Euro-Gaming in Linux [Linux FTW]

A “euro-game”, also known as a “German-style board game” are

are a broad class of tabletop games that generally have simple rules, short to medium playing times, indirect player interaction, and physical components, which are frequently wooden player tokens or markers. The games emphasize strategy, downplay luck and conflict, lean towards economic rather than military themes, and usually keep all the players in the game until it ends.

The most well-known example of this would be Klaus Teuber’s Settlers of Catan.

Where western / American-style board games tend to focus more on direct competition, zero-sum arrangements, and frequently combat themes, German-style games instead focus on empire-building, strategizing, and often economic themes. If American-style games are “during the war”, German-style are “before and after”. There is player interaction, of course, but it’s frequently circumstantial or coincidental. The publishers “Rio Grande Games” and “Mayfair Games” are both terrific sources (as are many games that win the annual Spiel de Jahres award)

In any case – they are a variety of games that have become quite popular here in America over the past decade. My friendly gaming group frequents many of these.

Over the past year, I have discovered several computer-based editions of these games that can either be played online (against other people) or locally (against computer AI) — the best part is that they have Linux-based versions! The games I’ll cover here, along with how to set them up and where to find more information on playing them, are:

  • Settlers of Catan
  • Race for the Galaxy
  • San Juan
  • Dominion / Puerto Rico / Carcasonne / others

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Synaesthesia, also known as “Piano Hero” [Linux FTW]

Last year, a friend of mine showed me this cool program he found called “Synaesthesia.” It is, as the title reads, “Piano Hero.” Notes fall from the top to the bottom of the screen and when they collide with the bottom, you must hit the appropriate  key on your piano / keyboard / MIDI controller. It is a VERY cool tool for training, practicing, and learning new songs. As someone that is not particularly skilled at sight-reading music (I do better learning aurally), any way to get new songs loaded into my brain is welcome.

We inherited a Yamaha Clavinova 350 last year as well, which has been really terrific for practicing; I was previously using a 2/3 size electric piano that was showing its age. I picked up an M-Audio Fast Track Pro interface off of eBay for about  $50, and so I can now use the Clavinova as a MIDI controller!

My big Win last week, though, which happens to be what this post is about, is getting it to not only work in Linux (not so hard) but getting the Clavinova to function as the MIDI controller for it (somewhat challenging). Continue reading

Using Virtualbox with an Existing Windows Partition [Linux FTW]

The recursion might blow your mind.

UPDATE: I am not able to help troubleshoot this anymore, as I have switched over to VMWare Player (post coming soon!); However, if you happen to discover anything about making it work, please post in the comments below and I will update the post text with your findings and credit you.

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!

UPDATE: Sandeep has submitted screenshots with instructions on getting this to work with Windows 7, see below, at the very end.

UPDATE: If you are getting the error message: Offset must be a number: rce
I have found the fix for it. See the instructions below.

UPDATE: Bogdan (see comments) was able to get Windows Vista working under Virtualbox OSE, using the method below. See his comments for specifics on Windows Vista.

UPDATE: Dan has found some tricks for getting this to work with Win7 if you are getting a BSOD on bootup.

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

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.

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

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. Continue reading

Karmic Win pt. 5, the Cloud [Linux FTW]

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. Continue reading