What does my blog title mean!?  How can the awesome GNU/LINUX be associated with that dirty dirty word, “proprietary”!?  Well you’ve heard the terms “cutting edge” and “early adopters” before – it usually means having the latest and greatest, but knowing that it’s not perfect.  I experienced that recently and the experience was a bit sobering.  My adventure involves two of the most major components of the Internet!  Well the two most important components for viewing the Internet – Firefox and Flash Player.

I’m running Fedora 9.  This RPM-based linux distribution is known as the “personal” version of Red Hat, nothing corporate about this distro.  So; on  one end it’s a great distro because it has developers that work on Red Hat feeding it patches of code.  For those that may not know, Red Hat is really popular in the business realm.  You’ll see a lot of enterprises running Red Hat.  Ubuntu recently came out their server version, but overall Red Hat has the complete package.

So; Fedora is bleeding edge when it comes to packages – F9 shipped with Firefox 3 beta (or was it release candidate 1) and Flash 9.  Since then Firefox 3.0.2 has been available in their repositories.  It took me a while to figure out this repo thing.  Why did it take so long before the latest version of a package, such as OpenOffice 3.0, would show up in the repo.  Well it’s because once it’s in the repository – you know you have a stable version that works well and good with the distro.

No Cake for Single-thread Sound Processes

I believe the audio package that’s most promising for linux is PulseAudio.  I noticed that whenever I had my music player open (Banshee), I was unable to hear audio on a web site using Flash (ex: YouTube).  It was the same case when I played World of Warcraft (thru Wine).  I came to the conclusion that my audio package is single threaded!  Single threaded!?  That is so Windows 95!  So; I began to make some inquiries on the #fedora chat room on FreeNode.  Someone suggested that I install “libflashsupport.i386″.  Well; I don’t know what it is, but guessing on the file name it looks like a library that helps other packages support Flash.  I installed it and it was gold!  I had my Banshee going and I had YouTube at the same time, I thought all my problems where gone.

After playing some YouTube files I then went to another web site and surprisingly my browser froze!  I thought to myself, “OK; this isn’t a big deal, it’s probably the first time libflashsupport is running so it probably needs to write a preference file somewhere and it’ll all be good the next go around.”  Yah!  At that point every time I went to a site that had Flash on it, no matter how complex or insignificant it was, my browser would freeze.  I have Firefox, Swiftfox, and Flock web browsers.  I tried each browser and at some point they would all crash.

So; the logical thing to do would be to remove the last component I installed – I removed “libflashsupport.i386″, but the problem still happened.  That library seemed to have fudge things up for me.  I ended up manually installing Flash 10, poking around in my package manager for anything that had the word “flash” in it.  Nothing worked.  For about two weeks or so I had so surf the web without Flash support.  At one point I realized that I can’t enjoy the web or some web sites because they use Flash in some kind of way.  We’ve become very dependent on Flash for presentation.

Factory Defaults

My last option was to revert the “factory settings” and see if that does anything.  I removed “firefox” and “flash” using my package manager and then installed them again.  That action put me back at status quo.  I’m running Flash 10 (at some point it made it into the repo) and Firefox 3.0.4.  I learned that I don’t have to have the latest and greatest.  There’s  a reason why I should wait until it’s released in the repo.  All-in-all, the repo is the “proprietary” component to a linux distribution… and I guess I can live with that.

Yeah that’s right… this is the first time I’m ever taking vacation. I’ve been working since 15 and I never really inquired about vacation time from my employers. I even worked for a company for 3 years and never asked for vacation. I’ll ask for one or two days off to do a weekend getaway, but that’s about it.

Linux Til 4 in the Mornin’

I started out last night by doing some programming work for one of my clients. I realized I needed to create a BETA of the application I created in order to work on new features while they used the live version. My problem was their web host – AT&T Shared Web Hosting. They totally suck! This is a big company trying to get some money from their clients that don’t know any better. For the most part they can rent out some linux servers and host silly little web sites, but when it comes to web application support – they totally worthless.

Well; I started doing some work for them… and I ended up spending the rest of the night troubleshooting (and lovin’ in it) linux and Wine. I turned on my Xchat and my preset server and channels started up. One of them was the Wine channel. So; I thought I’d make an inquiry and see if anyone would answer. To my surprise someone did and they helped me understand my video drivers and some other things. It was very cool.

Because I’m continuing this post almost a week after my vacation I don’t remember the rest, but overall – I was up very late, had to go to work and then finish packing when I got home.  I slept very good when we got to Florida.

The Rest of the Vacation

We enjoyed our time, but we should have planned our vacation around the grandparents having SOME time off.  We ended up watching the kids during the day and trying to go out at night.  If anyone has two kids you know that you’re tired.  So; we didn’t go out much – we forced it and we were tired nevertheless.  The first time we went out, we kept it local, and went up the street to a cafe.  I don’t recall this cafe being so cheap in quality, but they sure were this time.  We got cheap cups for our tea and coffe (no ceramics).  The live entertainment were some old 40+ musicians.

Again the rest of the vacation was pretty much, watch the kids during the day and attempt to go out at night.  It was good to see my family and friends, but we’re gonna do it a little different next year.  The cool thing, during the vacation, is my wife’s dad rode his Vulcan from Canada, with his daughter, in three days.  So; when he got down to Florida – he took me for a ride.  It was fun.

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.

Since I have tons of financial responsibilities, I cannot buy a next-gen console. I’m itchin’ for GTA IV, Grand Turismo 5, etc… I did get a chance to play GTA IV at my neighbor’s house the other day and I fell in love with it. Aw, it’s sool cool and he has a big screen TV too so it looked really nice. With touching GTA, it’s hard to go back home and NOT play it. I downloaded GTA San Andreas for my linuxbox and everything ran without a hitch via Wine.

I played some World of Warcraft last night (dinged to 46 on my priest) and was pretty tired – so I said my “gnite” to the guild members and intended to go to bed, but I found myself double-clicking on the San Andreas icon and to my surprise – I was up till 2:00 AM – AGAIN!!!?!?!?! It’s funny playing the game on my PC. I certainly had to get comfortable with the controls – it really handles different than the PS2 controller, but I did notice that I took my time with everything. I actually got more emersed into the world than I did when I played it on my console.

There are a couple of reasons why I think that I’m having so much fun with the game on my PC. First I have a 22inch wide screen, the details in the game seem much different than on console – as well as the loading time. Sitting in my chair, directly in front of my monitor is way different than sitting on my couch playing it on my little bitty TV screen. Overall; I really like the game on my PC. I’ve actually taken the time to “gang-up” with my local posse and it’s also making the ride more fun.