So it would seem triple-booting Vista, XP, and Ubuntu isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. If you’re not a technologically-oriented person (or if you get bored after reading three paragraphs), you’d better give this post a wide berth. Also note that this is not really a tutorial. I simply stumbled through this situation all on my own and take no responsibility for the pain you might feel when you nuke your computer and hit your head repeatedly on the keyboard because you did what I did.
All right, so, because I’m a geek, I decided to take it upon myself to put not one, not two, but three operating systems on my laptop. It started when I got a new hard drive and completely wiped all the Dell crap off of it so I could install Vista and Ubuntu. I couldn’t do this before because I had some weird partitioning going on with my hard drive due to the presence of Dell MediaDirect. As such, I couldn’t make enough partitions (one primary for the OS and one extended/logical for swap space) to put Linux on. After nuking MediaDirect, I was able to get things started. This was easy. Vista was already installed, so all I had to do was make some space and pop in the Ubuntu Live CD. It installed GRUB (the Linux bootloader), which automatically picked up Vista and let me boot to it just fine.
Continue reading ‘Nothing is ever easy’
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The inability (or unwillingness) of some game developers to fully implement compatibility with Windows Vista is driving me crazy. The latest fiasco? Bethesda Softworks and their game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Yes, I know I wrote a lovely review of the game a little while back, and let it be known that I still love the game. Amazingly, it works perfectly fine on Vista. I’ve had no problems…until now.
It all started when I discovered some downloadable content for Oblivion. There were a few interesting things there, most of them for fairly cheap, so I decided to buy a few of the content packs. I paid and downloaded the install files only to find out that they all produced an error message and quit. Confused, I looked around the Bethesda Softworks support forum for an answer. It wasn’t a good one. Apparently, none of the downloadable content packs from OblivionDownloads.com will install on Windows Vista. There was a note on the page before I confirmed my payment, but it appeared to mention only 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista. Too late did I realize it meant 64-bit Windows XP and any version of Vista. So I’m out $6.76 and there are four useless installers sitting on my computer, waiting for the day that Bethesda pulls its head out of the ground and fully supports both Oblivion and its addons on Vista.
I mean, why on Earth would those installers not work? It’s maddening. Not the loss of seven bucks, but rather that some game developers still aren’t catering to the Vista portion of their consumer base. Sure, there are a lot of Vista-ready games, but those are generally developed by companies close to Microsoft (Halo 2 and Shadowrun, anyone?) or on the bleeding edge. I know Oblivion is a fairly old game. I know that patching it won’t magically make things better. But considering that Oblivion works on Vista (at least in my case) why shouldn’t the addon packs?
The site says something about the “secure downloader” for the content packs not working with Vista, but that doesn’t make any sense. The forums are no help, either. They just resort to telling people that Bethesda doesn’t support Oblivion on Vista and that downloadable content won’t work. No work arounds, no hints as to when a fix might be in order, no help at all. I guess this means I won’t be putting shiny armor on my horse any time soon…
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Web browsers are interesting things. Most people don’t even care which they use. If you have Windows, you use Internet Explorer. If you have a Mac, you use Safari. If you’re smart, you use Firefox. But the operating system barriers have been slowly breaking down. Internet Explorer can be installed on Mac OS, although the Mac version is outdated and fairly crappy. Now, however, you can install Safari, the formerly Mac-only browser, on Windows. Granted, it’s only a beta version (more like an alpha, as I’ll later explain), but you can still try it out if you so like.
Continue reading ‘A Safari for the rest of us’
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In a previous post, I mentioned how I was trying out Windows computer games in Ubuntu Linux using Wine. That post left off with me installing a game from Steam, specifically Half Life 2: Lost Coast. How did it turn out? Rather badly, actually. I haven’t had too much time to figure out the problem, but I have a strong suspicion that it has to do with my ATI graphics card, which has had a number of compatibility problems with various Linux distributions, especially Ubuntu. I won’t bother going into the little details, but I’m not going to call out Wine or Linux because one game won’t work.
Further testing is definitely in order. But I do know one thing for sure: 3D acceleration is likely to give you problems if you have to use proprietary drivers for your graphics card. I have a feeling that’s my problem, but I guess I’ll see when I mess around with it more.
Also, this is my 100th post on this blog! Woohoo! Okay, anyways…
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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.
Continue reading ‘Linux and Wine’
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