My one gripe about linux

[dmcfarland]

I have one gripe about Linux. It doesnt do well with games. I cant play SFC3 on my linux box. I could install WINE, but thats a mystery to me. It would be nice to see someone reverse engineer windows games and port them to linux. I dont know how hard that would be. Thats the only gripe I have.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Do install wine ... it supports 727 games and counting ...

Edit: ... actually don't install wine ... it blows

[Refalm]

I have one gripe about Linux. It doesnt do well with games. I cant play SFC3 on my linux box. I could install WINE, but thats a mystery to me. It would be nice to see someone reverse engineer windows games and port them to linux. I dont know how hard that would be. Thats the only gripe I have.

In the case of closed source games, you cannot port them. The developers have to do that themselves.
Most of the time, games aren't ported because it's either completely written in Direct3D (Half-Life 2) or the developer doesn't want to spend money on porting (Call of Duty 2).
Games like Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 4 have been ported to Linux, and I hope that will encourage other game developers to do the same.

[dmcfarland]

Thats a real bummer. It looks like Im not able to play SFC3 on linux. One day.:nothappy:

[H_TeXMeX_H]

What is SFC3 anyway ?

[dmcfarland]

StarFleet command III

What is SFC3 anyway ?

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Hmmm ... never heard of it ... and I take back what I said about wine ... wine kinda blows goats right now ... even if you get something running on it, the program's stability is shit.

[dmcfarland]

I can live without it. I could always make a small 10g windows partition to play it on. I havent gotten around to it, and I dont feel like scrapping everything so I can do it or go through a bunch of hoops. I got my linux installation working the way I want it too. I dont even want to update the kernel. I fucked my install up the last time I did it.

[mobrien_12]

Wine is not really that hard to deal with anymore.  It has a GUI control panel so you don't have to edit wine.conf.

But don't expect miracles from it.  It's hard to reverse engineer undocumented API's.  

I've gotten it to run some games, but not my favorites.

I tried to get Starsiege working on Linux.  I actually got it running but the mouse control was backwards.

[worker201]

I dont even want to update the kernel. I fucked my install up the last time I did it.

Sounds like a user problem to me.

Just a reminder to everyone that Linux is not the system you install because you want to play games.  You can play games on a Windows computer.  You install Linux because you want to learn about computers, and/or have an intoxicating amount of control, and/or run a particular open source program, and/or support the OSS/FSF/GNU thing, and/or whatever other reasons you can come up with.  Please remember that you must make sacrifices to not use the most popular operating system.  If you're not willing to make those sacrifices, you're not ready to install Linux.

[dmcfarland]

For one I dont see the benefits or updating my kernel everytime a new one come out. I can see updating a kernel when there is a major revision.

I didnt install windows to play games, thats just a side benifit. Your attitude about linux is one of the reasons why it wont be an alternative to users who are currently using windows, and wont ever get popularity among regular people. I dont sucribe to your belief.

Linux had poor printer support 6 years ago, and now its much better. I predict gaming developers will come around eventually and so will others. People with your opinion however will make linux a non-alternative to windows, and that will allow M$ to keep its monopolistic strangle hold on the computer industry.

Sounds like a user problem to me.

Just a reminder to everyone that Linux is not the system you install because you want to play games. You can play games on a Windows computer. You install Linux because you want to learn about computers, and/or have an intoxicating amount of control, and/or run a particular open source program, and/or support the OSS/FSF/GNU thing, and/or whatever other reasons you can come up with. Please remember that you must make sacrifices to not use the most popular operating system. If you're not willing to make those sacrifices, you're not ready to install Linux.

[cymon]

Fucking things up is how you learn. For instance, say you're trying to do something, I'm using Debian for an example because that's what I use, you're trying to add an APT repository. So you go and do nano sources.list and you screw it up. Big deal, that's fixable. But you can always reinstall, just don't do it again.

[dmcfarland]

Im working on getting another pc so I can use one as a test bed. I can used that one to learn off of, while I have one for my normal stuff.

[Pathos]

wine 0.9 is easy.

just:
./tools/wineinstall

then copy in the fonts

Every program I've tried works quite well with one or two quirks

Stick Soldiers 2 -need -ogl and -32 parameters
Soldat - ingame fonts are screwy, but loads up faster than in windows
Notepad2 - a menu bar doesn't work (just turn it off)
Desktop architect - crashes now and again

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Fucking things up is how you learn. For instance, say you're trying to do something, I'm using Debian for an example because that's what I use, you're trying to add an APT repository. So you go and do nano sources.list and you screw it up. Big deal, that's fixable. But you can always reinstall, just don't do it again.

I completely agree ... I've learned pretty much everything I know (about computers and many other things) by messing with stuff until I fuck it up ... and then trying to fix it ... and usually succeeding ... if not then reinstall ... but you learn a great deal in the process (I've never read a single manual ... ever ... I tried, but they're soooo fucking boring)