Wine 1.4 Backport notes

Have a new spanking build of Wine on Karmic using 1.4 from the Launchpad PPA.  Here's a few notes on what I noticed here.

• I had to repackage wine1.3_1.4.orig.tar.gz to rename the folder to wine1.3-1.4
• ttf-symbol-replacement-wine1.3 is back in this build.
• changed the dependency debhelper >=5
• removed gcc-4.4-multilib
• removed oss4-dev
• remove in /debian/rules CC="gcc-4.4" line 51

Rebuilt it and there were no build problems.  I installed it and it looked like it didn't find anything wrong.  winecfg and wineboot works fine.

Winetricks was backported from precise pangolin.  Very easy to update for Karmic.  Just update the debhelper >= 5 and change the compat file to 5.

Witcher and Wine Update

Playing a lot of Witcher lately but I've run into some interesting findings.  One is that on a fresh boot, I have to run Witcher twice to fix the graphics problem (puppeteer bug), so this has very little to do with the Launcher.exe.  Having it run directly from desktop menu is also added convenience and less clicks to do.

At least one time, I had an error dialog box telling me that Witcher crashed.  Once I clicked OK, the game launched anyway, but there was no sound at all.  This has been consistent in that everytime the dialog box shows up before launch, the game loses sound.  I don't know what causes that but after a reboot, it fixes by itself.  The sound is also automatically disabled by the game so you have to go the option and re-enable it.

Witcher and Wine Update

So, in my session yesterday I found more interesting clues.  After work, I fired up Witcher straight away and predictably Geralt was invisible and this warranted a hard reboot to fix.  Something about Ubuntu is doing this I am sure as my playtime in older Ubuntu systems wasn't like this.  You can tell if Witcher is going to have graphical glitches if you're not seeing the flying crows in the background of the main menu (lower left hand corner of the screen).

Next thing I did after a reboot was run the desktop icon which runs the Launcher.  The game didn't have the crows in the menu but it turns out it wasn't Geralt being invisible.  It was the puppeteer bug.  So what I did was run the witcher.exe directly (something I always did on my first playthrough).  This fixed everything and Witcher ran well after that.  I updated the desktop icon to run the executable file so I expect this to be fixed for good.

Witcher and Wine

Long ago, I started playing Witcher.  I haven't finished it yet because it's a darn long game.  When I played with it, I was running the Cross Over Lame Duck edition but I had to use version 7.2.2 because version 8 would just silently crash.  Running that had a few graphical glitches like the trees and the vitality and endurance bar, but other than that, perfect.

I just reinstalled the game and it's running on Wine 1.3.33, but I noticed a few peculiarities in addition to the graphical glitches. 

The first was that Geralt would only walk for a few steps.  Then he would start to glide on the floor.  I believe this has something to do with the keyboard input that is bugged in Ubuntu 9.10.  If you pull out the sword, you will notice Geralt walking a few steps and then perform a roll on the floor, indicating that the game was reading double-tap direction input.

Second was this occasional problem of Geralt not being rendered.  I toggled UseGLSL to disable which seems to help although it does still happen.  Restarting the computer seems to fix things, so I'm not sure what it is.

Third was an issue with the so-called puppeteer lines that are rendered on Geralt.  I noticed this when I ran the game from the launcher but when I ran the game from Witcher.exe it didn't have this problem.  I deduced that this has something to do with the fact that my AppDefaults on Witcher.exe weren't getting picked up when I run Launcher.exe.  Since I have separate Wine bottles for each game I have installed, I decided to push the AppDefaults into the actual Direct3D settings.

Lastly was a lack of sound.  My experience with Wine apps and sound (and PulseAudio) is that the longer my computer runs, the more Wine performance seems to suffer.  My suspicions are that PulseAudio is still not in a good implemented state.  After copying my audio settings from Tomb Raider Underworld, I rebooted the machine and ran the game.  The game gave me a good scare when it still didn't have audio but after checking the game's options, I realized there was a toggle to disable sound.  Bah!

I hope to finish Witcher this time around.  The game is really huge and I really want this to be over in preparation for Witcher 2.

Wine and pasuspender?

I am about fed up with PulseAudio in Ubuntu.  Since day 1, my problems with it just won't end and this is the closest I've gotten to embarking into ripping it out and going back to plain old Alsa.  This has been a real utter pain in the neck so far but I've been reading on pasuspender as some means to get audio working.

How To Temporarily Disable PulseAudio

I hate PulseAudio.  I hate it with a passion.  Unfortunately, I picked Ubuntu when I should have gone Xubuntu.  Now, I hope this can solve some of the woes I'm having with wine and Tomb Raider (as well as other Wine related software).

Backports done!

I left the building overnight as Firefox8 didn't seem very fast to build. When I did install it, I managed to get through a few quirks in the install. It's some dependency on installed packages that were about to be overwritten anyway, so I added packages to install until dpkg didn't complain anymore. Here are the ones I added:

• firefox
• firefox-3.5
• firefox-3.5-branding
• firefox-3.5-gnome-support
• firefox-gnome-support
• firefox-branding

Firefox 8 is running here on Karmic. I went ahead and updated firebug as well. This is sweet!

1 down, 1 to go...

Thankfully, yasm-1 was not a pain to backport. I checked the versions and it was fine. Building only took a minute or so and now Firefox8 is building. We'll see how that goes.

Ack! More backporting!

Man, one website that I use for work has decided to block me from using it because my browsers are too old. Google Chrome doesn't seem to support Ubuntu 9.10 and Firefox is just too old. I'm not a fan of downloading Firefox from the website if I can get the deb packages to work. I think you know where this is heading.

Yes, I decided to yank Firefox8 from the launchpad ppa and do my own backporting to Karmic. You can get the packages I used here. I did the usual to prep up my build machine and I also double checked the control files just to make sure nothing was wrong. I thought the versions of the libraries was fine and hoped this would be a painless exercise, but that wasn't to be.

Building the deb package, I realized that apt-get build-dep for Karmic missed out the following.

• libcurl4-openssl-dev
• xvfb
• imagemagick
• yasm-1 (>= 1.1)

The three of them I could install just fine, but I found yasm-1 to be an oddity as I'm pretty sure yasm packages were built without the -1 suffix. I decided to take the risk and build it too hoping it's not too much of a big deal. We'll see how that goes.

Sims 3 Teaser Update!

I'm going to keep this very brief. I've basically updated to 1.3.29 and boy it really eliminated most of the graphical glitches on the game. It basically runs very well although it still gets some minor culling problems. Works very well!

UPDATE: And now, forced to backport Pidgin for Karmic

After some time of tolerating Empathy on Karmic, I have finally had enough of this. The app just does not get updates and I'm experiencing MSN frustrations with it as buddies do not appear when they do on Pidgin.

As it turns out, Pidgin is outdated on Karmic so, I am once again forced to cut myself my own release of Pidgin. This gets really boring after a while, but hopefully I can now get video and voice on Pidgin compiled to see how that goes.

Update: It's done. 2.7.10 on my Karmic. I had a few complications but nothing show-stopping. Libtools was complaining and I did this:

autoreconf --force