44.16fps
• 800x600, Wine - 48.59fps
• 1680x1050, Native - 54.02fps
• 800x600, Native - 56.22fps

Team Fortress 2

• 1680x1050, Wine - 43.88fps
• 800x600, Wine - 49.58fps
• 1680x1050, Native - 50.56fps
• 800x600, Native - 58.47fps

As you can see - the numbers are fairly close (at least closer than they are with the Windows vs Linux Wine benchmarks). With CSS Wine scored 81% the speed of the native version and in TF2 Wine was 86% the FPS native version. It is fantastic the progress the Wine project has made over the past few years, to the point where it can almost keep up with a native version of modern games - even so I would love to see native ports of these games to my favorite operating system.

~Jeff Hoogland
Please note while these benchmark scores presented are accurate to the best of my abilities, they only represent my personal hardware and software configurations. Your results on your own system(s) may vary (and if they do, please share them!).

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HOWTO: Starcraft 2 on Linux with Wine

Okie dokie - so I've mentioned before that I play Starcraft 2 under my Linux install with no issues. Since the game's official release a few days ago I have been getting a good bit of traffic on those two pages - so I figured I would put together a quick HOWTO for getting Starcraft 2 working on your Linux distro of choice. The game runs under Wine 1.2 and/or Crossover Games 9.1 with a small bit of work (the latter is easier to make work).

Since free is good I'll talk about the Wine HOWTO first. First off, download and install Wine 1.2 on your system. Next, run the following commands in terminal:

cd ~/Downloads

wget http://winezeug.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/winetricks

chmod +x winetricks

./winetricks droid fontfix fontsmooth-rgb gdiplus gecko
./winetricks vcrun2008 vcrun2005 allfonts d3dx9 win7

winecfg

In the configuration Window it opens go to the libraries tab and enter mmdevapi in the new override for library box and click add. Now scroll through the existing over rides list for mmdevapi click edit and set it to disabled. Finally click on the audio tab and set it to alsa.

If you still have audio issues after doing this and your distro uses Pulse Audio (Ubuntu does) install Wine 1.2 that has been built with pulse audio support with the following commands in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:c-korn/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

As of Crossover 9.1 Starcraft 2 is listed as "officially support" and as such you will find that it has an entry in the automated games installer. The only issue is that after the game has actually finished installing the StarCraft 2 process hangs around - meaning Crossover never actually knows that the game has finished installing and thusly never creates menu entries for it. Thank fully there is a simple fix for this - after Starcraft 2 has finished installing, open up your system monitor and look for any rogue Starcraft 2 processes and kill them off. After you have done this the CXGames installer will know that it has finished installing and will create the menu entries as it should.

If you have audio issues under Crossover you can open your Starcraft 2 bottle's WineCFG, select the audio tab, and set hardware acceleration from full to emulated.

Also - if you are trying to install from the retail CD (with Wine or Crossover) you might need need to manually mount the disc due to an issue with its split PC/Mac auto mounter. To do this run the following two commands in terminal:

sudo umount /media/SC2*

sudo mount -t udf -o ro,unhide,uid=$(id -u) /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Note some drives may use /dev/sr0 (or other mount points) instead if /dev/cdrom. If you are having issues getting it working scroll through the comments for some good tips - if you are still unable to get it working after that, make a comment of your own :)

Also - if you are attempting to get the game running with an ATI card, it was suggested in the comments that making it run under a virtual desktop allows it to run on some systems it otherwise fails to work on.

I tested the above methods on Ubuntu 10.04, Linux Mint Debian, and Chakra - but they should be applicable to any modern Linux distribution. Have any issues feel free to drop a comment below and I will do my best to lend a hand debugging. Happy gaming!

