Bastion Update

One quick word on Bastion.  The new nVidia drivers 310.14 from Ubuntu's experimental repositories have fixed the performance woes.  It's running now at a very slick frame rate.  Cool.

A Few Wine Thoughts...

I've been sinking my teeth on the Free to Play SWTOR for about a week now and the Wine workarounds are fairly reliable.  One word of advice is to avoid logging back into the game using Windows as you get stuck again with some insanely long loading times.  The game runs pretty fine, but the map and the mouse roll over on objectives are major cause for game freezes, so avoid using them as much as possible.  Also, I'm on the verge of quitting because the Sith Inquisitor quests have become next to impossible.  If this doesn't change anytime soon, I will purge this game and never look back.

I've also tried the following games on Wine and Steam: Mark of the Ninja, Just Cause, Velvet Assassin, and The Walking Dead.  They all work splendidly and without issues whatsoever.  Of the four, Just Cause is just plain crap.  Velvet Assassin is good, but insanely difficult even on the easiest difficulty setting.  Both Mark of the Ninja and The Walking Dead are crazy good and deserve some serious kudos.  I'd give all four games the platinum ranking!

Star Wars - The Old Republic Free to Play on Wine

Time and time again, I've tried to get this blast game to run on Wine.  As fate would have it, no such dumb luck for me.  I knew it was only a matter of time before the game hit the free to play model, and it happened.  So after some more fighting and tussling, I finally got the game to work.

This is also my first time using PlayOnLinux and it's a splendid tool that makes maintenance of my Wine builds easy.  What you need to do to get the game to work is run the script after downloading the exe installer from the main website.  This should pretty much run without issue.

If you run the launcher afterwards, all you'll get is a black screen.  You can set your Wine virtual desktop to 1000x600 to get the launcher to appear.  The game won't run afterwards, so I had to poke around a guide.  This one from the SWTOR website was extremely helpful.

Essentially, you'll need to get the password hash and other parameters of swtor.exe that the launcher runs and create your own shortcut that runs the exe directly.  My guess is that the long winded paths are messing up the game if executed by the launcher.

Performance seems OK, but it's only the starting planet.  Hope this little entry helps.

Hipchat and Ubuntu 12.10

Update:

http://www.ubuntukiller.com/2013/04/how-to-install-hipchat-in-ubuntu.html

There's a deb client for hipchat.  I haven't gotten around to trying it, but it should be interesting figuring out how to uninstall the old client!

Old instructions after the jump!

Bastion - Horrible Frame rate

I think the title pretty much says it all.  The last time I played a game that had such horrible frame rate,  it was Witcher 2 and that game had much more splendid than Bastion.  I don't know why it's slow as hell, but it's really killing the experience.  I also tried dropping the resolution, going window mode, disabling vsync and using nofixedstep.  None of it really helps me.  This is incredibly annoying for a game that hasn't really convinced me it's worth it to power through it in its entirety.

Creating Custom Launchers

The change to the Unity desktop brought along with it some oddities including missing features that normal GNOME desktops used to have.  I figured I'd post what I did to get my custom ssh apps to work in a console.

The easiest way without having to drag up in and install GNOME stuff is to create a .desktop file that appears on your desktop.  These are the file contents:

[Desktop Entry]

Name=ShellScriptApp

Exec=gnome-terminal -e /full/path/to/shellscriptapp.sh

Type=Application

StartupNotify=true

Comment=Your Comment Here

Path=/full/path/here

Icon=/icon/path/to/the/png/file

The contents will run a gnome-terminal and execute the command you need so you get a nice terminal window with the app running.

Gee... Check Point, Thanks!

As I work on this, I'm beginning to see that Check Point is the culprit of Virtualbox throwing up with the networking.  This is utterly annoying and something unexpected.  If I cannot fix this, I may have to repeat the entire process again.

The Final Stretch... hopefully

Slowly but surely, I'm starting to settle in on the new Ubuntu install.  I like the Unity desktop generally speaking.  There's a few oddities here and there like the lack of screensaver and how the UVC drivers are broken thereby rendering the web camera completely and utterly useless.

VirtualBox is giving me problems when I transferred my VM images from Ubuntu 9.10.  This has simply forced my hand into installing a new Windows 7 image for my work.  Shame but it had to be done.

