Linux Corner

[Ocram's Razr 963]

I still stand by my statement that Linux Mint is not user friendly but I eventually got my wifi card to work by reinstalling LM17 from the DVD then going to the device driver manager, plugging in my laptop by ethernet, then chosing to install and use the proprietary driver. After that, I updated, making sure not to use level 4 or 5 updates.

--Ocram

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

And what do you gain from using LM over Ubuntu?  You can have the Cinnamon desktop and have a choice of several others.

[Alejandro24 575]

OK, this is getting really annoying! Linux is absolutely NOT user friendly! I have been trying to install a driver for my Wi-Fi card (my laptop is a Dell Inspion 1545 and it uses a Broadcom WiFi card) for the past 2 hours. I managed to download everything I need from the Broadcom website and to un-tar (decompress) it but trying to install it in the terminal either gives me no result or 3 errors. I am using Linux Mint 17 (Quiana).

 

--Ocram

 

Go to Menu of MInt > System > Administration > Driver Manager

Or in the search bar on the menu try to look with the words "hard", "mana" or "driv" (that is is the way that I found the manager). Keep your computer with a physical conection to internet while the installing of the drivers.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This is a reply to questions in the new poll.
 
I use the Unity desktop.  It is the default with Ubuntu.  I used to use the GNU fallback, but eventually decided that I could quite happily live with Unity if I added a few features.  Here is my current desktop.
 


Notes: In the upper panel there are some extra things. The blue one is Dropbox. The Red one is the general menu which I often use instead of the dash when I know what I want. The Dash is used for searching only.

the Launcher is hidden and has been tuned to my specification, and has an icon that starts up my current default script for SC4. The reason the icon for Banished is on my desktop is that it won't stay in the launcher if it is not present somewhere else (damned nuisance) Other than that, the launcher has had several defaults removed and the apps I use the most put in.

Do I like Linux? I answered yes.  Several reasons:

 

1. Upgrading to a new version is a snap.  You simply move your home directory to an off-line area and do it.  Or, if you choose to do a direct upgrade to the next iteration, just allow it to happen.  Updates like this occur every six months and take about two hours total. 
    
2. You can always back down from your current kernel to the previous one, and this is about three deep.  The GRand Unified Bootloader has this as a feature.
    
3. And speaking of GRUB, you can have as many operating systems in GRUBs list as you like.  It is just a matter of having enough disk partitions.  At the moment I have 10 any of which can contain a boot.
    
4. Linux does what it damn pleases.  This does not include leaving you with a BSOD.  Linux has a facility called whoopsie on Ubuntu, which recovers fatal errors and simply keeps going by reloading the offending module after taking a dump.  It can then report this error to the distributor.  Often the disturbance to what you are doing is hardly noticeable other than the panel that pops up to say it happened and asks permission to report it.
    
5. Further to the opening statement in 4 above, Linux is a well trained laboratory animal and it always does what it has been trained to do.  No fuss, no bother, no threats.
    
6. No viruses or malware to speak of.  I run the provided AV suite called CLAM-AV and ufw, the standard firewall.  It is like wearing belt and suspenders because there is also a kernel module called apparmor which is a security system that protects all applications.  Security freaks can also turn on the Secure Linux kernel which adds DOD-type security with ACLs and CACLs.  Not worth the effort on a single user machine, and really only for paranoid secure installations.
   
   You do have to be aware of phishing expeditions, however.  Thunderbird, the mailer I use, flags suspicious pieces of mail and it is easy to create a permanent filter for nuisances.  It also uses spamassassin.
    
7. Generally, unless you have an application that you must have for business reasons, everything you can do on Windows you can do on Linux.  To run a precious windows program there is wine (WINdows Executive) which is an on-the-fly compiler for windows calls or mono which runs things from the .NET world.  mono can run alone or encapsulated in wine.  wine is not an emulator, but an operating system layer.  Not perfect, but most things run.
    
8. gvfs the universal file system.  You like NTFS?  Keep it.  NTFS files are maintained (read/write) by this file system.  I use ext4, which is the latest development of the UNIX file system.  It is node based, and very fast.  The file system, by the way, loses the idea of "drive letter".  Instead, everything is connected to a single tree structure
    
9. And last, but hardly least, for private users this system is free.  The cost is cutting one DVD to create the live boot.

 

 

Now, Linux is not for everyone.  Users must be able to make that live boot DVD and check it to make sure that the checksum (MD5) is correct before starting.  Fear of consoles is probably something one has to get over as, while many features to have Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs), some simply are not important enough to bother, and so if you intend to use them, you have to learn a little about the console shell (BASH).

 

If you use the live boot you have the ability to do a test drive without affecting your existing system in any way.  The test runs entirely in memory and doesn't touch your storage.  If you decide to install the system you have the choice of installing it:

 

a) in the same partition along side your existing system for dual boot

 

b) in a new partition along side your existing system for dual boot

 

c) destructively by taking over your machine for Linux only (not initially recommended).  For this step you should have any files you want to keep safely stored off-line.  Your machine will be formatted.

[Alejandro24 575]

Thank's for answer the poll Nonny. I forgott to add the Unity option at the desktop environment, also I had added a new question too.

 

I use Linux Mint, with its current version 17 in its KDE variant. I use KDE since GNOME 2 where replaced with GNOME 3 and the fallback. I didn't like the last GNOME since I used it a time ago, and also I have tried Cinnamon, MATE, Pantheon and XFCE. But I didn't like them, because several reason. So I falled in love with the german KDE since GNOME seems to be dead, usefully speaking, for me.

I use Linux Mint since the version 7, but I've used also Ubuntu, Fedora, Mageia, Mandriva, Estrella Roja, Arch, Majaro, Elementary and OpenSUSE. I like Mint because is the most direct system about its configuration, I can take the easy or the hard way, even both at the same time if I want. It is based in Ubuntu, it is like Ubuntu but renovated.

