tail -f findings.out

The single largest reason I had a Windows (XP) installation on my main home PC was to play games. Everything else I needed or wanted to do I could do just as well or better in linux. I did not try making the final switch with Wine, Cedega, and related solutions for gaming until recently, however. Windows is annoying, slow, prone to crashes, and generally unproductive. So why be stuck with it for fun?

After deleting my Gordian knot of a Windows installation in a moment of rage and adding only Feisty Fawn back, I was forced to face just that question. Getting Wine installed is very simple.

sudo apt-get install wine

works just fine, in fact. All you have to do after that is run

once, make sure OSS is set under Audio, tweak your resolution under Graphics, and that’s about it. I recommend that you check the emulate a virtual desktop option, and uncheck the allow window manager to control windows option. Before I made the first change, I could not even see the Wine window when it launched.

Something else to note: After installation, there will be a .wine hidden folder in your home directory. In this, there is a folder called “drive_c”. This is where Wine installs programs (in “Program Files”, intuitively enough).

To install WoW, pop in the first CD, navigate to your CD drive, and run

. This will load the familiar installer, and run as normal. When it prompts for CD 2, just switch the disks and press OK and likewise until done. After install is complete, start up the game. To do that, you must navigate to where WoW.exe lives, and run it with wine. You should also pass the “–opengl” option, as using DirectX is generally problematic, and not necessary. I made myself a handy alias:

alias wow='~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/World\ of\ Warcraft/WoW.exe -opengl'

Faster than a double click! You might be prompted to allow ActiveX controls when the Updater loads, which you should allow. (Wine installs it all for you, you just accept the option).

Now, depending on a whole legion of options, such as your graphics card, driver, the alignment of the celestial spheres, etc, you may encounter more and less graphical, sound, and performance issues when you first play. In my case, sound with OSS was fine, the app ran fine, and graphics were ok. Once I got playing, however, the graphics got slower, and were quite jerky in high traffic areas. There are several tutorials on what to tweak, but I found this one quite helpful. Once I performed the tweak with

, I was getting 80-90 FPS no problem (on a GeForce 6600 GT card no less), and 45-55 FPS with all the options on the highest setting. This is better than what I got in Windows!

Aside from running better, the other thing I love about running WoW in linux is that I can switch apps much faster. For example, if I have a browser open in my second monitor, all I have to do is… move my cursor over onto it. WoW does not mind, in fact does not even blink. I can immediately interact with the rest of my desktop. In Windows, I could not move my cursor out of WoW at all. I had to minimize it, then do whatever it is I wanted to do. No more chains!

[EDIT]: By popular demand, a few screenshots are in order!

WoW running on my Ubuntu Desktop, dual LCD setup, with fluxbox:

WoW in game shot from same system:

These were taken with my favorite screengrabber, ksnapshot. The last image is of my main, Temeluchus.

WARNING: Reading about the following program may induce long periods of time wasting and excessive enjoyment.

Alright, now that that is out of the way… I started playing with a program called Festival some time ago, but have been unable to write about it until now. I am still trying to think out how it might actually be useful to the average linux fanatic, but it is unequivocally fun. While it is actually a very advanced linguistic program, the basic function that gives it greatness is: you give it text, it reads it to you. And not just in a Stephen Hawking sort of tone (while I love him too), but in a wide range of voices, from distinguished British gentlemen to American women.

While very neat to play around with, I had a few ideas on how it might be put to more practical use in interacting with a linux system.

1. Alerting: One immediate use that came to mind is to create a script that would monitor various statistics and warn you if they reached dangerous pre-defined levels. The warning could then be sent to Festival. Having my computer warn me of something out-loud would be much more effective than having to remember to check the metric myself.
2. Testing/Stats: I think it might be quite handy to have Festival read you the levels of certain resources or the progression of certain tasks while performing testing. While testing a program, it could read out available memory at the time, or the percent completed of a task being performed. This way you could keep track of needed statistics while monitoring others at the same time, or watching the program output.
3. News: This idea was proposed in one of the articles I read on Festival, and I think it might be quite useful. In short, you create a script to get the latest news items, likely from one or more RSS feeds you subscribe to, and send these to Festival. That way you could be read the latest news while working on other tasks.

There is an Ubuntu package for Festival, which makes the basic install rather trivial. Source may be downloaded here. It will compile on any *nix machine, OSX, and apparently Windows machines as well.

As mentioned, it is a rather advanced program with a wide range of features I will not go into here. Some helpful sites for further information:

• Tutorial and demo
• Ideas on use
• Advanced voice packages (MBROLA)
  
• Official manual

When editing my X display configuration, I sometimes want to know what resolution is actually being displayed, as compared to what I have set in xorg.conf. An easy command to do this:

. This command is designed to provide X display information, just what I want!

The most common things I need are resolution and DPI. Here are examples of these:

This tells me just what I need to see to confirm if what I am trying to set in the X config is manifesting or not.

Of course, if you want to do it the hard way, you can use the Pythagorean theorem, and divide the diagonal pixel resolution of your screen ( equal to the square root of the width squared plus the height squared) by diagonal size of your screen in inches… I’ll take the command.

I came across a very helpful utility for web development today: YSlow. It integrates into everyone’s favorite Firefox plugin, Firebug, and reports what is slowing the page the most, based on some standards for high performance sites.

Once you are on the page to check, you just have to click the YSlow button (sits beside the Firebug icon), it gets the info it needs, and displays something like the following:

You can expand each category to see details:
Check it out!

Some people have difficulty renaming lots of files at once on the command line. I used to experience this issue a lot, especially since “mv” was the command recommended. While I can appreciate why mv makes sense for renaming, it still was not intuitive for me. The original file is, in a sense, gone. Renaming a file can be seen as making a new file.

However, there is another command, nearly as available, which can rename things quite easily. You will never guess its name. Something simple, and descriptive of the action of renaming files…: rename! It syntax is easy:

rename 'PERL REGEX' FILELIST

The FILELIST can use regex as well. So if I wanted to renamed all of my Mahler “Symphony No. 1″ files (they all started with “_- Mahler”), I would simply run this in the folder the files were in:

rename 's/^\_\-\ Mahler/Mahler/' *.mp3

Voilà! Now all my file names have been fixed in one fell swoop. An explanation of regex is not something I want or can do right now, but internet tutorials and articles on it are legion.