Twenty Bucks Thank You Sir May I Have Another

In my last post, I put $30 towards Heroes of Newerth in August. That left me with $20, and $20 for September, October, November, and now December. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to play any games (aside from some stolen HoN time) and I was looking for a new game. I’m a sucker for zombie movies, and I had paid quite a bit of attention to Left 4 Dead, but had always held off because the game was distributed through Valve’s Steam, a DRM-encumbered platform.

Then, in October, Codeweavers announced they were going to support Left 4 Dead 2 in their next release. I hemmed, I hawed, and I folded, on the rationale that supporting Codeweavers was good enough to qualify this purchase for the Twenty Bucks program. (For those who don’t know, Codeweavers is pretty much the commercial side of Wine, employing most of the key programmers.) I bought CrossOver Games, installed Steam, and bought the combo pack of L4D and L4D2. Then I anxiously awaited the demo and the CrossOver Games release that would support L4D2. When it arrived, the demo ran almost perfectly in regular Wine, after some initial installation issues. I played a bit with my son and was living the good life.

Then came the final release on Nov 17th. The installation was broken again, and when you could get the game to run, it would crash within a few minutes. I spent hours working on the installation, even figuring out that I could keep the crash from being a hard lock by enabling sound emulation in CrossOver Games. Codeweavers released three rapid patches, updating CrossOver games to support changes Valve was making in the game. Many CrossOver users and Wine users were experiencing different crashes, with a variety of fixes that fixed some people and not others. And we weren’t alone – hundreds of Windows users were also reporting the same kinds of crashes and the same kinds of random fixes.

I should have known, of course. I was growing suspicious when I noticed that after Steam verified and replaced files such as the client.dll file, the md5sums didn’t match the previous files or future versions. Clearly, these files were being altered somehow, and a crash would cause them to be messed up and then require a replacement from Steam. Then, in the CrossOver forums, Caron Jensen said this:
Some of the drm protection continues to check during gameplay. Usually CrossOver passes this check, but sometimes it does not. We can reproduce some of the crashes and issues at hand. The best thing you can do is file a support ticket.

 
Now, maybe it’s not the DRM, and Jensen is wrong – perhaps it is an anti-cheat mechanism or some other system. But I think it’s the DRM, because that explains much about how Valve is responding to this problem. I think this is why they are keeping almost entirely mum about the whole crashing issue, and mostly communicating in patch notes – they know if they explain why these crashes are happening there will be significant customer backlash. As long as they can pretend it’s a game problem, they can maintain the illusion that Steam DRM is transparent and prevent a PR fiasco. I’m also pretty sure at this point that they don’t know what the problem is, since there have been two patches to fix it and both simply caused more problems. Valve could probably fix this problem today, right now, by removing the DRM. But they won’t. Because to them, customers are thieves – even after they’ve paid.

Putty for Mac

$15.00

Windows Emulators for Linux

If you are not one of the pack that gravitates toward a PC running one of the flavors of Windows, or a Mac enthusiast, you are likely running a version of Linux.



Suppose you want to run software such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, or a Windows based game on your Linux computer. Is there a way to do this? The answer is most certainly yes. There are two possibilities. You could set up a separate partition, run a Dual Boot System and switch back and forth between your Linux and the Windows system. On the other hand, you could get a Windows Emulator program for Linux.

There are quite a few out there. All you need to do is do a Google search for Windows Emulators for Linux. One word of caution, not all of the emulators available on the internet will work with every Linux build. Some may be made exclusively for Red Hat, while others might only work on a Ubuntu system.

One of these is called; CrossOver Linux, and is designed by Codeweavers. This software will allow you to run productivity software, plug-ins, and games on your Linux. It integrates with Gnome, or a KDE environment. CrossOver will work on any x86 based Linux distribution and will allow you to use Windows plug-ins directly from your Linux browser. You just click on the application as you would if you were on a Windows system. It will also mesh perfectly with many browsers, such as Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera. You can open Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets within your email client.

There are two versions of CrossOver Linux, Standard, and Professional. Standard is $39.95 and runs all CrossOver supported Windows applications and plug-ins. Professional is $69.95 and includes the above as well as games, and multi-user support, among other things. You can find more information about CrossOver Linux at: CrossOver Linux
WineHQ provides another emulation solution free. Wine is free like many Linux distributions, as volunteers write some of its source code. Wine allows Linux users to keep the stability, and flexibility of a UNIX based system, and still run many of the Windows applications that many computer users have come to depend upon. As Wine is open source software, you may extend it to suit your own needs. Wine may not support all Windows applications however.

Crossover games 8.1.2 Better support for Lord of the Rings Online on Mac

A while ago I wrote a post about running Lord of the Rings Online on the mac platform using Crossover Games. This post was much visited from people that wanted to find out how to play lotro on the mac which shows that the mac crowd cannot be satisfied by the native WoW boredom.

I still do my Orc-bashing using a mac and I am very happy to say that the performance with the new version is even better. Some glitches like the floating names or the sound in videos belong to the past.