~Jeff Hoogland

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A New Cycle in the Vinyard - Bordeaux, Crossover, and Wine 1.2

July 16th, 2010 marks the next release in the "stable" line of Wine releases. Periodic "stable" releases of Wine are important because they are heavily tested to ensure that no regressions have occurred (meaning software that was working, will continue to work) between versions. It has been over two years since we saw Wine 1.0 stable released (which feels like a life time in Linux years - I mean comon that's a whole Ubuntu LTS release ago). This new release brings with it over 3,000 various bug fixes, as well as added support for 64bit applications. For a complete change log check here.

New stable releases of Wine are so important that my two favorite commerical Wine products, Bordeaux and Crossover, have both jumped right in Wine 1.2's new stably goodness with soon to be release product updates.

In addition to all the improvements Wine 1.2 brings to the table Crossover's 9.1 release also includes fixes that allow Star Trek:Bridge Commander and Modern Warfare 2 to function properly again. Their change log also notes "Made several application profile tune-ups" so hopefully your favorite games will perform a bit better under this Crossover release than they did with older versions.

The soon to be released Bordeaux 2.0.6 release sports a few very important updates in addition to Wine 1.2 - these include:

• Support for Firefox 3.6.3 and multimedia plugins
• Support for VLC 1.1.0 (this is mostly for BSD and OpenSolaris users)
• Many Steam fixes (Including fixing this nasty bug)

Beyond all of these Bordeaux is also the first Wine binary package to add support for the ever more popular Pulse Audio (default sound server in Ubuntu for some time now):
Also worth mentioning is that in celebration of the Wine 1.2 release Bordeaux is currently having a 50% off sale - 10$ for this product is a steal. It is well worth it for the time it can save you if you use Wine software often on your Unix systems.

~Jeff Hoogland

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HOWTO: Installing Ubuntu Packages Offline

Something that is difficult to do in Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is installing packages on a system without an active internet connection. This is a brief HOWTO for easily installing packages on an offline Ubuntu system. In order to do this you will need another system (preferably something with Linux) that has an active internet connection as well as a flash drive.

Step 1 - Manually performing an apt-get update
This step is optional if your system was online at some point, however if the system never had an internet connection (or never had apt-get update run) you will need to manually update the packages lists.

To do this goto your system that has an active internet connection, open a terminal and run the following commands in order:

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/main/binary-i386/Release
mv Release archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_Release

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/main/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
bunzip2 Packages.bz2
mv Packages archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_main_binary-i386_Packages

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/restricted/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
bunzip2 Packages.bz2
mv Packages archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_restricted_binary-i386_Packages

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/universe/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
bunzip2 Packages.bz2
mv Packages archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_universe_binary-i386_Packages

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/multiverse/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
bunzip2 Packages.bz2
mv Packages archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_multiverse_binary-i386_Packages

This should generate five files for you, copy them to your flash drive. Take the flash drive over to your Ubuntu system that is offline and copy them to

/var/lib/apt/lists

Note, you will need super user privileges to do this. To open a super user file manager on Ubuntu run

sudo nautilus

Step 2 - Generating Package List
On your offline system we now need to generate the list of packages we want to install. For this example I am going to use the wine1.2 and filezilla packages, however it will work for any package(s). On the offline system run the following in terminal

Due to issues with the terminal code posting on blogger the two lines needed can be found here.

Note you can list as many (or as little) packages as you want to install. Take the apt_list_new file we just generated and copy it to your flash drive.

Step 3 - Download the Packages
Plug the flash drive with the apt_list_new file into your computer that has an internet connection. Copy the file to the desktop of the computer and then run the following in terminal

cd ~/Desktop && wget -i apt_list_new

The above command will download all the packages you need to your desktop, copy them to your flash drive.

Step 4 - Installing the Packages
Attach the flash drive you copied all the packages onto to your offline system. Next, copy all the files ending in .deb to /var/cache/apt/archives as root. Finally run

sudo apt-get install wine1.2 filezilla

It will tell you "Need to download 0 of XMB" just enter "y", press enter, and poof! Your software will be installing.

