Blog.amhill

Pants optional.

Posts Tagged tutorials

Linux FTW: Using Virtualbox with an Existing Windows Partition

Jan 27

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 21 Comments

The recursion might blow your mind.

Last week, a friend of mine needed me to do an audio file conversion, but the app that I use is installed on my windows partition. I really don’t ever boot into Windows unless I have a good reason for it — I’m much happier tooling around in Linux — there’s just something satisfying and comfortable about being able to pop open a shell at any time.

Anyways – it got me thinking: I’ve booted into a Windows XP image,  why can’t I use VirtualBox to boot from a whole partition? Surely that is possible…

Tonight I finally got to play with it. And as you can see from the image here, I got success. :)

It’s a little challenging, but it’s doable. I had to spend some time to iron out the kinks, but you can reap the benefits! Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , ,

Linux FTW: Quake-style terminal window

Jan 22

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 6 Comments

Long ago (mid-90’s), there was a revolutionary 3-d first-person-shooter game called “Quake”, made by id Software, the same people that made DooM a few years before.

Quake had this really cool feature where you could press the ~ key at anytime during the game and a terminal window would drop down from the top of the screen. This terminal screen could be used for anything from chatting to changing maps and more. It was sweet.

Since then, there have been many attempts at replicating the functionality in both Mac and Linux environments, where it is still common to use a terminal window with some regularity.

One such software package, Guake, has become a personal favorite of mine. It’s very simple; no bells or whistles other than the ability to adjust the Opacity. My only beef with it was simply that the terminal would just pop up on the screen rather than drop down from the top. Totally superficial — but what’s the point of using an open-source OS if you can’t customize it to do exactly what you want?

Last night, I figured out how to do it. And it’s glorious (video demo after the jump). Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Linux FTW: Karmic Win pt. 7, Wine, DirectX, and Games

Nov 15

Posted by Aaron in Geekery, Reviews | 2 Comments

In the last post, we discussed using Gnome Do to do awesome things such as maintaining Twitter easily.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (in Wine)One of the key factors in finally making the switch over to Linux completely was when I learned that Windows Emulation had progressed far enough that I’d be able to play modern games on it successfully. I hate to seem so shallow that video games would make or break the decision, but I just know that if I can’t do pretty much EVERYTHING I like to do while on Linux, the likelihood of its endurance is far less.

Counter Strike: Source (in Wine)In any case — with a few simple steps, a few downloaded files, and some patience, you can easily setup DirectX 9 in WinE and play many modern games including Civilization IV, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Counterstrike: Source, and many others. NVidia cards tend to have much better success than ATI, but there area workarounds for ATI users.

Wine’s official website maintains a very comprehensive database of applications that have been tested under Wine. The list is intimidatingly long, and contains both popular and esoteric gmes; old and new. The “Platinum Top 10″ (top 10 most popular games, raked by popularity, that work perfectly in Wine without any modification) are:

  1. Guild Wars
  2. Photoshop CS2 (CS3 and CS4 have not bee fully emulated yet)
  3. Supreme Commander
  4. Watchtower Library 2008 (yes, as in the Jehova’s Witnesses… strange that it’s a top 10 app)
  5. Half-life 2 Retail
  6. Silkroad Online
  7. Spore
  8. Day of Defeat: Source (via Steam)
  9. Star Wars: Jedi Knight – Jedi Academy
  10. Call of Duty 2

see more games/apps from the Platinum list

The Gold list, games that require a few tweaks but work perfectly once fixed. The tweaks are almost always in the AppDB profile, but if not, it’s just a google search away. :) The Top 10 list has some high profile games, and so it’s worth mentioning:

  1. Final Fantasy XI
  2. Warhammer Online Live
  3. World of Warcraft (The profile explains that the only reason “Platinum” wasn’t chosen is because the Installation wasn’t tested — they likely just copied it over from a Windows computer; full installation instructions are available on the Wine Profile though.)
  4. EVE Online
  5. StarCraft Brood War
  6. Steam (the distribution platform for games from the “Valve” distributor — there may be some issues with “purchasing” games on Steam, but any games that you have already purchased on your account should be downloadable just fine)
  7. Team Fortress 2 (Steam)
  8. Aion: The Tower of Eternity
  9. Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
  10. Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (Battle.net play was not officially tested, but may work)

Not every game works just yet, but the list is growing. See the Wine ApplicationDB for info about whether or not your favorite apps will work, and how well they work.

Pretty much every modern game (made for windows) requires DirectX, but fortunately setting up DirectX is pretty easy and can be done in less than 30 minutes (assuming a broadband Internet connection). Below is all the files, and instructions, to getting set up with DirectX in Wine.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , ,

Linux FTW: Karmic Win pt. 6, Gnome-do & Twitter

Nov 12

Posted by Aaron in Geekery, Reviews | 1 Comment

2009-11-11-202755Yesterday, we discussed using the new “UbuntuOne” cloud service, and integrating it into numerous apps on Karmic.

A while back, I discovered the Avant Window Navigator, a Mac-style docking program (available through the USC). Matt McKimmy had commented on that post, mentioning the program Gnome-Do.

At that time, I had checked out Gnome-Do, found it interesting but was still infatuated with my fancy Mac-esque dock, so I never really got around to using it.

This time though, Gnome-Do came pre-loaded with the Karmic installation, and I decided to give it a shot for a while. Browsing through the preferences, I noticed some plugins and integration tools that I hadn’t noticed the first time around; or maybe they just weren’t offered, not really sure.

Gnome-Do, written to function sort of like “Quicksilver” on Macs, is a genius little app that does it all. My favorite aspect of it so far is its integration with Twitter though. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , ,

Linux FTW: Karmic Win pt. 5, the Cloud

Nov 11

Posted by Aaron in Geekery, Reviews | No Comments

2009-11-10-200859In the last post we discussed using Rhythmbox music player, linking it up to last.fm and configuring it. I will do a future post comparing it to Amarok and Banshee.

With this new version of Ubuntu, they’ve introduced a really awesome new feature that shows a lot of potential. It’s called “Ubuntu One“.

Ubuntu One is a cloud-based platform that allows, at the least, file synchronization across Linux PCs (have not yet discovered a way to synchronize with Windows PC also, but I’m looking!). But really, this service offers the potential to really synchronize ANYTHING with the cloud service and some other applications, including Firefox, Tomboy notes, Evolution, and others, have already created plugins to jump on this.

All users are given 2 GB of space, for free (comparable to services such as Mozy), but upgrading to a whopping 50GB is only $10 / month. By comparison, Mozy only charges $4.95 / month, but that price is “per computer”. Since this service is really intended to be used as a cross-computer synchronization service, using it with 2 computers is essentially an equal price. (Are you REALLY going to be backing up more than 50GB of data?) Additionally, Mozy requires a special “MozyPro” plan for businesses / commercial use, and UbuntuOne makes no distinction (to be fair, Mozy does not support Linux natively, either… so if you’re using Linux, it’s really a non-option anyways. :) )

So how does one get on board with this service? It’s easier than it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , ,