The Mad Rants of a Raving Genius

Now, I don’t advocate mixing operating systems and alcoholic beverages (who knows what you might compile), but if you’re a die-hard gamer like me, you might be interested in the non-alcoholic Wine for Linux. It claims not to be an emulator, but it pretends to be Windows enough to be pretty useful. Basically, it’s a Windows compatibility layer, allowing you to run Windows applications in Linux. It’s not perfect, of course, but it actually works fairly well for running games in Linux, which should hearten any gamer stuck with making do with Unreal Tournament on Linux (I know there are other games, but even so, the selection is pretty limited). However, all is not perfect with Wine, as I’ve found.

I’m currently running Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on an external hard drive attached to my Dell laptop. I would dual-boot with Ubuntu actually on the internal hard drive, but due to the strange configuration of this laptop, I don’t have enough partitions to install Ubuntu and it’s swap space. Anyways, it’s now installed on the external hard drive, which works fine. It’s just not as portable as I’d like. Well, since there’s so much room allocated to the Ubuntu install, I decided to try out installing some games using Wine.

Installing Wine was easy enough through the Synaptic package manager included with Ubuntu, although the version of Wine I was able to get was a bit outdated compared to the latest version on the WineHQ website (by a few months), but I haven’t noticed anything too lacking with the older version. Anyways, after installation, I was able to configure things including the look of Wine windows and various drivers. After all that was fixed up, I tried installing some games.

My first try was Call of Duty. It’s not exactly a new game, but it’s not that old, either. In order to install from the CD, I had to right-click on the main installation file and open it using the “wine” command, so the installer would know to use Wine. Installation went great until I needed to insert the second CD. Ubuntu wouldn’t let me eject the first CD! It kept saying the device was in use so it wouldn’t eject. Never had that problem in Windows. Anyways, since I couldn’t get the second CD in, I had to ditch the installation. Kind of annoying, but oh well. If I really wanted to play CoD that badly, I’d run it on Windows.

Not to be one to give up that easily, I decided to go for a non-CD installation. That entailed installing something from Steam, the Valve content delivery system, which provides such games as Half-Life and Counter-Strike. Installing Steam through Wine was fairly easy, but I couldn’t just right-click on the Steam installation file and run with Wine. Instead I had to go through the Wine File manager (reminiscent of Windows 3.11) and start it from there. Everything went fine until Steam started up and asked me for my username and password. Trouble was, I couldn’t see any text at all. I even managed to muddle through putting in everything and starting Steam all the way up, but no text ever appeared. That, quite simply, was a problem. A quick Google search turned up a simple solution: I simply needed to copy the Tahoma font file (tahoma.ttf, if anyone’s wondering) to the Windows directory of my virtual C drive in Wine (that’s ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts, where ~ is your home directory).

After copying the font file, Steam worked like a dream. Unfortunately, I’m still in the midst of downloading the game. And here I thought I was supposed to have a fast Internet connection. Anyways, once I install and run the game, I’ll be sure to write another post detailing how that goes.