FergyTech

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.

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So last night I finally decided to upgrade my home desktop from Fedora 8: Werewolf (best name ever) to Fedora 9: Sulphur. My main reasoning was to get Banshee 1.0 installed and have a happier podcasting life. Lukily for me I have a seperate partition to store my data and I backed up my /home directory. Not all the files just the ones I thought were important, which included most of the [dot][files/folders].

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I’m having a hard time understanding what makes Livna so hot, in the linux-world.  To my understanding they are better than getting videocard drivers from nVidia’s web site because they are opensource and when you install the latest kernel update - your card won’t go bonk!? on you.  As for me, I’ve been using nVidia’s propriatory drivers because that’s the only way I get World of Warcraft or any other video game to work.

The only issue that I have to deal with right now IS, when my kernel is updated.  I have to run through the Xserver configuration.  Once I get into my desktop, I would then switch back to my propriatory drivers or CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE back out to a full shell environment to reinstall them.  It is a bit of a hassle, but I have yet to jump on the band wagon of Livna.

A GUI is a very complex piece of software and there could be any number of reasons why it would lock up on you. If you need to kill your x server and then restart it, here are some tips:

Killing X server via Command

Type “init 3″ in your terminal and that should kill x server.  If it doesn’t find the command, then switch to the root user by typing “su -” (you will need to know the root password).

Restarting X server

Simply use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. Some times this will help, but this combination will explicitly restart the X server.

Working with a Console

If the previous keyboard combination did not work then try CTRL+ALT+F1. This will not kill X server, it will simply open a full screen console. I believe Red Hat and Fedora Core have F1-F6 as options. If you want to switch back to a GUI environment use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+F7.

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