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]: