Now that I’m actually using Windows 7 both starter and home premium editions I can say a few things about it. As you know I used the rather icky Windows Vista before. There are two obvious differences:

The taskbar has been significantly improved over Vista where now instead of having to click through stacked items you just mouse over the stack you want and it pops up. It is also more icon based than text based so more can be fitted in.

The other major difference is the UAE is less irritating. It’s still irritating but less obviously so most of the time.

There are many other less significant changes. For example, there’s a more or less automated home networking system which is nice enough but only good if all are using Windows 7.

Changing backgrounds have also been added even with an Australian theme pre installed in the home premium edition. A nice touch really.

It still has it’s issues. No bluetooth driver for my mobile, odd bugs with older games. A very pushy internet explorer. You know, Internet Explorer is just a firefox downloader.

There’s also a new Action Centre which collects the various issues you are suppose the deal with such as Windows updates and security or bug issues. A good idea but it has too many serious flaws such as telling me I have no video drivers installed just after I successfully updated the drivers and bugging me to rechange windows update settings after I changed them to my preference.

I’m not convinced it’s faster to boot or shutdown than Vista was on the older hardware but IMO that was fast enough on Vista anyway. I haven’t been irritated by this issue on Windows or Linux for many years now but it seems some people get very annoyed about it.

A very silly issue when I clicked on the games folder on Vista it would take several minutes to load up. Windows 7 is much faster, perhaps 10 seconds if that.

I would have to admit overall this is definitely better than Vista which will deservedly go down in history as a shitty OS and all they really had to do is remove the problems especially fixing the UAE. I think it’s also better than Windows XP at long last.

Ubuntu 10.04

I’ve also switched back to Ubuntu from Kubuntu on version 10.04. It’s nice to see Ubuntu has dumped the ugly brown default theme. First impressions do count.

Overall I’m impressed it’s super smooth and everything “just works”. They have switched to Mac-style on having the close and resize icons on the upper left instead of the upper right of windows but this setting can be changed back to the right if you desire.

There’s more social media focus and Ubuntu One is built in now which is a cloud computing service. Cloud computing is everywhere now, I may even blog on that. It’s very much where things are going right now.

Firstly there’s the email which doesn’t do it’s job on junk mail filtering.  Then when you try to mark it as junk the server doesn’t respond.  And that’s half the issue with their email, it is frequently down.  Nowadays all I get is junk there, I simply don’t use it.

Then there’s Games for Windows LIVE which I truly despise.  Fallout 3, an otherwise excellent game, uses this awful system.   When I first installed Fallout 3 Windows LIVE was automatically setup in Xbox mode instead of PC mode and I very nearly wasted money getting a game expansion which would only be available for the Xbox version of the game.  After berating Microsoft for it they helpfully advised me they’d not have refunded my money or even my ‘points’ if I made the mistake of trusting them.  They also didn’t bother to help me fix the problem.  Fortunately Google search solved that one for me.

I recently reinstalled Fallout 3 on Windows 7 which, despite coming for the same company, is a decent job.  However, again Windows LIVE struck.  This time a bug in Windows LIVE and Windows 7 made the game fail.  Don’t these people have any internal communication?  That problem too was fixable via Google search.

I do use MSN messenger, another Windows LIVE branded product.  This one has not been such a disappointment but I’m trying aMSN again which seems to be better implemented and doesn’t have adverts.

These are overheads, or if you like computer maintenance, which comprises of several wasteful mechanisms which sap you computer productivity, speed, responsiveness and your personal time.

What I’m talking about is everything on your system that isn’t core to your service. There’s always been this in effect in various ways. For example, boot up, shutdown, time to launch an application etc.

But now we have a whole new layer. It all started with antivirus updates and Windows update which were at least loosely useful. They became automated, mostly because the majority of computer users would never update unless it was automated.

But then everything else jumped on the bandwagon. MS Office updates. Silverlight! I didn’t even install Silverlight yet there it is pooped on my Windows system. Windows media updates, what a joke! Windows media has stunk for perhaps a decade now. And windows updates is excruciatingly slow.

And it isn’t just Microsoft, no. Quicken and Google and Abode and you name it have updates galore too. Even games do it. It’s not just updates, it’s the advertising, the known and unknown info passed back via the net, the forms and permissions and terms of agreement and read the privacy document first. How about discovering the hard way the program only runs in admin mode. ‘Error 412, Would you like Microsoft to try and find a solution to the problem?’ We all know how hard they try. It is indeed very trying. How about the User Account Control (UAC)? It ensures installing something takes much longer and locks up your system more than the installation process itself. And that’s not even including the never ending permission prompts.