Have any issues or suggestions on an easier method of installing software on an offline Ubuntu system please drop a comment below. Also, if you only have a windows system with an internet connection available to you a LiveCD is a good option or you can always install wget on Windows.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

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Starcraft 2 and a bit of Wine - Linux Performance

EDIT: If you stumbled upon this page looking for a HOWTO for getting Starcraft 2 working under Wine check here.

I mentioned earlier this month that I was enjoying the Starcraft 2 beta on Ubuntu 10.04 thanks to Wine software. In my previous posting I had simply stated that SC2 was "playable" under Wine. I have a fairly powerful gaming laptop that sports an nVidia 260m GTX and a 1680x1050 resolution panel. SC2 defaulted itself under Wine to "ultra" settings on my system - after playing one game at these settings (well it was really more like playing a slide-show). I promptly lowered the details and textures to low (while leaving the resolution the same).

With these settings I average around 40 FPS at the main menu and in game. At the high end I see just over 50 FPS while playing and at the low end it bottoms out around 20 FPS in combat. (For those wondering how I obtained these numbers press control+alt+f to put an FPS counter in the upper left hand corner of the screen while in SC2). These numbers come from the latest SC2 patch as of today (05/25/10).

Now for a bit of an ironic story regarding SC2. Late last night I dual booted my system with Windows 7 Ultimate again due to the need for an embedded youtube video to work in an Office 2007 power point presentation (it failed to work under Crossover and youtube plays poorly in VMs, thus native install was my only option left). Back on topic - since I had Windows installed anyways I figured I would copy over my SC2 files (god bless Blizzard and their portable installs) and see how comparable the performance was on the native operating system.

Needless to say it performs better, in fact the FPS I see under low settings on Wine is about equal to the same FPS I was seeing under high settings on Windows. That is about where the things that worked better under Windows ended for SC2 on my computer.

I would like to prefix my following statement with the fact that my network drivers are installed, working, and I had used several other applications online just fine.

When I joined my first SC2 game on Windows I had just selected my workers to start mining when the lag started, around two minutes later I was dropped from the game and it counted as a loss in my ladder league. I figured it was just something funky with my internet line, even though I had not had any issues in SC2 under Wine in the last three weeks, as such I promptly selected "find match" to start another game. Two minutes later I had "lost" another ladder game due to "connection" issues.

Fan-flipping-tastic.

Just out of curiosity I decided to boot in Linux to see if the issue existed there as well (I'm hoping the irony of rebooting into Linux to play a game isn't lost on anyone). Needless to say the problem was not present there, after sweeping two ladder games without any connection issues on Ubuntu I can indeed confirm that it was a "connection" issue with the SC2 was only happening under Windows.

Yes: I know this game is still in beta.
Yes: I know odds are this issue is limited to my system.

Is it still annoying? Yep. It is ridiculously ironic? You bet.

Anyone else have fun story they would like to share about an application working better under Wine than it does on Windows itself?

~Jeff Hoogland

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Bordeaux 2.0.4 - Hands on Review

Competition is an important part of all markets. It drives innovation, keeps prices down, and typically tends to ensure a quality product. Don't get me wrong, I think Crossover is fantastic software, but with Cedega pretty much being dead where is the choice in commercial Wine software? Lesser known than the two previously mentioned is Bordeaux.

Bordeaux is a commercial Wine software more similar to Crossover than Cedega in respect to the fact that it directly uses the Wine project. What makes Bordeaux worth taking a look at? Well there are a few things!

Firstly I would like to highlight the fact that Bordeaux updates their software regularly. The version I obtained to use for this review is the soon to be released 2.0.4, which ships with Wine version 1.1.41. The current release, 2.0.0, ships with Wine 1.1.36 (where is Crossover has been shipping with Wine 1.1.24 for sometime now). For those not familiar a newer Wine version typically means support for more applications and better performance for those that already ran in past versions. Worried about buying Bordeaux and then having an new version come out a couple months later? No worries, your purchase comes with free upgrades for six months after purchase.

