#linux wine

quick question for any linux users

WINE on Linux can be a little interesting to get right at first. The Vulkan libraries have made it possible to a lot of DirectX-type stuff that couldn’t be emulated with OpenGL. And with Steam pushing developers to have more inclusion of Linux, that pushed a wave of gaming on Linux, and I think Lutris, a front-end for a bit of gaming and emulators, I think another wave is upon us.

I’m running Linux Mint 19.1 with an nVidia card and that leads to interesting times if you also want to run CUDA. My best answer is to use the Graphics PPAs.

Well hello folks I am back at the helm in the world of Linux Life.  So as I explained in the last episode my main 1TB hard drive died so I have had to resort to use my 120GB SSD as my main drive.  Well so far I must admit it is working pretty well.

Admittedly in time I may switch up to a larger SSD say 480GB as there is no way I can afford a large SSD of over 1TB as the price is still silly.  Now I understand the technologies of getting above Quad Level Cells is not easy.

This 120GB is a TLC drive (Triple Level Cell) and the larger the cells the shorter lifespan the drives have.  So to get the drives to have longer life cycles they are using cells in certain configurations so that they are not always in use, setting aside areas to be unused until certain cells failure rate hits a certain threshold.

So a 1TB SSD may have 1.5TB worth of cells but some are held back until needed to extend lifespan of the drives due to the problems with Non Volatile Memory used in these drives.

Anyway enough technical data discussion.  I actually have sitting on my other desk in the room an i7 sitting on a motherboard with a buggered BIOS.  I also have 32GB of DDR3 memory for it however I don’t have a case or PSU to set it up as a system.  I may have to get another motherboard if I can’t figure how to sort out the BIOS issue.

However it would be nice to have another i7 system running to be used as a test bench or an alternative backup system to be used for various projects.  As nice it is to have this laptop I use and I have listed it’s shortfalls previously.

If I can get this i7 main motherboard up in a desktop case I gain the advantage of being able to add or remove components in order to get a better system.  Which is something I can’t do with a laptop.

However funds being what they are I doubt I will be getting this project off the ground any time soon.  As I stated in the past I have a NVIDIA GT710 I can use, I have a few 1TB 3.5” drives about the place I can use.  I have a TP-Link PCI Express 2x card for Wi-fi.  I’m just missing a case and PSU then I can get a machine up and running.

By the way this is not a request for help before anyone gets worried.  I am just stating for the record what I do and don’t have at this time.  So lets get that straight off the bat.

Not against donations if people are willing but I do not expect anyone to supply me with anything.  Lets get that on record.  I am not begging/coercing anyone for parts, money etc.

So what have I been playing with in Antergos since we were last here.  Well I have been still playing with MAME got a few more ROMs working and running.  Obviously that’s the thing with MAME certain ROMs that worked for years hae been re-dumped due to discoveries that certain files were wrong.

Which is good as it means you are getting the true experience but equally frustrating when you have to new set that work.  However, that has always been the case with MAME so I really should be used to it.  However even a lot of the established ROMs have been redone and that’s when it becomes annoying.

I have also been noodling around with Wine.  I have been looking into podcasting again and was recommended a program to assist with removing certain audio anomalies.  The program in question was Izotope RX.  Well first I tried the current released version which is RX6.  No matter what I did it would install fine but upon trying to run it Wine would give an Application Error.

I put a query up on WineHQ forums and they were more concerned I did not use CODE tags in my initial post than the problem at hand.  I was recommended to setup a Wineprefix for it but it did not help in the slightest.  

After a bit of a run around I managed to get RX5 (the previous version) working fine with Wine so I may get back to podcasting if I can come up with a script or an idea worth broadcasting.

When I was looking at Winetricks to sort out the Wineprefix for the Izotope program.  I noticed you could install certain applications using it.  So I was looking through the list when I noticed that Steam was in the list.  So for the hell of it installed it.

Sure enough it worked and now I have access to my whole library of Steam games not just the ones available in the Linux version of Steam.  I have 160+ games in my Steam library but under the Linux Steam version only 63 are available as they have Linux conversions.

Sure enough it works an I tried Blur, Burnout Paradise and Pac-man Championship Edition 2.  All work but obviously due to limited SSD space I had to remove Burnout Paradise.  I would like to have seen if Castlevania: Lords of Shadows worked but it needs 15GB of disk space to install so that isn’t going to happen while using a 120GB drive.  Sheer space limitations stops me running it.

So I can access games I couldn’t before including Bombtag so I can now play the game without having a Windows partition with my girls.  So at the moment I am quite happy RX6 didn’t work otherwise I would not have gone playing with Winetricks.

In time I may try more Windows games if I can get a larger drive.