Then there’s the need for antivirus, anti rootkit, anti trojan, link blockers and spam canners. Defragmentation which takes hours, cleanups for files and sloppy registry entries.

All in all there so much superfluous rubbish in Windows it’s no wonder Linux is so much faster. It’s not just the software it’s the focus on getting things done rather than making money from the masses.

Linux does have some of these issues too but on the whole it’s not near crisis and each problem is better managed. So what I want done gets done. On Windows the capacity to do what I want is hampered by amazing levels of inefficiency.

Google Wave is a new communication tool;

Real time – what you see is updated as people type. Yes you can actually see the text inserted etc. Which makes for great visibility of your spelling errors but also helps the free flow of communication.

Collaborative – built from the ground up to let you work together with people to cocreate.

Embeddable – much like YouTube videos you can insert them anywhere. For example into a blog. I might even try that. It can also have stuff embedded into it like photos, videos and also;

Extensions – Like FireFox, Google Wave has extensions you can add in to make the experience as feature rich as you like. There’s aren’t many yet but I’m sure it will balloon. I’ve seen suduko, a simple poll, Google maps and conferencing

Another way to look at it is to compare with other communication tools. Despite what Google might claim it’s not really anothing new. What is new is that it has taken to best feature from many online communication tools such as email, twitter, instant messaging (MSN), facebook, etc

Now that I’ve actually seen it, I remain excited. It’s going to be a the huge improvement I had hoped it would be. It will replace many communication forms. Time will tell which ones but email at least.

It’s layout is similar to email. There’s contacts you can drag to add to waves (think of them as enhanced email message threads). The waves are sorted by search, folder or inbox, for example. For now Google Wave is preview and terribly unstable with large waves which have many people involved and ‘blips’ which are pieces added to the wave. It seems to run better on Chrome as one would expect.

I see it becoming a common collaborative tool and intend to use it as such myself.

Google Wave is grossly overhyped but only in the marketing mememe sense.. The sheer number of people who want it without having much clue what it actually does is staggering. The content is solid and not overhyped. The waves are coming.

Firstly we have to talk about expectations. Realise each game is a bit of a gamble. You can check out the AppDB to see your odds but there’s no guarantees and sooner or later you will have a game you disparately want to run that simply will not work. So what I’m saying here is approach this with a good pinch of patience as well as low expectations for specific software.

The AppDB doesn’t just give you summary results and guideline ratings they provide quite a bit of information on how to get the game going. Look amongst the comments and often a Howto is provided. Sometimes reading about similar games or other versions of the same game can help. Read those details in AppDB and elsewhere carefully, there’s often clues on how to get things going right there.

Use the latest development wine source. At the moment this is 1.1.16 and should be quite straightforward for you to install in any popular Linux distribution. Leave compiling from source and GIT releases to the advanced users.

Do not run wine with root privileges of any kind. Getting a game to work isn’t worth asking for trouble.

In my experience with many games the most common issues you will encounter are; fullscreen/windowed issues, DirectX issues, mouse issues, sound issues.

PREFIX it.

A wine PREFIX is a directory (default is .wine) which has the entire Windows setup in it. Think of it as a bottle of Wine which is kept separate to other bottles and Linux itself of course. So you could have a .wineold for older games, a .winetest for testing wine with new games or a .wineoss for keeping those games that need OSS sound support separate to your other ALSA games. It doesn’t even have to be a .wine something you can call it anything. I just use .wine in front to remind me what the directory is for.

Also note, if you are new to Linux, the ‘.’ in front of a directory means it is hidden from normal view. To see these hidden directories and files you need to use the right command in CLI or select an option in your file browser.

To tell wine which PREFIX to use is simple. You preface (PREFIX) each CLI command like this

env WINEPREFIX=”/home/username/.wineprefix”

Obviously use your real username and whatever you called your prefix directory. You may also need to change the path if you have a different setup. After this you use the wine command you want to look at the prefix directory. wine, winecfg, unistaller, winetricks and regedit all work with this PREFIX.

Winetricks

Winetricks is pretty much as it says, a bunch of tricks to help you get wine more functional. Mostly it’s got commonly needed dll overrides and other software. You can run it in the GUI but this will only install to the default wine prefix. If you use CLI you can use WINEPREFIX with it and it can then be installed to any directory you need. Remember to add the ‘sh’ to run this shell script and ensure it can be run as executable.

env WINEPREFIX=”/home/username/.wineprefix” sh winetricks

winecfg

This is the core way to configure wine to work with your software. The main sections that matter are;

Sound

Yes the long delay before it shows is normal. On first run it will usually try to set a default driver. Use ALSA if at all possible. To do so simply tick the ALSA driver box and untick the others if ticked. Try OSS if ALSA doesn’t work for you.

