HOWTO: Starcraft 2 on Linux with Wine

Sathya | September 2nd, 2010 - 9:15 pm


Starcraft 2 [runs] under my Linux install with no issues. Since the game’s official release a few days ago I have been getting a good bit of traffic on those two pages – so I figured I would put together a quick HOWTO for getting Starcraft 2 working on your Linux distro of choice. The game runs under Wine 1.2 and/or CrossoverGames 9.1.

Crossover 9.1 Starcraft 2 is listed as “officially support” and as such you will find that it has an entry in the automated games installer. The only issue is that after the game has actually finished installing the StarCraft 2 process hangs around – meaning Crossover never actually knows that the game has finished installing and thusly never creates menu entries for it. Thank fully there is a simple fix for this – after Starcraft 2 has finished installing, open up your system monitor and look for any rogue Starcraft 2 processes and kill them off. After you have done this the CXGames installer will know that it has finished installing and will create the menu entries as it should.

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It worked out of the box with my current WINE install (1.2)

via Thoughts on Technology: HOWTO: Starcraft 2 on Linux with Wine.

[Today Only!] Download your Copy of Crossover for FREE!

Sathya | October 28th, 2008 - 11:59 pm


Codeweavers’ CrossOver software, which allows you to run Windows programs on your Linux and Mac machines, has a Lame Duck offer in which for today ONLY they’ve put up unlocked builds of Codeweavers’ CrossOver for Mac and Linux, and are allowing you to download them FREE OF COST.
Make the best use of this opportunity, head over to Codeweaver’s site

or use these Direct Download links
Download CrossOver Mac Pro

Download CrossOver Games Mac

Download CrossOver Linux Pro

Download CrossOver Games Linux

Remember to signup for the serial, you might receive it in a couple of days time though.

Google Chrome – Impressions, Links And Running it in Linux using Wine

Sathya | September 5th, 2008 - 1:37 am

Much like most of Google’s projects Google Chrome was launched all of a sudden yesterday. Though it was “discovered” rather “accidentally” by one a Google insider hitting the send button containing the comic-book type images of Google Chrome’s workings(excuse me, a Google guy hitting the “Send” button accidentally? Yeah,right! (Santosh agrees with me too on this one). And the hype was unprecedented. Once the hype died down and everyone got to try – the impressions were rather more or less universal, mainly being

 

  • Its frikking fast
  • Its too basic
  • Chrome aims IE userbase rather than Firefox
  • Unless addons are brought in, most Firefox users would not switch to Chrome.
  Google Chrome is basically the best of Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari and Internet Explorer all rolled into 1. You have the benefit of rendering engine – WebKit which powers Safari and Konqueror(since Webkit is a fork of KHTML which powers Konqueror), you have the equivalent of Internet Explorer’s InPrivate mode, Opera’s speed dial-like homepage, and Firefox’s addon capability(though not there at the moment).
Now what’s my take ?
Well for one, the homepage is similar yet different from Opera’s speed dial. Unlike Opera’s Speed  Dial which requires you to manually set the web pages, Chrome does so automatically based on which pages you most frequently visit –  One step better than Mozilla Firefox’s Most visited button.

Homepage

You can also search through your history pages, or open your recently closed tab pages right from the home page(Incidentally, it also shares Firefox’s shortcut for Reopening the recently closed tab – just hit Ctrl + Shift + T) and bingo!

I did like the UI – its plain, simple, and free from clutter – gives me maximum space for my web viewing purposes. Just have a look at the pic below – no irritation menu bars or huge buttons (thought the omission of stop button is unforgivable).

Chrome - Full

 

I also like the way the just 2 buttons which are placed next to address bar – these 2 allow you to configure most of Chrome’s options, and have links for openings new tabs, new windows, and the Incognito mode – which, like IE’s InPrivate mode, doesn’t store history, cookies etc of the sites visited under this mode.
Then there are also some neat touches that I like 
  • Re-sizable text boxes. – Unlike most browsers, Chrome gives you an option to resize the text boxes – perfect if you want to type some especially long sentences – say an address probably, but the default width provided was too less. Just hold and drag the handle the edge of the text box and resize
  • Popup status bar at the bottom – Again, unlike most browsers, you don’t have a fixed size status bar, eating away real estate. The status bar pops unintrusively while the page loads and then disappears. It again pops up while hovering over a link – real smooth!
  • Chrome is frikking fast – whether on pages which heavily use JavaScript or not – I suspect its because, like Opera, the WebKit rendering engine grabs and displays text first, images later – this is especially obvious if you’re using a slow connection like I am
  • Chrome seems to be localized to specific countries – For example in the Manage search engine page, Chrome offers me, in the list Choices of MSN India, Guruji, Yahoo! India and Rediff

Search Engines

  • The whole moving tab-thingy is neat! You can detach a tab from a window, and it becomes a separate window! Similarly, moving a lone window to an existing Chrome window attaches it as a tab!

Tabs Tabs detached

 

  • Chrome comes with its own task manager! You can kill any tab, or plugin. And as its been mentioned, every tab is a new process and hence even if 1 tab freezes, it doesn’t take down the entire browser – though Chrome hasn’t crashed at all for me.
Google Chrome is still in beta(the version number is 0.2.149.27) and it shows – there are several drawbacks:
  • One of the MOST CRITICAL drawback, atleast for me is the lack of RSS support – RSS is the killer, I use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks extensively, and can’t live without it. Is this Google’s way of telling we won’t give you an RSS reader, use Google Reader if you want ? Though I _do_ use Google Reader extensively, I would also prefer something like live bookmarks
  • No Addons/extensions as now, but hey, it’s still early days
  • Some pages don’t work with Chrome yet, most notably Google Analytics and Lively!
  • The save/retrieve password is bit of a miss – it suggests passwords based on domains only, and not on sub-domain, page basis
  • It may not consume memory but it _does_ eat up a LOT of CPU.

Task Manager

 

  • The options page is still simplistic, and looks like a direct rip from Firefox. And it uses IE’s proxy settings! Clcik on proxy, and it loads up the Internet settings used by IE – pushed out a little too fast?
  • And hey, WTF is it with that shitty 475kb Bootstrapper thingy huh ? 
All in all, Google Chrome has got a nice start – I will definitely be using both Chrome and Firefox – lets see what the Big G has in store for the future.
Here are some links 

 

WINE 0.9.51 Released

Sathya | December 18th, 2007 - 6:50 pm

Wine 0.9.51 was released today, with the following main changes:

  • A bunch of WinHelp improvements.
  • Better Japanese font support.
  • A ton of rpcrt4 fixes.
  • Several Alsa capture fixes.
  • Improved support for screen resolution changes.
  • Lots of bug fixes.

Binary packages are in the process of being built and it may take a few days for them to appear, but the source is available now. You can find out more about this release in the announcement. Check out the download page for packages for your distribution.

DirectX 9.0c in Linux using WINE

Sathya | November 23rd, 2007 - 8:28 pm

I found this blog giving a step-by-step tutorial on how to get Direct 9.0c installed on your Linux box. Worthy of a look I say!

Excerpts:

About DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. DirectX, then, was the generic term for all of these Direct-something APIs, and that term became the name of the collection. Over the intervening years, some of these APIs have been deprecated and replaced, so that this naming convention is no longer absolute. In fact, the X has caught on to the point that it has replaced Direct as the common part in the names of new DirectX technologies, including XAct, XInput, and so forth.

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