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The brand [GNU/Linux / Alternate OS] thread: Steam finally confirmed
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Alternately, depending on how hard-core you wanna go, Arch.
Some folks also really like Crunchbang.
Basically, my approach since Unity came out has been "anything other than standard Ubuntu."
Like, put my linux in the blender cause I is toothless.
I am not shamed by this statement.
Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!
Big lean toward Xubuntu because there is a TON of documentation for doing X, Y or Z with Ubuntu and that'll apply to Xubuntu as well.
I've been ridiculously impressed with it so far - Cinnamon is basically a bunch of people saying "what the fuck internet?" about Gnome 3, and adapting it's good ideas into a user interface that makes sense (it's very Win 7 like, which is a good thing).
It's also Ubuntu-based, if you're familiar with that paradigm.
EDIT: In other news though, what the fuck ddclient. It is just about fucking impossible to make it behave sensibly on a Linux router (i.e. hey, if you fail to update on reconnect, maybe keep trying until you succeed?).
I've also heard great things about Mint, but I haven't tried it.
This is a good choice.
#! is great but NOT as a first time distro.
The only distros where Wine's worked well for me have been Arch (my current), Crunchbang, Ubuntu and Mint. Arch has definitely been the best, and Ubuntu probably the second best, though that might be Crunchbang as well.
However, I think it might be less about the distro than it is about having a current version of wine and properly setting up your games. Even then, some games are just garbage for Linux; take for instance, much to my frustration, anything made by Zeboid (sp?) games. It's like they've purposely developed their games to be impossible to run on Linux. Even with games that work, I wouldn't expect it to be a flawless experience, though some games are nearly so.
Games that I've recently got running pretty well: Dragon Age: Origins, Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas, Skyrim and Portal.
The general recipe for success, at least for me, has been a bit of a three step process.
(I'm not sure how familiar you are with Linux/Unix, so forgive me if any of this comes off as patronizing.)
Step One: Preparation
First thing's first, get Winetricks and install it.
Next, when you're ready to install a game (or something like Steam), you'll need to wrap your head around the concept of Wineprefixes. As far as I can tell, a wineprefix is basically like a different 'copy' of your Wine drive, all its settings, etc. I have all of my Steam games in one prefix, Dragon Age and Crysis (which doesn't work for me
Step Two: Installation
While within the same terminal window in which you've set the variables (that's important), do your Wine stuff. If you want to install Steam, 'winetricks steam'. There are plenty of other Windows system 'packages' to download, but they vary from game to game. Typically, the go-to place to find what you need for a game is the WineHQ entry for said game; the easiest way to get there is to google 'winehq GAME_YOU_WANT_TO_INSTALL'.
Then, of course, install the game using Wine.
After the install, you'll probably want to navigate to the program in question and run it to see if it works. I'll use Dragon Age as an example from my own collection:
cd /home/seeks/.wine32/drive_c/Program\ Files/Dragon\ Age
wine daoloader.exe
Again, you'll want to make sure you're still in the terminal where you've set those variables earlier. You can do a simple test by either doing 'echo $VAR' (i.e., echo $WINEPREFIX) or typing 'env' to see all of the environment variables set for that shell.
If it works, awesome. If not, cry and google the problem, and take another look at the WineHQ page for the game.
Step Three: Running the program consistently
There are a number of ways to do this I'm sure, but the easiest for me is to just set up a little shell script and execute that whenever I want to run the game. The reason for this is because A) I don't like having to re-navigate my way back to whatever obscure location it's installed to and B) To save myself the effort of having to manually re-set those environment variables every time.
You'll want to put your script into a directory that's in your path variable (echo $PATH). The easiest is probably /usr/bin, or if you've added your own bin directory to the path (see spoiler below), into there.
export PATH=<PASTE HERE>:/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/bin
You might want to spawn a new shell terminal after saving before you close the one you're 'working in'. Just in case you fucked up somehow, you'll want a working terminal to undo the damage. In the newly spawned terminal, do an 'echo $PATH' again, and it should be the same except with your new directory at the end. From now on, you can just place executable scripts in there without having to muck around with root privileges.
As for what's in the script, well, here's a copy of the one I use for Dragon Age:
Change whatever you need to for yourself or your game, and don't forget to escape (backslash) those spaces.
Once you've put the script into a bin directory, mark it as executable with a 'chmod +x FILE'.
