So I have a computer that a friend's dad built, since he does things like build computers and programming and such. He's a huge Linux buff, so OpenSuse is the primary and default operating system. There's... what is it, partitions? with other operating systems, including Windows 7, but since he doesn't use them he didn't put as much effort into making sure they work. It lets me use the web, art programs like GIMP, and some other things. I've been missing the Windows games I used to play, before my laptop died, so I decided to try them out on this computer. Something's screwed up, so sound doesn't work at all. Sad face. I /like/ the music in Civ IV, and playing without just doesn't seem worth it. Figuring out what's wrong with the sound is way over my technological expertise (sure it's probably a driver, but which one? how do I figure it out? No clue). I'm in a socially anxious funk and I don't want to contact him to ask for help, because it's for a game, and I'm still unemployed. He's not my dad, so he wouldn't be all "so found a job yet?" but the parental disapproval looms. Regardless, I know that Wine is a thing that lets non-Windows computers try to run .exe, YMMV. So I figured out where the installed games were, then switched over to Linux to try them. I don't really know what I'm doing with Wine, but it seemed easy enough. Right click on the application, open with Wine. Civ opened much more slowly than on the Windows side, but it did open. I reveled in that beautiful menu screen music for a minute, then made a game with default randomized settings to test how the game itself played. Spoiler: The loading screen informed me I was being too optimistic. From what I can tell, this computer doesn't know what it's doing in Wine either. I mean, it did run. It's just missing some things. Spoiler: Like the ground. I checked in options and adjusted the graphics settings as low as I could, and checked off a few other things to simplify what the computer needed to do. Spoiler: Technically an improvement. At least more of the objects are visible. The game might be playable like this. Technically. I'll get around to emailing him in a day or two, because the other two games I tried installing in the Windows worked fine, besides the sound problem, but wouldn't even open on the Linux side. Wine crashed and cried. I made this thread so I could show the beautiful images of villagers and scouts floating in space.
In my experience: Wine is way more trouble than it's worth. There's a bunch of caveats and I gave up on it years ago. That ground rendering issue is actually something I've seen on some older hardware in general on other games.
A friend of a friend has been trying to get Undertale to play on their Linux computer, so I said I'd give a shot at getting it to run in Wine. Of course, I have the Steam version, so first I had to get Steam running. That was the easy part! Dig through my folders, find Steam.exe, and right click to run with Wine. It logged in for me and everything. It just had the slight problem of not having any text on the screen at all. (Quick google search leads me to believe that I may not have the font installed.) After I searched through my folders for where I've got Undertale installed, it only took a few seconds of the Wine indicator bouncing to the opening screen appear! And success, I now know how to play Undertale through Wine. Steam is a headache, but Undertale's a simple enough game that I haven't had any problems yet.
Aha! Even better, I don't have to run Steam through Wine! If I run the Linux version of Steam, and just use Wine to open Undertale, it works! :D :D :D
Not Wine stuff, but Linux newb stuff! I successfully used the terminal to install the drivers for my printer! I learned all kinds of exciting things. Like the fact that you have to type /home/name/Downloads/filename in order for the commands to know what the fuck they're doing. My actually-computer-savvy roommate listened to my excited story and said "oh, right, i forget you don't really know stuff like DOS..." so maybe that's DOS things and not linux things. but the point is that I installed it and did the test print and now I can scan my doodles without needing to switch to the fucking Windows partition every god damn time. eta NEVER MIND i can PRINT things from the computer with it but it doesn't seem to recognize the scanner and i can't seem to find the control suite program thing to select the scan option in the computer???? god i just can't escape windows can i
Neat! Now for me, I started with computers in the age when typing things at them was just what you did, for everything. So it's ingrained.
#jealous #so jealous i started with like windows 95 and most of the time i spent on the computer, i spent messing around in paint and encarta and the spiderman comic maker? so uh. not exactly back-end computer workings. T_T
@swirlingflight CodeAcademy has a course on the command line, which may help if you want to understand it better!
And before long you'll be doing nasty things like for I in `ls -l | tail +2 | cut -f4 -d' ' | sort | uniq`; do id $I | cut -f4 -d= | tr ',' '\n' | sed -e "s/^/$I: /"; done (which is printing every group id for every user that has a file in the current directory. Probably pointless but hey, ugly shell.)
They certainly are much better than the alternative. Configuration management and automation tools are even more awesome, even though they can be annoying at times. Only become useful if you have more than a handful of computers, though.
Five months later, have I emailed him? NOPE. Anxiety is a beautiful thing. It helps that I found other games to obsess over anyway.
