About two plus weeks ago my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card died on me. It was a sad sad day in Fergyville. The mayor of town gave a heart-filled eulogy and instructed all residences to put their flags at half mast. I found a spare video card and saw it had a VGA port. So; I then ordered a DVI (f) to VGA (m) adapter from Cables for Less and waited another couple days for it to arrive. When it finally arrived, low and behold my spare video card was actually an AGP card and my motherboard only has PCI Express slots. I went spiraling down into a very deep depression (for about 2 minutes). I’ve been without my Linux partition for roughly two weeks and it was driving me insane.

When all hope was lost, I accidentally realized that my motherboard has an on-board video port. How could I have missed that!? I’ve disregarded on-board video for so long that I no longer see them when working on my computer. I was happy to see it, but when I loaded my Linux partition, I didn’t get nice, clear graphics. Instead I got fuzzy and impossible to work with X session.

It Works on… Windows!?

It’s kind of hard for me to admit this, but the on-board video DOES work in my Vista partition. I installed the drivers from the motherboard CD and to my surprise I was able to play Battlefield 2 (low specs though). How can this be… Windows should NEVER trump Linux… that’s just LAW!

Fedora 12, My Hero!

I spent the next couple of days on IRC and countless search results on how to fix this matter. Most of the responses were to try out Fedora 12 and see if it works then. I was very reluctant to do that. I finally got Fedora 11 all tweaked out the way I wanted and Linux distros really aren’t the best thing to do an upgrade on. It’s always best to do a clean install. I wasn’t ready to do that again. Someone suggested I at least try the Fedora 12 LiveCD. I thought, “yeah, that should be too difficult to do.”

I downloaded the 600+MB file within a matter of minutes and loaded it onto a USB drive. To my surprise, X worked. I immediately installed XChat and told my friends on #fedora-social. So; I then backed up my home directory and preceded to install a fresh copy of Fedora 12.

Always Learning

One of the greatest benefits to running Linux full-time is the learning aspect of it. I’m so used to doing a full DVD install of the distro that I take for granted what’s NOT installed if I was to scale back a bit. For example, I did a LiveCD install. It went fairly quick, but then I realized that some of the apps I’m used to having weren’t installed. No worries, just YUM the mess out of the terminal and I’m back in business. What I’ve learned this go around are the names of these vital GUI applications I’ve become dependent on. Damn I love Linux!

I’ve been using the Hulu.com services from time to time to catch up on shows I’ve missed. I don’t have cable so this is a great alternative for me. I remember hearing about Hulu Desktop on a podcast a while back, but I totally forgot about it. Well, earlier this week a friend on Twitter mentioned it and that sparked the tech-geek in me to try and install it. Lucky for me, they have an RPM and a DEB installer. For you hardcore-Linux enthusiasts or masochists, I’m not sure if they have source files available.

Installing Hulu Desktop

I’m using Fedora (of course, it’s the distro of champions) so I chose the RPM route. It was very easy, simply download the RPM file and double-click it. It’ll check for dependencies and install what’s needed.

Flash Hiccup

When the program starts for the first time, it told me it couldn’t locate the Flash plugin. To my surprise, the error message was very helpful. It stated

If you do not have it installed, please modify ~/.huludesktop with the correct location
of libflashplayer.so.

Unless I’m mistaken, under normal circumstances I usually point the apps to the “/usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so” file. Well when I tried that, it didn’t work. After a couple of minutes of searching, I saw that the “nswrapper” version is what the app was looking for. I did a locate and copied and pasted the location to that nswrapper file.

$ locate libflashplayer.so

My Overall Impression

In the end, it was a pretty straight-forward installation and the error messages are actually helpful. I like the application a lot. The interface is slick and while your putsying around different show listings the show that you’re currently watching is still playing in the upper left corner. That’s sweet. I think I can get better video quality if my nVidia drivers worked properly. Let’s hope Fedora 12 fixes that issue.  Now I just have to move my desktop machine downstairs and hook it up to my television set and we’re off to the races!

