Just switched to Ubuntu...

Ease

Ease

Ease

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I had a lot of problems with XP on my laptop, so I decided to try out Linux for the first time on one of my own machines. I picked Ubuntu, and at first I really liked it. In fact, I still love the look and feel of it, and the snappiness!

However, this weekend I went over to a friend's house for some good ole' fashion LANing and had some troubles. After about four hours of trying to use WINE and PlayOnLinux I gave up trying to play any games. All of; Battle for Middle Earth, Age of Empires 2 and expansion, and Genesis; would install fine but would not run! Running them would cause the splash logo to come up, then suddenly I'd get an error and the splash would disappear.

I've read countless instructions, followed many, and had no success! Any advice before I switch back to Windows?!
 
Games are programmed to run using the Windows/Directx frameworks.
You can get them to run using Wine. However, they don't run perfectly and you have to make allowances for this.

As an analogy you could say you are attempting to run an Xbox game on your Playstation. You can probably understand that this would take a lot of engineering to work and the end result would still not be perfect, right?

To play Windows games, use Windows.
 
Unfortunately Linux wasn't developed to meet your gaming requirements. If you want to play games designed for WINDOWS perhaps you should use WINDOWS?
 
try building it from source, the version of wine bundled with ubuntu is quite old.

http://www.winehq.org/

I'm sure they have repos somewhere as well

also get on the wine appdb as it usually has tricks for getting stuff working

http://appdb.winehq.org/

theres also useful little script called winetricks to help configure wine

Code: 
wget [URL]http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks[/URL]

sudo mv winetricks /usr/local/bin

winetricks
more here http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

also if it all goes a bit squiffy, simply,

Code: 
rm -rf ~/.wine
which removes the wine directory where your apps and registry are but doesn't remove wine.

also wine sometimes needs you to restart but won't prompt you, so make sure you do a restart after you install it.
 
LabR@t said:
dual boot, its the best way

gamming on windows and all else on Linux
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This is the best solution, I do recommend this as well, I'm using linux since 2003, if the game wasn't developed to work under linux "like Counter Strike and VDrift" then it's better to run it under windows, Wine sucks in fact!!
 
dangerstat said:
If you want to play games designed for WINDOWS perhaps you should use WINDOWS?
Click to expand...

I might be misreading this, but that seems pretty negative. Not sure how well founded that is as my first line was "I had a lot of problems with XP" showing that I used to game with Windows, and my last line "Any advice before I switch back to Windows" shows that I've obviously thought of "playing WINDOWS games on WINDOWS" ...

I was only hoping that veteraned linuxers could show me where I was going wrong.

Okay then, dual-booting it is. However, how come so few games are designed to run on both Windows and Linux? Linux seems pretty prominent nowadays?! Also, could anyone give me a short list, or link to such a list, of games that are compatible with Linux?

Dearly sincerely.
 
Just quietly and an honest opinion - Linux is nice for a desktop where you might do a bit of word processing, a bit of spreadsheet work, maybe even a bit of web browsing ;) but if you're a gamer you're looking in the wrong place.

Linux is a world away from being considered as a main stream gaming platform and despite the efforts of the likes of WINE, it's just not going to work for you. None of the big gaming houses are going to be developing the big games for Linux so really all these guys above saying 'If you want to game use Windows' are saying it for a really good reason.

Linux has a very small market penetration compared to Windows and OSX so games developers are not going to spend the time making games for an OS where they are not going to get the solid return on their investment. Linux is also an OpenGL platform (that unfortunately differs somewhat to the PS3 OpenGL) whereas Windows and XBOX use Direct X so it's not always easy to port over.

Is a simple money in versus money out thing and the games houses can't see the numbers to justify the money and effort.
 
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Thanks SteveOB. Very neat and concise explanation for myself ^_^

One last question; for programming (Java/C/C++/DM/e.t.c) would you recommend Linux or Windows?
 
Ease said:
Thanks SteveOB. Very neat and concise explanation for myself ^_^

One last question; for programming (Java/C/C++/DM/e.t.c) would you recommend Linux or Windows?
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I personally, from a very limited understanding of the above languages, would again suggest that Windows would be the more desired platform simple from the standpoint that there is likely to be more help for the windows based apps and the background processes involved.

Despite the massive leaps in usability and the very smooth and simple install of Ubuntu and it's bedmates the industry is behind Windows and OSX more than the other options.

Please if anyone has a more educated perspective on this jump in.
 
I have used wine for running CS:S on my rig and pretty much works just as well as a windows box (ok, so slightly less fps most of the time, although with a modified client config file, i can get something like 1800 fps on the video stress test on my aging 939 rig)... until recently where it randomly crashes out every so often and I can't for the life of me work out what's causing the problem (have used different versions of wine - both precompiled, and self compiled, with patches and without - different versions of drivers, different installs, wine registry hacks - in fact, everything that I can think of other than changing distro and everything that I can find online). So although for my purposes - up until recently - wine has been great (also used to run the Dawn of War series and some other games) it still is a reverse engineered Windows api implementation for linux, which means that it's always going to be a bit buggy and also, linux distros are so varied (different versions of this library, different versions of that, etc, etc) means that applications won't necessarily work flawlessly on all setups.

That said, when it does work, the games that I play work well enough for me (I don't have a physical windows box to game on) and I'll continue using it, but it can be a bit fiddly to get it set up right.

You might want to try out Cedega as well - which was forked from wine back when it was on a BSD license. This is a paid for service, but you can download the free trial and use that indefinitely (without updates) if it works for you.

EDIT:

Vasquez said:
theres mono for .net applications but that won't help you with games
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You can install .NET in wine via winetricks, as wine will not automagically use mono.

EDIT2:

OP - I notice from your sig that you play Crysis.... unfortuantely, I think you might have to stick with Windows if you want to play this game, as the winehq app database doesn't rate the compatibility of this game very highly :(
 
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Vasquez said:
you can as .net applications can also make calls to windows, but some things, rasterbator for example, will work natively on linux under mono.
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Don't get me wrong - mono is great, but it doesn't mean that you can just automagically run Windows .NET apps in wine - VI Client (ESX management tool) doesn't, which is a huge pain for me, as I need a virtual Windows box just to manage my ESX server :(
 
Take a look at Cedega.

You'll have to pay for it mind. But their site claims that two of the three titles you mention will work.
 
Ease said:
I might be misreading this, but that seems pretty negative. Not sure how well founded that is as my first line was "I had a lot of problems with XP" showing that I used to game with Windows, and my last line "Any advice before I switch back to Windows" shows that I've obviously thought of "playing WINDOWS games on WINDOWS" ...

I was only hoping that veteraned linuxers could show me where I was going wrong.

Okay then, dual-booting it is. However, how come so few games are designed to run on both Windows and Linux? Linux seems pretty prominent nowadays?! Also, could anyone give me a short list, or link to such a list, of games that are compatible with Linux?

Dearly sincerely.
Click to expand...

Sorry I was a little harsh there, apologises.

I've had mixed experiences with wine for gaming - but I'm not really a gamer. To give you an idea this weekend I bought BF2 and BF2 SF and Quake 4 (a bit old school yep but I like them) got them both working with wine in about 2 hours. But to be honest there is no way you should expect Linux to work (even with wine) for games designed for an alternative operating system.

Dual booting is probably your best bet, well actually probably Windows and Co-Linux is a better option if your tied to windows.
D
 
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