About

Tells you the wine version you have at the moment.

Applications

Here you can set the Windows version you want to mimic, normally this is the version that the game was designed for but sometimes other versions work better. You may need to try different ones. You can also add an application here which will then let you set a configuration for that application only instead of for all applications in that wine prefix.

Libraries

Lets you set overrides where basically you select the wine library you want to override and then add the replacement you want to use instead. Overrides can often help you run games that use features in the wine based libraries which are bugged or have not been implemented.

Graphics

Most of the settings in this section are useful and might need to be changed for one game or another. Usually leave it as is but read the AppDB for suggestions for changes. The two window manager allowances sometimes need to be deactivated.

If you use emulate a virtual desktop (800×600 preferably) to try a game out, that way if it screws up, it won’t mess up your desktop.

Drives and Desktop Integration sections are generally fine as is.

regedit

wine comes with a registry editor which lets you configure the registry settings if you need to.

game.ini

You may also need to play around with you game’s or the system’s ini files which hold configuration information. In here you can change all sorts of settings to help avoid wine bugs and non implemented features as well as generally tweak your gaming experience. You can usually find the ini file in one of your game directories.

Other

Install cabextract in linux. It seems to help with same games.

Switch off KDE desktop effects or Compiz effects (eg on Ubuntu). They interfere with some games. Or leave them running but consider switching it off if you’re having no joy to see if it helps.

You often need to run the windows executable with wine from the directory the executable is located in, especially for older games. So need to change directory in CLI first. EXCEPT usually when installing from CD it’s best not to do this as it makes ejecting a disk (for multiple disk installs) difficult and usually running and installer in the disk directory is not needed.

Uninstalling

Do not use the uninstall shortcuts in your menu to unistall. Either use the wine uninstaller

uninstaller

which has a so-so track record with me or simply delete it manually or for a clean result delete the whole wine prefix. Just make sure you are OK deleting anything else installed to that prefix.

Advanced Options

I’m not there yet but there’s some more advanced stuff to do I lack knowledge of namely;

1) Using multiple versions of wine at the same time. This allows you to run games that worked on older version but have regressed (not longer working) on the latest version of wine

2) Running wine without the desktop entirely. Wine doesn’t need KDE or Gnome to work. Running in a mode with no desktop environment should improve performance and reduce issues.

3) Bug reporting. I’ve never reported a bug of any kind mainly because I’m not sure how to.

4) Using a patched wine namely a wine which has been patched with a fix. It would allow running games like Fallout 3 at the moment which has a serious mouse bug which has been dealt with via a user created patch.

However to get a higher success rate and an easier installation process you should consider using one of the GUI (graphical) interfaces which both simplifies the wine process and ensures you don’t have to touch the CLI.

There are a couple of options to do this but unfortunately none of them stand out as problem free. I’ll list them here;

1) Use Cedega, a commercial product which is not really wine. As best as I can determine it is a very old fork of wine meaning it is based on wine some time ago but has altered significantly from wine since it split off for better or worse. I do not recommend Cedega because it has a dreadful reputation for both support and running games and because it costs $US45/year.

I cannot personally vouch for or against this product except their Eve game bundle failed to work. They also offer a Mac flavour called Cider.

2) Use PlayonLinux, a free open source product which uses clever scripts with recent versions of wine. There seems to be a significant language barrier from English users there but otherwise the community looks active and friendly.

I have not tried it out but might do so sometime.

3) Use Crossover. Crossover comes in three flavours. The stable office/business Crossover Linux, the more leading edge Crossover Games and the Crossover Mac version. Crossover is really the official commercial level of wine and it is a positive thing to note that Crossover and wine try to work together.

Crossover Games is the cheapest and targets games only. It costs $US29.95/year. There’s a 7 day trial so you can see what it’s like.

I used the trial to test out Crossover and to foray into wine. Overall I found the GUI application to be quite nice and reasonably powerful and it included a few installers for supported games. It used a slightly older version of wine; 1.1.0 versus the current 1.1.13 at the time.

More than the GUI software provided, Crossover is a support service and offer support for a few popular games.

