Linux

hey yall.. my guildmate sent me here.. he said this would be a good place to get some help.... ne way here is my prob. what happened is my old hard drive died... dad said it couldnt read "track one" anymore.... so we foze it, popped it back in pc and got most stuff off.... now my dad had a spare hard drive (he an IT) and this one happens to be running linux.... Suse to be exact.... still new to the OS.... but i was wondering if there is any way to run GW on linux... my step-bro is already trying to run SC with a prograp "emulator" as he calls it called Wine. pretty much it mimmicks windows... a program to run a program... he gets SC running... but it is slow, laggy, and he cant use battle.net....

now whenever i try to run GW using wine the computer starts to Freeze, or it says it is already running GW.... if there is any way you can help that would be great!....

Wine may or many not work with Guild Wars. What I'd recommend is Cedega which is based off of wine and is for gaming. It looks like Guild Wars is officially supported to.

http://www.transgaming.com

Get Cedega, lets you run Windows apps on Linux. I was using it just a few days ago when I tried to resize windows while paritioning my drive to make room for linux (and foolishly was using linux to resize it, and corrupted everything).

Quite a neat story, but I'm sure you don't want to hear it.

hmmmm... that makes me want to make a complete switch. It is about time for a rebuild... I need a copy of Ghost. If I can get an image of my windows setup so that I don't have to rebuild it every time, i might have to make the jump.

Athough it may sound like a neat idea, running a Windows game in Linux via a Windows emulator, it probably is not a very good idea from computer performance point of view.

A game like GW does not require a lot of internet communication, but it does require a lot of power from your PC, in particular for the neat 3D graphics. Emulation is just that, it emulates every Windows command, and so introduces another level of software interpretation that needs to be carried out.

Hard disks are not expensive today, and just to play GW you don't need one that is super sized; a "mini" hardisk by today's standards, say 40GB would be way more than sufficient for GW and several other games. Setting up a computer to be dual boot with one or two hardisks is no biggy either today. So you might want to consider getting another small hardisk, putting Windows on it for Guildwards, and putting it in your computer alongside the hardisk with Linux. So when you play your Windows games like GW, you have the full power available from your operating system.

Tried the dual-boot. It sux. It's too hard to manage, and get files to be recognized on either partition. My computer only uses SATA hd's, so buying a new one is out of the question atm. So, 2 questions:

(btw, my system is a 3.2ghz P4 with 512mb DDR2 Ram, and 256mb Radeon. I'm not too worried about performance, but more ram would be nice...)

1. Has anyone tried using Cedega, and if so how well does it operate with Guild Wars?

2. Anyone know if any linux drivers have been made for Logitech's gamepads? I like my emulators, and keyboards just don't cut it for true Mario Kart action!

None of the options work well enough. The main issue is the difference in graphics software. Windows uses Directx and Linux/unix use Open-GL. If you want to run Directx apps on a linux machine those calls need to be converted on the fly. This is an issue with the way the graphics get drawn (missing textures, etc...) as well as performance (FPS lowered significantly).

Can you play GW on a linux box? YES, but with issues. Wine, Cedega and a few others i can't think of at the moment will PLAY, just not very well and with much fiddling with configurations.

You're best option is run a dual-boot machine and pick up a hard drive for a windows install, they're plenty cheap.

Wine and Cedega are not emulators. They translate the Win32 API calls into native Linux API calls. There is a small amount of overhead from this translation but no where near as much as an emulator. Personally I run dual boot, it is easier. But if you are stuck with Linux Cedega is your best bet for running games.

Guild Wars should run very nicely under Linux using Cedega, if you have a GeForce based card. If you have a Radeon based card, there are unfortunately quite a few performance issues still.

WINE, unfortunately, doesn't work yet. I try every time there's a new release. :'(

Cedega runs GW fine, though you get some graphical corruption with the DX9 renderer. I recommend running it with the -dx8 command line option, and everything works perfectly. ^_^

*sigh*

... and I would have the radeon.

i havent tried it after the new dx9 but like someone said u can use the -dx8 option, i ran GW under Ubuntu using Cedega without any problems, i never took the time to get Antialiasing to work tho but it worked fine, my HW is
P4-3.0E
1GB Dual DDR
GF 6600GT

Hmm, ok, I never tried either, I just always thought wine was an emulator.