The next wonderful things about Bordeaux is that just like Wine - they support most forms of Unix officially. Bordeaux is available for purchase for the BSD, Linux, OSX, and Solaris platforms (Where is Crossover only officially supports OSX and Linux even though they have unsupported BSD and Solaris builds). Bordeaux is also affordable, at 20$ for the Linux binary it is half the cost of even the cheapest Crossover product.

Now for the most important part of any review - the functionality of the product. While the list of software Bordeaux officially supports is not extremely large, they do support many of the key applications that most Unix users require from the Windows environment. These include (but are not limited to) Microsoft Office 2000/2003/2007, Photoshop 6/7/CS/CS2, Internet Explorer 6/7, and Steam. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the recently released new Steam GUI was near fully functional under this latest release of Bordeaux. In fact the only issue it gave me was a distortion of the tray image icon. I loaded up a few of my source engine games (L4D2, Team Fortress, Counter Strike: Source) and they all ran perfectly fine.

Bordeaux's GUI for installing and managing software is simple, but functional. It contains three main sections: Install Applications, Manage Wine, and Unsupported Packages.
The Wine management tab provides easy access to tools such as a command prompt, notepad, regedit, taskmgr, winecfg, and application un-installer. The unsupported packages tab allows for installing all of the various Winetricks packages into a given "wine cellar" (Bordeaux's version of the "bottle" or WINEPREFIX).

Over all Bordeaux works quite well and this 2.0.4 release is a step in the right direction. One key reason to pick up Bordeaux over Crossover is if you have need of both Steam and Office 2007 on your Linux install (A prime example for this is if you are a student such as myself and game occasionally while needing M$ Office because your school requires it). To have both of these applications supported under Crossover you would at least have to purchase their 70$ professional package versus the 20$ it would cost to have support for both these applications under Bordeaux.

~Jeff Hoogland

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Some WINE with your Starcraft 2?

EDIT: If you stumbled upon this page looking for a HOWTO for getting Starcraft 2 working under Wine check here.

It finally happened. I have a Starcraft2 closed beta key! What feels like decades ago now I had applied for a Starcraft2 beta key on Battle.net and had all but given up hope after many months of waiting when a friend was kind enough to give me one of his invite passes. I entered the key into my account and was thoroughly excited when I saw the beta appear in my downloads. I was clicking through the website as quick as I could so I could get the game downloading, when reality came crashing down on top of me as I hit the downloads page and was asked to choose between a Windows and an OSX client.

What is a Linux user to do? With the recent release of Ubuntu 10.04 I had removed Windows 7 from my hardrive as it had not been booted into in over a month and was simply taking up storage space. My first thought was to simply reinstall Windows 7, giving it just enough space to boot and install Starcraft. Then I thought about the fact that I almost never reboot my system and that having to restart just to play Starcraft would be a real kill joy (and a time waster).

I run all of my source engine games on Linux via CXGames however upon looking at their entry for Starcraft II I had little faith that it would work under Crossover. Not quite ready to give up hope yet I headed over to the WINE AppDB entry for SC2, lo-and-behold it had a gold rating! Browsing through the page you will find a wonderful HOWTO for recompiling WINE from git with a custom patch for SC2. Always one to jump in with both feet first I promptly uninstalled my current WINE version from my system and began downloading/compiling a patch version of 1.1.43 Twenty minutes later (I have a fairly good processor) I had the patched version of WINE built and installed. I then proceeded to download the beta client and get it installing under WINE (I also followed the directions here that contains some extra tweaks for running the beta under WINE, it also installs SC2 to it's own WINE prefix).

I have been happily playing Starcraft 2 under Ubuntu 10.04 for the last three days now. All I have to say is that it is a true testament to how much progress the WINE project has made in recent years when it can be counted upon to run a new title that hasn't even been fully released yet! Performance under WINE is not perfect, but on lower settings it is more than playable (which is what really counts). There seems to be a processor bottle neck on higher detail settings (also present in L4D2 under WINE actually) that hinders performance.
~Jeff Hoogland

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Minting the Girlfriend

A few weeks back the girl I have been dating for awhile now had idly made a complaint about her laptop being poky at certain tasks. I'd used the thing once or twice to check my email and recalled it was running Vista - no surprise there. I like this girl a lot and figured it was time to take that next step in our relationship:

I offered to put Linux on her laptop.