I fought to find the answer to this question for weeks. I almost pulled the plug on my Vista adventure, to revert back to Windows XP, in order to play Battlefield 2.  I finally found the answer, there’s a secret v1.5 beta 2 patch being hosted on the mirrored sites, which has Windows Vista support.

• FileFront (BF2_Patch_1.50.exe, 1.27 GB)

Backstory

I am running Windows Vista: Home Premium (32-bit) with a nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card.  My original problem was I’d double-click on the BF2 icon and my screen would go black (as if it’s loading the game), but then exit to the desktop. I was sorely stuck… in Linux you can run the program in Terminal and if there’s an error it’ll print it out there so you can know exactly what’s causing the issue.  In windows, I don’t know how to do that. If I run it in the command prompt, I don’t get any print outs.

I did numerous Google-searches and most of them took me to forums where people talked about removing the annoying User Account Control (UAC) feature within Vista.  Other suggestions were to change the shortcut properties to run the program in a “Windows XP Service Pack 2″ compatibility mode, some even suggested changing your screen resolution, in order for the game to at least load and then switching it back.  None of these simple suggestions worked for me.

At my whims-end, I figured, at this point only a software patch could fix this problem.  I only found the official v1.41 patch on the official sites and I accidently came across a beta patch on a mirrored site.  I downloaded it, patched the game, and now I’m happily running Battlefield 2 on my Windows Vista 32-bit system.

You like my mathematical equation for dead playtime with World of Warcraft on a linuxbox?  When I first installed Fedora 8, I ran Wine 0.9[something] with nVidia’s proprietary drivers.  I had no problem playing World of Warcraft.  I did notice something though – that every time there was a kernel update – when I restarted my Xserver that things would be kind of haywire.  I would normally have to reinstall the video driver and then I’ll be back to status quo.  So; now I’m a bit more seasoned with linux and open source or non-proprietary software means a little more to me than before – and getting that to work with WoW has proved to be quite difficult.

The Free-be Process

First I’m going to talk about the natural progression of a user migrating from the “Windows/Mac” world into this vast ocean of the “linux” world.  I heard on a podcast that most folks come into the linux world for various reasons, but the consistent reason is for the FREE software.  It’s awesome NOT having to pay anything anymore.  As for me, I’ve been used to not paying for software for a very long time… I’m a digital pirate.  There; I’ve come out of the closet (on that issue, I’m really a heterosexual).  I haven’t paid for software in over 10+ years.  But over the past couple years my conscience has gotten the best of me and my escape from the underground is linux.

So; the natural progress is people want free software, later on when they become familiar with all this software – they are exposed to GNU and the fight between proprietary and non-proprietary software.  And that is where I am, my friend.  I wish to run linux with no proprietary software – well except for the NEEDED ones like Flash, etc.  If you’re running open source/non-proprietary software – you will have less complications as the kernel and operating system progresses and improves.

Getting WoW Installed

Ok; back to my dilemma at hand.  I installed Fedora 9 (F9) and I was stoked to see that Wine released their stable version, which is “one point oh” (1.0).  It’s a great milestone to release a 1.0 version and Wine has been in works for years.  I was happy to see that F9 had this in their repos.  I installed it and immediately installed World of Warcraft.  I had no problems with it.  I also installed the kmod-livna drivers for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card.  It worked because I was able to apply “Desktop Effects” and get the whole cube and wobbly windows effect.  But when I try to run WoW nothing would happen.  So; I ran the command in my terminal to see what the error messages were and it seemed to have not registered something with the Wine/Windows Registry.

I’m not certain which component is the culprit, but so far I can’t install any of my games using Wine 1.0.  GTA: San Andreas, Battlefield 2, etc.  I always get some freaky error and I usually just move on to other things I have to do.  So; I’ll try and keep a log of what happens, but this is my situation at the time.  I’ve done some Google searches and WIne forum searches, but no luck yet.