If Cedega allows Windows 3D games in all their glory to be played on a Linux machine, then that is fantastic! But by "all their glory" I mean here with all the graphic detail that the graphic card which is installed in the PC is able to supply. I say this because my wife and I have played GW side by side for a year now. She had until recently an older PC using a relatively inexpensive Nvidia 5xxx series card (can't remember exactly) and I am using a far better card, an Nvidia Ti4200. Due to the better card and faster PC, my graphical rendering of the GW world was far far better than hers. Now I built her a new computer with an Nvidia 7900GT card, and the rendering of GW's world on her machine is far better than on mine! The point here is, getting GW to play on Linux is one thing, but can you get the graphics to perform as well as is technically possible with the card you have in the machine? Or do you have to sacrifice performance, detail and quality due to the translation to openGL? Because it does make a difference, when you play GW with the rendering that is available with a better card (the game is much more fun to play). I would be interested in hearing the answer to this.

Regarding dual booting: this is really not much of a problem today. It may be tricky and confusing for you to set up the very first time, but it is far easier today than it was some years back. It may be easier if you were adding a Linux OS to an already existing Windows OS, as in the past Windows always assumed it was the only OS on your hardware. I just say this to not get you to give up on Cedega, but just so you know that dual booting is still an option for you.

I'm not sure about Nvidia, but i can tell you that i tweaked an ati on Ubuntu running cedega and even with the -dx 8 option, it ran no where near as fast or looked as clean, artifact free as it does on a winxp box, this with an ATI x1900xt. Many times it would just simply crash depending on how i set the rendering. No idea how Nvidia cards fair though.

Wine will never work with Guild wars, or most MMOs, becuase it does not, and will not support DirectX. Wine is mostly for applications, not games.

WINE stands for "Wine is not an emulator" tbh.

WINE and Cedega both run about the same amount of games, both support directx call conversions and both contribute to each other when improvements are found. Ton's of win games run fine on both, including eve and WOW as far as MMO's. Guild wars on the other hand seems to be plagued with issues from loading to artifacts to plain outright textures missing completely. DirectX 8 is fully implimented on WINE and Cedega now and 9.0c is still experiencing issues here and there. Neither of them play guildwars as well as a windows box...

This is not true. One of the reasons there is a lot of bad blood surrounding Cedega and Transgaming with respect to WINE is that Cedega takes the open source WINE code base and tweaks it to work (in varying degrees) with recent Windows games. They do not contribute their work back to the WINE project.

Codeweavers, who produce CrossOver Office, are the primary contributors to the WINE project. Their product (CrossOver Office) is basically the latest and greatest version of WINE with additional GUIs added to make managing your Windows apps easier. When Codeweavers makes improvement to their CXOffice product (and subsequently WINE) they contribute it back to the WINE project.

As such, WINE and Cedega (formerly WineX) generally have the ability to play the same games, though Cedega does do something to WINE to improve the playability / performance of DX games. Therefore sometimes games don't work well (or at all) in WINE when they do in Cedega. Cedega also costs $5 per month with a minimum 3 month subscription.

I used Cegeda for 3 months and cancelled my subscription because their support was lacking and there was a LOT of arguing and infighting within the community (which you only have access to if you pay). I still have the version of Cedega that I downloaded (version 5 something I think) but I'd have to pay again to get the latest which may or may not improve the playability of the games I'm interested in.

I do not have GW yet, but I intend to play the worldwide preview this weekend and would prefer to play it in Linux if it's comparable performance since my primary OS is Linux.

I have had guild wars running fine on wine... dunno what you all complain about

This has been mentioned before. I managed to get it running on VMWare although it doesn't fully support 3D acceleration yet. If you do a search you will find a couple of screenshots I posted. And as far as I know it Does run on WINE but lags/crashes/is not really playable. Dual boot is your friend if you really wanna play.