She had used my many computers which all run various forms of Linux several times and was open to the idea. After reassuring her that none of her data was going to be lost by installing Linux and in fact I would even leave Vista on the computer should she want to go back to it, she was ready to let me get Linux installing on her laptop. Thankfully she had a 320gig hard drive in the system, most of which was unused, so I was able to give Linux 80gigs to reside on.

For a long time I have always installed Ubuntu on friend's computers who where interested in moving away from Windows, however as I recently stated I now feel Linux Mint is better suited for this situation. Thankfully I keep a 1gig flash drive in my laptop bag that boots a Linux Mint LiveCD (Created using unetbootin - if you have never installed from a flash drive before I highly recommend it, much faster than installing from a disc). Around half an hour later I had the operating system fully updated and installed. I spent another five minutes creating a mount point and fstab entry for her Windows partition. And lastly for the sake of easiness I created symlinks in her /home directory so she could easily access her pictures/documents/music stored on the Windows partition.

Then came that fateful question: What about Microsoft Office?

Personally I had grown up using Office 03 for a short bit and then mostly OpenOffice.org, so when I made the move to Linux just having OpenOffice on my own systems was fine for myself. She was used to the ribbon setup of Office 07 though, beyond that she also had all of her calender dates residing in Outlook and she used OneNote a few times a week. The solution?

Crossover

Thanks to this wonderful GUI front end for the Wine Project, Office 07 can be installed under Linux just as easily as on Windows. In fact, after I had installed Crossover on the system and she saw the GUI she took the computer from me and installed Office 07 herself because "anyone can follow an installation wizard". Which is very true, the point of the Crossover products is that you don't need to be a Linux Guru or even a computer tech to install Windows software on Linux and it does a fantastic job to this end.

Was the move to Linux successful for her? More than three weeks later and I can say with confidence:

Yes it was.

Is Vista gone from her laptop? Not yet, but maybe someday (Move Media Player not installing on Linux or through Wine is the last hangup). She is booted in Mint more often than not and has found her way around the Ubuntu Software Center to install Frostwire (among other things). She also used the Linux answer machine to hunt down the driver for her Cannon MP190 printer when it was not auto-found by the printer installer on Mint.

All in all I must say though, the best part about installing Mint on her laptop is that now when I use it to check my email I no longer have to use Vista :)

~Jeff Hoogland

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Is Cedega Hanging in There?

In one of my past articles I made a bold assessment that it appeared Transgaming might be dropping support for their Cedega Wine software. However it now appears that Cedega might be hanging in there - After more than a year of silence there was finally an update posted in Cedega's "Den" (announcements section). The post promises the certification of two games, Torchlight and Defense Grid: The Awakening, that happen to work well under their "recently" released 7.3.3 engine (The latter of the two pleases me greatly, I had purchased DG on Steam over the holidays and it does not function properly under Wine/CXGames as of yet). Also provided is a very vague "Development Update" that promises better OpenGL performance and mentions that at some point in the near future we should see a more detailed development plan - Alas two weeks later and still nothing.

In the end what does all this mean? Maybe nothing, but then only time will tell. I'm hoping that Transgaming gets around to posting development updates faster than they have been about fixing their application voting system (which has been non-functional for close to two years now). If Transgaming want's to save their Linux product they need to get on the ball - and quick. They are no longer the only big player in the world of commercial "Win-on-Lin" for gaming. Codeweavers has already posted their plans for development in 2010 and since they already support L4D2 (one of the most recently released hit PC titles) Transgaming is going to be hard-pressed to play catch-up.

As I've said in the past: I think Cedega is good software, however there is more to buying software than just the product itself. Here is to hoping Transgaming can get their customer service act together in 2010, because - while I like CXGames, competition is a wonderful driving factor in the business world.