Pulse Audio is much better here than in 9.10 but it still suffers from the HDMI issue where the audio cuts for the first few seconds.

Looking forward to the new Steam Linux release and have begun fiddling with Wine and the CrossOver Flock the Vote software.

Next time, I hope that the upgrade path will be smooth.  I'd hate to fight with it like this all over again.

Demystifying the network woes

I've noticed that my network is (mis)behaving in pretty much the same way as it did in Ubuntu 9.10.  I've begun digging up some resources to see why it's happening and it looks like a BIOS/firmware issue where the interrupts are not being set correctly by the BIOS.  You can read more about it here and here and here.  The problems described are EXACTLY THE SAME as the ones I'm having.  The question is, which one do I grab for the motherboard DP55WB?

Handy command here:

sudo lshw -class network

This will spit out the UNCLAIMED output.

Bonus:
When my portable hard disk started to spew stupid crap about not being able to mount using ntfs.  I needed to run chkdsk from Windows.  This command was helpful:  chkdsk /f [drive letter]:

Ubuntu 12.10: nVIDIA Oops!

I thought installing the nvidia drivers would be very easy.  Turns out, I was wrong.  I ran sudo apt-get install nvidia-current which failed because apparently, it didn't include the kernel headers.  I ended up with vesa and without the taskbar, rendering the desktop useless.

To fix this, I went to the commandline screen (ctrl+alt+f1) and logged in.  Then sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic and then sudo apt-get remove nvidia-* to get rid of the currently installed nvidia drivers.  Lastly, I ran the nvidia driver install again: sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-updates nvidia-settings to recompile the drivers (and slipped in the config app).  After reboot, all's well!  Special thanks to this forum thread.

Pulse Audio still exhibits the same issues with HDMI where the audio being played misses a few seconds.  Typical of this POS audio layer.

Now it's about trying to get this Logitech Quickcam to work which used to work splendidly on 9.10.  Oh well, time to see what's going on.

Ubuntu 12.10 - Growing Pains

I guess no matter how good things get with Ubuntu, you still get the usual first boot scares.  In my case, it's the video display (surprise! surprise!).  I run a GeForce 9500 GT and it's an old card for sure.  When I got to finally boot, I got a purple screen and then no video signal issue.  Poking around I realized I had to set the kernel options on grub to nomodeset but it's been a while since I last mucked with grub.  So, I wanted to do a post here that summarizes everything I've learned.

If you don't get the grub menu on boot, just before grub loads, press SHIFT.  Since I had the network boot to start, I had to press CTRL+C to stop network boot and then wait for the routine to exit.  Before the text "grub loading" appears, I was jamming the SHIFT key like crazy.  From there, I edit the first option (ubuntu) and then add nomodeset to the linux/boot entry.

Many, many thanks to this Ubuntu forum thread for the info.  It's nice to see that there's so much self-help information available online to fix these things.

Now it's time to get a real nvidia driver up and running!

Making the Leap

Today has been a long time coming.  I have extended the lifespan of Ubuntu 9.10 well beyond Canonical's support and I feel that with the strides Ubuntu has made, it's worth the leap.  I designed my work desktop computer so that I could easily backup my stuff and upgrade without much woes, but because of laziness on my part, I've been putting off that for a while.  Before I knew it, 9.10 had reached its end in terms of Canonical support.  Just like my old trusty Gutsy 7.10 install on my laptop, I was falling into the same trap of staying on an old system.  This time, hopefully, I stay true to the design goal and keep Ubuntu updated.  With Ubuntu 13 aiming towards gaming (thanks to Valve), it should be an interesting ride for sure.

I had a few external hard disk scares last night as I was backing up my stuff.  I swear Seagate products have gotten lousy through the years.  Thankfully I have more than one drive to back my office stuff up.  Smooth start to the transition, right?  I thought so.

Next up was booting Ubuntu 12.10 and not detecting my network card.  Cool.  Thankfully, I saw a link on Ubuntu's forums about a glitch where you need to set the network boot as the first booting device from the bios.  The tip didn't work in the forum thread, but it sure damn worked for me.

Now, I've clicked install and the disc is taking a while to read.  I hope I manage to get the upgrade or all the work will be for naught.  I'll post again when something significant happens.