However Crossover Games has three problems I noticed;

1) It’s out of phase with wine. Some of the advice in wine can be useful but you must be aware of the version of wine Crossover is based on and you do not know any hidden changes made by Crossover. This, coupled with Crossover’s support based service, means wine users are not so willing to help a Crossover user. They expect Crossover to do the job. The games database in Crossover is OK but is too incomplete to really supersede wine’s software database.

2) Crossover Games has bad support. I contacted them about a few issues including on supported games and received replies 2 days *after* the trial ended which were also less than satisfactory. It’s was very bad pre-sales service and a sign of later service should you actually cough up the cash. There is no support for games outside the few officially supported as well so the support you pay for is very narrow.

3) The software does menus in KDE very badly even deleting other game links when installing a new game.

Given the primarily support based nature of Crossover and my experience I can’t really recommend them.

These services are as easy as it gets with wine at this time and the overall result is passable but if you do have some basic skills you can get a cheaper and improved outcome.  I’ll help show you how in an upcoming post.

The ability to use Windows based applications is very useful for many Linux users. For new users this mitigates the learning curve of so many new applications at the same time as the operating system. It also broadens the application base which can be important in areas in which Linux is not well supported, such as games, or it can make speciality applications usable on Linux which can often be useful to business.

There are 3 real ways to achieve this.

1) Run Windows as dual boot. This is my primary route and easy to do. It lets me run whichever operating system I like. The cost is the time delay of rebooting into whichever OS I desire and the waste of hard drive capacity implicit in running two operating system and often two copies of the same application, one for each operating system. I also have to pay for Windows.

2) Run Windows emulators or virtualisation software. These exist but I’ve never tried them and the drawbacks are significant.

3) Run WINE. Wine runs Windows based applications natively which, needless to say, is not trivial. However it’s got a lot of advantages, particularly speed. Speed in getting things going and speed of the running application.

Wine has a long history. Since 1995 it’s been reported to run MS Office and currently runs it near flawlessly. However MS Office has become less important to Linux users since OpenOffice is just as good in practical terms. It also has some degree of popularity and can load and save native MS Office documents anyway. But there’s more Windows applications than MSOffice.

Recently WINE has leapt forward in development and, more importantly, functionality. I am quite late on the bandwagon having only heard of it since version 0.9 or so and used it since 1.1.0. It’s now up to 1.1.14.

I’ve been astounded at how good it is, though it certainly has a long way yet to go. I play a lot of games and in my experience with using it the results have been very approximately this way;

Around ¼ of games will not run whatsoever. Around ¼ can be run but are either virtually unplayable or require rather complicated steps to get working for a non-expert. The next ¼ run with some reasonable tweaking. The final ¼ run out of the box.

I’ve also noticed some preconceptions that might need correcting;

1) Only older games and applications work well: Actually the game’s age doesn’t really make that much difference to the success rate. I’ve had old games fail on me where more modern games might work fine. The only exception to this are games that require directX10 components.

2) Applications running on WINE are slow: Nope. Since it runs natively, if there are no serious slowing bugs, the games will run at speed comparable to Windows. Sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower. Practically speaking I’ve only noticed slowdown in 10% of games I’ve tried.

3) Applications running on WINE are less stable: Well it’s like this. The games that do not run or do not run well are definitely not stable. But those that do I have found just as stable if not more so than on Windows. If a game is known to crash on WINE it will usually be reported.

4) WINE is hard to setup and use: Actually WINE is very easy to setup but it can be hard to use for those who have little expertise, especially if you want to get that extra ¼ of applications and games to work.

5) WINE is an emulator: No no no! This one is so hated that WINE has the acronym Wine Is Not an Emulator.

I would encourage Linux users who want to try running Windows based software to give WINE a go. I will be posting updates related to WINE in due course. I hope to cover support, how to set things up, useful information, common issues and maybe some specific games.

Software Freedom Day (SFD08) is a world wide event promoting Free and Open Source Software to families and businesses. It’s held each year and this year is on Saturday 20 September 2008. There are many small localised events all across the world organised for that day.

My local Linux User group is doing one of these in Victor Harbour of South Australia. A rather pretty seaside town popular with tourists. The website above will let you know if there’s a local event planned for your area.

We intend to have;

• Speakers giving special presentations on Linux & Open Source Software

• Interactive tutorials & demonstrations

• Hands on with systems set-up with Linux for you to come and try for yourself

• Stands showcasing Linux & Open Source Software, along with some other “Techie” IT & Computing goods & services

• FREE Linux & Open Source Software CD’s, & maybe a few other goodies

• BBQ, snacks & drinks