~Jeff Hoogland

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Wine, CXGames, and Windows 7 Performance Comparison

I blog more than a little about Wine software. In the past I have run benchmarks between the most current pieces of Wine technology out there and how they compare with each other. However one important question many gamers have when looking to game on Linux is not so much how do the different Wine technologies compare with each other so much as how do they perform compared with the program(s) running natively on Windows? Since I finally installed Windows 7 I figured I would take a look into just how well my favorite non-emulators stack up against the native platform for a few 3D applications.

The Tests: I ran both a synthetic benchmark (3D Mark 2001se) as well as some actual game applications (TF2, L4D, & L4D2). Each test was run several times under Wine/CXGames/Windows to ensure that the scores are as accurate as possible.

The Hardware: While my hardware is not fastest in the world it is (as of posting this) relatively new and decently quick. Processor - Intel p9700 2.8ghz Dual Core, RAM - 4gigs of DDR3, Video Card: nVidia 260m with 1gig DDR3 dedicated memory.

Operating Systems and Drivers: Ubuntu 9.10, running the nVidia 190.53 driver & Windows 7, running the nVidia 195.62 driver

The Wine Software: Wine version 1.1.35 (with extra fonts and the d3dx9 packages installed via Winetricks) and CXGames 8.1.4 - both of these are the latest versions as of my posting this.

The Results:

3D Mark 2001 SE

• Resolution: 1680x1050
• - Wine Scored: 18497
• - CXGames Scored: 18538
• - Windows 7 Scored: 31573
• Resolution: 1024x768
• - Wine Scored: 22141
• - CXGames Scored: 23265
• - Windows 7 Scored: 35508

Team Fortress 2

• Resolution: 1680x1050
• - Wine: 65.11 fps
• - CXGames: 61.78 fps
• - Windows 7: 87.13 fps
• Resolution: 1024x768
• - Wine: 81.82 fps
• - CXGames: 70.68 fps
• - Windows 7: 101.88 fps

Left 4 Dead

• Resolution: 1680x1050
• - Wine: 13.76 fps
• - CXGames: 27.36 fps
• - Windows 7: 63.48 fps
• Resolution: 1024x768
• - Wine: 19.93 fps
• - CXGames: 35.38 fps
• - Windows 7: 65.65 fps

Left 4 Dead 2

• Resolution: 1680x1050
• - Wine: n/a
• - CXGames: 38.45 fps
• - Windows 7: 72.04 fps
• Resolution: 1024x768
• - Wine: n/a
• - CXGames: 56.46 fps
• - Windows 7: 111.68 fps

Things Worth Noting: Obviously all the applications run faster natively under Windows than they do under Wine technology (I hope no one is surprised by this). Secondly I'd like to point out the FPS averages for Wine 1.1.35 and CXGames 8.1.4 have improved from older versions. Lastly I feel I should mention the n/a score Wine has on Left 4 Dead 2 - this is because try as I might no matter what hacks/cracks I throw at Wine I can still not get Left 4 Dead 2 to play for me under Wine.

Wrapping Up: Obviously if you are extremely worried about getting every last FPS out of your video games you should stick with Windows - however depending on your hardware and what games you are playing Linux may very well be capable of playing them at a satisfactory level (remember the human eye can only see 60 fps, so anything higher is overkill). Also remember that with almost every new release Wine continues to further advance it's performance so be sure to check back for new benchmarks/scores as new versions are released.

Happy New Year to everyone and keep on fragging!

~Jeff Hoogland
Please note while these benchmark scores presented are accurate to the best of my abilities, they only represent my personal hardware and software configurations. Your results on your own system(s) may vary (and if they do, please share them!).

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HOWTO: Devil's Tuning Fork under Wine

I've been in a gaming mood of the late and I much prefer to be able to run my games under Linux as opposed to having to reboot into Windows. That being said a game I've really enjoyed playing is Devil's Tuning Fork. It is a very unique first person indie game in which your character "sees" with their ears. It is being developed by a team of students at DePaul University in Chicago and it is a free download from the game's homepage.

