EA Origin Store Client on Wine

I have had some issues with Origin beginning last year where the client would just crash and crash.  No matter what version of Wine I used, it wouldn't run at all.  I moved through different Ubuntu distro versions and still no luck.  The crash point is C:\Program Files\Origin\Origin.exe: double free or corruption (!prev) and it seems to happen sporadically. After poking through the wine bug entries here and here, I figured out how to get the client to run reliably.

Since I installed my Origin client on a 32-bit Wine prefix, the commandline you'll see here is specifically for that.

WINEPREFIX="/path/to/wineprefix/of/origin" WINEARCH=win32 taskset -c 0 Origin.exe

Try it and see if it works!

FGLRX Post install do's...

This is a good precaution to do because updating your packages can inadvertently cause you to download bad versions of the fglrx drivers.

$ sudo apt-mark hold fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-dev

AMD FGLRX 13.8 BETA Driver

So, I updated my drivers to 13.8 Beta today using this guide.  The install is no different from Quantal but it's just to make sure I don't make any foolish errors.  I also took the liberty to remove the xserver-xorg-video-intel package that was used by a hack.  As it turns out, there is progress.  Now fglrx will load up without having to use bogus outdated intel video drivers.  The bad news?  Using an external monitor still does not work.  It is clearly a regression with fglrx drivers with 13.04.  That's just how it is with AMD, I suppose.

Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition and Wine

I'll keep this brief.  This was a fairly helpful thread on that front.  Tricky getting the options.ini stuff going which seems to cause crashing.

Progress on the fglrx dual monitor issue

Here's a nice little progress.  I think the root cause of my dual screen woes is the solution to get fglrx working in the first place!!!  This is some spectacular failure on AMD's part, but what else is new with AMD with Linux?

AMD did put out 13.8 beta drivers.  Hopefully, I can ditch the stupid solution and get my 2 screens back!

Worth looking into is the seemingly "Official" bug on launchpad.  Someone posted a possible workaround by disabling SNA acceleration.  Certainly worth a try.  I hate apt-marking outdated packages.

Section "Device"
      Identifier "intel"
      Driver "intel"
      Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
EndSection

Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition: D3D Error 16:10 Not Supported

I'll keep this one brief.  Had a problem with Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition on Steam where the game refuses to start.  This Steam thread helped me get this one sorted.  Basically, open your Windows Explorer and go to %appdata% location and look for MKKE.  You'll find the dxdiag.txt file.  Open it and change the Dedicated Memory to 1024 MB.  Save the file and set it to Read-Only.  This will trick the game into thinking it has enough Video RAM to run the game.  Then watch the game reconfigure the settings.

Youtube Android Woes

So, on that old Eken tablet, the Youtube app started acting up.  I am treated with the "An error occurred" when attempting to sign in with the app.  If I try to play any video, I get the "Unsupported video format" error which doesn't make sense at all.

So, I started looking into a possible fix for it when I found this helpful link.  Turns out, it is the answer!  I used the Youtube 4.1.23 apk off the web and it works like a charm.