Some progress on my attempt to use World of Warcraft on Ubuntu Linux has been made – in fact, with enough tweaking I’ve managed to get a decent frame rate and eliminate the icon artifacts I was getting. Most of the tweaks involved editing the Config.wtf file World of Warcraft store it’s settings in.
This screenshot was taken under Ubuntu Linux 7.10, standing a little ways outside of Orgrimmar. It’s hard to see at this size, but the frame rate is 21fps. Up top where the location name appears there is some icons from the top toolbar in Gnome flickering through.
Next up is Adobe Photoshop CS2. While the program installed and appeared to run – I initially messed up with the installers – reloading the CD got me the Setup.exe I needed. Licensing is still a pain with this program. It will not connect over the Internet to Adobe’s servers, and the activate by telephone option exits with an error stating there is not enough disk space. (There is)
I wiped out the installation and reinstalled, opting for the 30 day trial option. At least I can use it for a month while I figure out how to get the appropriate registry keys recognized. There is no point calling Adobe for this since they do not support Linux.
Multitrack Studio for Windows is a program I’ve used from time to time to record and mix music ideas. There are other programs for Linux available, I just wanted to see if it would work. It does, although stopping playback can cause it to stutter into an audio loop and crash with a buffer underrun error more often than not.
Although iTunes works under Linux with Wine, I was unhappy with the performance – I don’t have an iPod so I was willing to try a program which was organized in the same manner, but native for Linux. I was half figuring I might need to write one, then I found Banshee. This program does it all, and it does it very nicely. It’s designed for Gnome, and Ubuntu users can install it right from the Synaptic Package Manager.
I will document the list of tweaks I did to World of Warcraft when I have time, and will update on the status of the Photoshop licensing if I get it resolved.
As I’ve mentioned in previous articles (Linux, Ubuntu and Me; Ubuntu, Stage One; and Ubuntu, Stage Two) my network is wireless using a USB dongle that I insist on keeping in the set up.
I have several reasons for this: all my upgrade slots are filled (AGP has video card, PCI has Soundblaster Live! and WinTV cards) and running cables would require a large amount of cat-5 wiring strung across several doorways, ceilings and down a flight of stairs. Ugly, time consuming and annoying to say the least. The current dongle I have works excellent (better than my old PCI card in fact) and came at a decent price.
The catch is that the Linux drivers for the RTL8187 chipset don’t include the B model. It’s functionally compatible, just not recognized by the driver. Lucky for me, someone did some correspondence with RealTek and found out what codes to enter into the driver to correct this. Furthermore they provided him with the source code, allowing him to make the appropriate changes. The source package is freely available for download.
Compiling the drivers was simple – as per RealTek’s README included in the files, the only caveat I encountered was that WPA encryption doesn’t seem to work (WEP 64 and 128 do) and it doesn’t automatically load on startup. I live in the suburbs and can get away with 128 bit encryption, so I can compromise on this point. By adding pre-up /{path to drivers}/wlan0up to /etc/network/interfaces just before the first wlan0 line (iface wlan0 inet dhcp on my system) it works perfectly. I reboot, and it just connects. Voila!
As a footnote, I’d like to mention that all my previous posts on this matter where made on my Windows XP laptop (which has to stay that way since it’s used at / owned by work) but this is the first post made with my newly configured Ubuntu system.
I made some more progress on a few fronts with this system last night. I made a few tweaks to the X11 configuration to enable direct rendering for my Radeon 9200 video card, thus adding a slight performance boost, as well as some edits to the World of Warcraft Config.wtf to boost audio and video performance. The audio still has a minor stutter, but is vastly improved and the frame-rates while outdoors is nearly acceptable – meanwhile it outperforms the Windows environment while indoors which I found interesting.
Further tweaks will need to be made to prevent some artifacts that appear with the UI icons, as well as the overall frame-rate. In order to fix the audio issue, I believe I will need to increase the priority of the Wine process to accommodate the extra layer of software processing required to output to the ALSA drivers. I’m holding out on too many more video modifications until I see what effect this has on overall performance.
Photoshop is at this writing still inoperable. Loading the installer failed to accomplish what I hoped as CS2 is using the Microsoft MSI format – I have since learned that Wine does in fact support this, if I pass the file to msiexec, which I hope to try this evening.
For a kicks, I tried installing a few common programs (that do not use MSI installers) to see the results. MSN Live Messenger installs, loads, and gets properly embedded into the task bar – however, I failed to get it to display the login / contact window thus negating any ability to actually use the program.
iTunes threw several errors and during the installation of the related QuickTime software blacked-out the screen several times. I was able to load and play a wave file through it, albeit the interface was laggy, leaving me to overall determine that Wine is capable of running this – as long as you don’t need iPod support. (I don’t)
My favorite text editor, Crimson editor, installed but fails to operate.
All three of these programs have perfectly usable and nearly identical alternatives on Linux so these where merely tests performed in vain for curiosity’s sake.
On the agenda for this evening is making the wireless network work without dropping to the command line every time I reboot, attempting to run the MSI installer for Photoshop, and increasing the process priority for Wine – particularly while runing World of Warcraft.
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