Getting DTF working under Wine is fairly easy. To do so do the following:

• Download & Install Wine version 1.1.32 (It crashes out under the latest version which is 1.1.35 as of my posting this, you may want to consider installing 1.1.32 along side the latest version instead of replacing it)
• Download & Install DTF using Wine - Note when it tries to install DirectX it may fail, this is fine just click finish.
• Download Wine Tricks

Now open your favorite terminal and navigate to the directory you saved the winetricks file to and run sh winetricks d3dx9 vcrun2008 xact dinput directplay at this point you will see lots of scrolling text as Wine Tricks works its magic, eventually it will prompt you to install VC2008 - install it.

You should be all set to play - just load up the game.exe using Wine (version 1.1.32) and the DTF should load right up for you. I hope you all enjoy this lovely title as much as I did.

~Jeff Hoogland

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HOWTO: Setup Steam Version of Crysis on Ubuntu

In one of my previous posts I mentioned I had the game Crysis running successfully under Cedega with a few native dll over rides. Today I am going to detail the few hoops you will need to jump through if you wish to get Crysis running on Linux.

We are going to need a few things before we get started and I feel it is easiest to round up all the files before we get started. Go download the following files:

• vcredist_x86.exe
• odbcbcp.dll
• pdh.dll

In addition to these three files before we start you are going to need Cedega and the latest Wine version installed as well as Steam installed under both Wine and Cedega.

First thing we want to do is get Crysis downloading under the Wine version of Steam (this is going to take awhile depending on your internet connection). While you are waiting for this to download take the two .dll files you downloaded and place them into ~/.cedega/Steam/c_drive/windows/system32 next load up Cedega and install the vcredist_x86.exe into your Steam folder.

Once Crysis is done downloading on Steam (running under Wine) go ahead and load the game through Steam. It will prompt you to install several things (DirectX, .NET, and Punkbuster) - install all of them. Once it is done with this Wine should even load Crysis to the main menu for you (however if you try to load a level of the game itself it will result in X crashing - give it a try if you do not believe me).

Next go ahead and close Steam and we are going to move all of the Crysis install files from your ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps to your Cedega Steam install - ~/.cedega/Steam/c_drive/Program Files/Steam/steamapps Now we need to copy over the install of M$ .NET that was installed in Wine (~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Microsoft.NET) and place it into your Cedega Steam folder (~/.cedega/Steam/c_drive/windows)

Alrighty - we are all set to play now just load Steam through Cedega using the UT3 profile and launch Crysis. When you load Crysis for the first time under Cedega it will install the same things it did under Wine (DirectX, .NET, and Punkbuster) - however the .NET install will fail. Don't worry, this is expected (its why we copied over the .NET install from Wine) just click continue with installation and everything will run fine. After it finishes with this Crysis should load right up for you and you'll be ready to go!

Lastly - one trouble shooting note. On some systems having the in game Texture detail set above medium (so on High or Very High) causes it to fail to load. If this happens simply set it to medium or low and it should be good to go.

On my own system it runs at a playable frame rate (around 25 fps) under full screen 1024x768 resolution. Remember your own mileage may vary.

~Jeff Hoogland

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Has Transgaming Abandoned Cedega

Pretty much anyone who has used Linux for at least a short while is aware of Wine technology and what it does. For many Linux users, largely Linux gamers, having properly working Wine technology is essential to their everyday computer user. The topic of commercial Wine software has been known to cause many heated discussions over the years on various Linux message boards. It appears at long last that perhaps this seemingly eternal argument may finally be coming to an end. Transgaming, the company behind Cedega, appears to be finally putting down its (some would say much controversial) Linux software.

While nothing official has been posted by the company itself, I feel it is pretty obvious Transgaming is letting Cedega die a slow death. November 13th 2009 marked the one year date since we last saw an update in Cedega's news page - The Den. While we did see a small update to the software in August - this did not add any new functionality to Cedega, it simply resolved an issue a World of Warcraft update had introduced. It is also heavily obvious that Transgaming does not check their user forums (or they really just don't care about what happens there if they do). There is now a two page thread on the boards of users simply asking for news on what is going on with the company/future of Cedega - we've gotten no official response.

The best conclusion I can come to is that Transgaming no longer sees any profit in Linux gaming and they are instead moving all of their focus to their Cider Mac software (which has has several updates over the last year - adding support for new games and such). I'd encourage anyone wanting to support Linux gaming to not to send Transgaming your hard earned money if this is how they are going to operate. I'd be willing to bet that they have not put out an official statement so they can try to bleed out every last cent out of their dieing product before they put the final nail in it's coffin (if ever). I understand if they need to let the project die - but at least tell as such, don't leave us guessing.

Anyone else have input in the situation? I'm letting my Cedega subscription lapse at the end of this month and will not be renewing unless they get their act together and start communicating with their customers.

Update: It appears Cedega might be hanging in there...

Regards,

~Jeff Hoogland

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HOWTO: Install Multiple Wine Versions on One System

Wine Technology advances at a rapid rate, in the last month we have seen two updates to Wine (1.1.33 & 1.1.34). Many of us like to stay using the latest and greatest Wine software - with good reason each new version typically fixes issues and improves performance - however on occasion a new Wine release will suffer from some regressions that cause some applications to stop working properly. The solution to this? Quite simple: revert your Wine install back to the previous version so your application can still work properly for you.

This is fantastic if you are only using Wine to run a single program - however in the case you are running two or more programs under Wine it is not unheard of for each of the different programs you are running to perform better under different Wine versions (or with different patches). The solution to this issue is simple: install multiple versions of Wine on the same system and run each program with the version that it behaves best under.

Step 1 - Setup:

Download the source code tar.bz2 file for the additional Wine version you wish to install from Source Forge. Extract the contents of the tar.bz2 file to your preferred directory

Then we want to install all of the build dependencies we will need to compile Wine from source. On Ubuntu we can do this by running the following command in terminal sudo apt-get build-dep wine (You should check here for information on getting the Wine build dependencies on other distributions.)

Step 2 - Compiling Wine:

Open your favorite terminal and change directory to the location of your extracted Wine source. (If you wanted to apply a patch to your Wine source now is the time). Once you are ready we are going to configure and compile your Wine source. To do so we use the following command in terminal ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/bin/wine-someversion && make depend && make

At this point go make yourself a sandwich, watch some television, or better yet go read some other wonderful articles written by yours truly. (Seriously configuring & compiling Wine takes a fair bit of time depending on your hardware)

Step 3 - Installing Wine & Clean Up:

Alright, now that you have a full stomach we can install our newly compiled Wine code and setup the last few things we need. Install Wine with the following command sudo make install

Lastly we need to create our new wine, regedit, and winecfg commands. To create the wine-someversion command we use a symlink as such:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/wine-someversion/bin/wine /usr/bin/wine-someversion

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/wine-someversion/bin/wine /usr/local/bin/wine-someversion/bin/wine-someversion

To setup up winecfg-someversion and regedit-someversion you have to do the following:

1. Open your favorite text editor as super user (example: gksudo gedit)
2. Enter the following as the only line: /usr/local/bin/wine-someversion/bin/winecfg
3. Save the file to /usr/bin/winecfg-someversion
4. Make the file executable with the following command: sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/winecfg-someversion
5. Repeat the above four steps only replace winecfg with regedit

Lastly:

You can now use your different Wine install by running the Wine command with its following version number. In the attached image you can see I have my default Wine command (currently 1.1.33) and then I also have 1.1.32 installed which I access by running wine-1.1.32

You can install as many different Wine versions as you like in this manner. This way you can feel safe in installing a new Wine version and not have to worry about breaking support for your favorite Windows based application.

Cheers,

~Jeff Hoogland

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