The Shire is more beautiful using a Mac...ok who threw that at me?

Putty for Mac

$15.00

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 5 Crossover

There have been several attempts down the years to make Windows unnecessary. The most audacious is doubtless ReactOS, which cuts to the heart of things and wants to be a complete Windows XP-compatible OS. Needless to say, this is no small project and will take a long time to complete; right now, I'd call it somewhere between completely useless and intriguingly experimental. (It runs Skype, at least.) I'm also concerned that if they ever do get it anywhere near useful completion, Microsoft will stomp on it hard.

That's certainly the high road. But how necessary is it to clone the whole damned OS? A Windows app, after all, is just a block of x86 machine code that makes calls into one or more APIs. If you can clone the APIs in an acceptably clean-room manner, you don't need to duplicate the entire architecture, kernel and all.

And that brings us to one of the oldest and oddest ongoing projects in open-source computing: Wine, which dates back to 1993, and provides a compatibility layer consisting of clean-room DLLs implementing the Win32 APIs, plus whatever magic is necessary to make the deeper host OS machinery look like Windows to the app. This is easier than implementing a whole OS, with the further advantage that if done properly, Wine can act as a Windows compatibility layer over several Unix-like OSes, rather than only Linux. Currently, Wine can operate over Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD Unix, and x86 Solaris.

After 16 years of dogged work, Wine actually works pretty well. Part of its success is due to a remarkable cooperation between the Wine project and a commercial software house in St. Paul named Codeweavers. Codeweavers sells a $40 deployment/management utility for Wine called Crossover, which basically makes Wine noob-friendly. (Naked Wine is pretty stark.) Codeweavers also tweaks Wine itself to improve app compatibility, and contributes those tweaks back to the Wine project under LGPL. Some financial support is also provided to the otherwise volunteer-based Wine project. Wine's maintainer, Alexandre Julliard, is an employee of Codeweavers, where he works full-time on Wine development.

Codeweavers focuses mostly on big-market apps like Microsoft Office, and doesn't officially support apps beyond a relatively short list of "gold" software. However, I've found that a great many Windows apps install and run just fine under Crossover whether they're on the list or not. InDesign 2.0 is listed on the site as "known not to work" but apart from a minor display glitch, it seems to work as always. (I haven't tested it deeply so far.) Most Microsoft apps work beautifully (especially older ones) and I've been using Office 2000 and Visio 2000 under it without incident since last fall.
Wine implements a sort of runtime environment emulation for Windows called a "bottle." More than one bottle may be created on a single host OS, and each bottle has its own emulated C: drive and Registry. By giving each Windows app its own bottle under Wine, apps are prevented from interfering with one another in the dreaded "DLL Hell" effect. Because it's not a VM, the performance hit for running Wine/Crossover is very small, and most important, you do not need to have a legal copy of Windows running in the VM. On the other hand, a bottle looks enough like Windows to be infectable by Windows malware, though one bottle probably can't infect other bottles on a Linux system, or the underlying system itself. (From what I've heard, the low-level system tricks played by many malware packages keep them from running or at least running completely.) There are known conflicts between WGA and Wine, so don't install WGA if you can avoid it.

Bottom line: If Wine supports all the Windows apps you absolutely must use, you do not need Windows at all. I haven't tested all the Windows packages that I use here (next up is MapPoint 2004) but for Office and Visio 2000 it's been nothing short of magical, and I'm guessing InDesign will come along eventually. In a mature software market, time works in our favor: One by one, existing apps will be installable under Wine, and each time that happens, Windows slips a little bit deeper beneath the waters of irrelevance.

CrossOver Games 8.1.2 for MAC OS X released

CrossOver Games... Now gamers can play the games they want, on whatever platform they want! With CrossOver Games, you can run many popular Windows games on your Intel OS X Mac or Linux PC. Whatever your tastes — first-person shooters, fantasy, strategy, MMORPGs — CrossOver Games provides the capability to run many popular games titles. CrossOver comes with an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing your games simple and fast. Once installed, your game integrates seamlessly into your Desktop. Just click and run! Best of all, you do it all easily and affordably, without needing a Microsoft operating system license.

CrossOver Games is built on the latest versions of Wine, based on contributions from both CodeWeavers and the open-source Wine community, and then lovingly hand-crafted by Stefan Dösinger, our very own Wine/Games connoisseur. Unlike other CrossOver products, which are aimed primarily at office productivity applications (and hence maximum stability), CrossOver Games aims to bring you the latest, greatest, bleeding edge improvements in Wine technology. This means that the newest games run faster and better under CrossOver than under other versions of CrossOver, or other version of free Wine, for that matter. You want to run your Mom's knitting software? Maybe you should look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you need better framerates on Linux or Mac so you can frag your buddies: check out CrossOver Games!




Version 8.1.2:
• Fixed installation of Left 4 Dead 2 via Steam on the Mac.



Intel Required
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Putty for Mac

$15.00