From now on, all you need to do to run the game is type that script's name from the command line. I'm sure you can also create graphical shortcuts to these scripts as well if you're the point-and-click type.
TL;DR: Watch this guy's video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=242CHuMMegc
I use Mint. It was extremely easy to get into and pretty much every Ubuntu tutorial/troubleshooting guide works for it. It's installed on my laptop and desktop, and was on my old laptop too.
Has anyone used PinguyOS? It seems like a very good choice for someone just getting into Linux. I'm actually downloading it right now, since my sister wants to try Linux out and it does almost everything she wants.
Openbox is not new user friendly.
I mean if you have to edit code in a text file in order to add newly installed programs to the menu, I'm going to say that's not new user friendly.
Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!
I'd agree with this. My recommending #! probably wasn't that great of an idea. I think to a certain extent I get caught up in a line of thought like "if you're saying you want to try Linux you must want to be doing at least *some* stuff manually so you have (or feel like you have) more control over and more interaction with the system." This is probably not the best way to approach "getting people to use Linux as a desktop OS." :rotate:
Re: #! guess I didn't spend enough time with it. To be fair I've had to mess around with .desktop files to add crap to Ubuntu's menus as well (Wine stuff mostly).
How come the Live CD of things always runs my graphics perfectly, and then when I install the whole thing explodes?
Who is preparing these things and making decisions about which drivers will be installed? Because it's incredibly disappointing.
If your card is HD3xxx or older (maybe it's H2xxx), use the radeon drivers. Trying to manually install the 9.3 drivers will hose your system because it requires an ancient versions of xorg-xserver.
HD6950.
I got it up and running, but Cinnamon is sitting there using 50% CPU just to display itself and I'm thinking "this is ridiculous", since it's rendering things jerkily.
The first time I did this I unplugged the pi and everything went back to normal. The second time, not so much.
Annoying!
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
In other news, I have inherited a number of appliances that were used for embedded vulnerability scanning when they went EOL. Their normal operation is based on a SquashFS thing (which was/is 3.0 and no longer supported by the Ubuntu file mounting thing so there's some stuff to sort out there...)
At this point I have no idea what their architecture was (I suspect it might be ARM, but who knows) hence my attempt to mount the SquashFS first to see what it's all about.
I'm not sure what to do with them...
m0n0wall device? general purpose network service server (dns, dhcp, ntp etc...)? Both? Calibre front end web ui thing... Something else?
I guess, until I know hardware specs it's hard to tell.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
80386 architecture... Interesting.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
apache,ntpd,samba,mysql,rtorrent? Anything else that common.
If you download compiz settings you can set a hot corner for the scale effect, which is basically expose.
The only thing which changed has been the addition of ntp.
But I disabled that first.
My computer is just a jerk... Maybe.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
Hopefully even if it is just Ubuntu that only means that they only provide support for Ubuntu.
Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!
Radeon driver.
I cannot stress this enough: you need to NOT install the fglrx driver.
The Live CD uses the radeon driver. It is good. Whatever get's installed blows up everything forever.
Of course if you don't have an ATI card then don't worry.
Selecting to start mint just gives me a blinky cursor. If I select the next option down, recovery or whatever I get a menu with some options that don't seem to accomplish anything in regards to the above blinky cursor.
Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!
Try Ctrl+Alt+F1 - it's likely that X is failing to start, but you should be able to login to the console.
I had the same problem when I installed initially (and filed a rather tetchy bug report noting that it was some BS).
If you can login then it's likely you need to install some type of X driver for your graphics card.
I can select recovery in Grub, and then exit recovery at the next menu and get to a desktop. Updating software now and hoping that fixes it.
Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!
Now what?
Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!
1) Remove all display drivers from your system after backing up your xorg.conf file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf)
2) Install proprietary drivers from the manufacturer (you'll have to download them first, obviously)
2-ALT) Look around for that radeon driver like elictricitylikesme was talking about and install that.
3) Restart, pray
As for what display drivers you've got installed, I couldn't say. It'll depend on what manufacturer you're using and the distro. Try 'aptitude search mesa' and see what pops up. You might not want to uninstall Mesa itself, but whatever other Mesa display drivers you've got installed, uninstall them. I think 'apt-get remove' works, but I'm not sure what the exact command is. Make sure to just uninstall it, and don't 'fully purge' it from your system in case you need to reinstall.
If you're using ATI, you should be prepared for less than amazing performance, at least in my experience. It was mostly okay, but SDL applications got way slower for some reason.