I like Linux because more or less the same points that Nonny says. It is secure and fast, I guess this one of the most atractive characteristics about Linux. But it is also malleable, you can make it so beautifull so also you can make it so sterile. But is is just visual, because internally is powerfull. And the comunity that rounds all the distros is awesome, I'm pretty sure that there are no more strongest comunity like the linuxers (linuxeros, as I say it in spanish).

The only one windows software that I run in Linux is SimCity 4, and it runs pretty well with the help of Wine.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Good revision, Alejandro.  I've updated my answer to the polls.

 

Currently I am running SC4 and Banished in wine with a 32-bit prefix, which seems to run better than the 64-bit one.  It is somewhat messed up from trying to get another game to run, and when I feel inclined, I am going to rebuild it.

 

Generally speaking, if you are running a 32-bit program it is better off in a 32-bit wine prefix.  If your machine is 64-bit, you get a 64-bit prefix.  There is a method for creating a 32-bit prefix in the wine wiki.  Do exactly what it says.

 

If you want to save our current 64-bit prefix simply use this:

 

mv .wine .wine.64

 

then create your 32-bit one.  You can swap them back and forth with the mv command.

[Alejandro24 575]

Actually I've been testing SC4 with PlayOnLinux, and it works well. Soon I'll post the results.

[Alejandro24 575]

Microsoft Office is still the mainstream office suite. Since OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Calligra and KOffice are great office suites too, the world rules by MSOffice. This is a problem for a Linux user among Windows users. But this problem can be solved: Just install the MSOffice web apps... in Ubuntu!... Or in another system based in Ubuntu. It works, I have tested it .

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Neat for people doing cottage industry things.  The salvation for those who "must have" MS-Office.

[Alejandro24 575]

Something usefull for me. I said "something" because our student works are mostly in LaTEX and some of them open document formats. But there are a few people still using MSOffice.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I haven't felt any crying need for any MS software of that magnitude in something like 15 years.  I suppose people in the work-a-day world are stuck with it though.

[Frolius666 0]

Hello everyone,

 

Does anyone have experience installing Ilive reader and the PngtoFshBatch tool on linux mint?

SC4 is working fine and so is the lot editor, but whenever I try to start the reader or the batch tool it just stops, no notifications.

I think I'm missing something.

Tried to download and install VB runtime on wine, but got the same result... nothing happens.

All help welcome...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

To get a diagnostic of what is happening, run the program from the Linux console.  Just open a console and type the command name you'd expect to use preceded by the wine request.  Here is my SC4 script to perhaps give you an idea of how this should go:

 

#!/bin/bash
date
env WINEPREFIX="/home/john/.wine" \
wine "C:/Program Files/Maxis/SimCity 4 Deluxe/Apps/SimCity 4.exe" \
 -intro:off -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 -d:directx \
 -CPUCount:1 -f &>~/sc4.log
date

 

This is my production script for hardware mode, but the thing to note is that I save the wine output to the file ~/sc4.log.

 

If you do this while executing any command the command output goes to the designated file.  The redirection key is &>.

 

If you are not a scripting type, the tilde is a Linux(UNIX) expression for your home directory.
 

[Alejandro24 575]

Plasma Desktop, by KDE, presents its versión number 5.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Tech Note:

 

If you are using ext4 file system on disk you should be aware that files can be fragmented.  There is a defragmentation program e4defrag which can be run in super user mode to defrag a file or a directory.  It has a test mode that will tell you if a file is fragmented enough to fix.

 

Here is an example of the test mode:

 

 

john@john-12-10:~$ sudo e4defrag -c Sim*/Reg*/Pass*
[sudo] password for john:
<Fragmented files>                             now/best       size/ext
1. /home/john/SimCity 4/Regions/Passepartout/City - Grand Island.sc4
                                                 3/1            741 KB
2. /home/john/SimCity 4/Regions/Passepartout/City - Owattawettness.sc4
                                                 2/1           1520 KB
3. /home/john/SimCity 4/Regions/Passepartout/City - Port Midland.sc4
                                                 2/1           2062 KB
4. /home/john/SimCity 4/Regions/Passepartout/City - Cote Moyen.sc4
                                                 1/1           2656 KB
5. /home/john/SimCity 4/Regions/Passepartout/City - Medoc.sc4
                                                 1/1           2324 KB

 Total/best extents                33/29
 Average size per extent            1735 KB
 Fragmentation score                0
 [0-30 no problem: 31-55 a little bit fragmented: 56- needs defrag]
 This directory (SimCity 4/Regions/Passepartout) does not need defragmentation.
 Done.

There is a man page for this program.

 

Note that the fragmentation score on these files is in the trivial area, so no defragmentation is needed.

[Alejandro24 575]

Linux commercials...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Fascinating stuff.  The most interesting is the IBM one.  If I was Microsoft and IBM was advertising Linux, I'd be running scared.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

wine-1.7.25 update received today.

[Alejandro24 575]

Well, I'll keep it in mind 'till the weekend...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Look what I found in my latest sc4.log file (the wine execution log)
 

fixme:ntoskrnl:KeInitializeMutex stub: 0x74c49c, 1

Mutex is the C++ routine to call if you want mutually exclusive items in a program.  It indicates a multi-tasking/multi-process initialization.  It explains some things.

 

The -CPUCount parameter on the command line would not be necessary if the program didn't try to multiprocess.

The fact that the call is there means that if wine ever gets this working, multiprocessing might work.

 

In the past, at least one of my tests got this program up to 120% on my system monitor which indicates it was using more than one of my cores.  However, the likelihood of a crash was increased, probably because this is not working or not working properly in wine at the time.

 

This is a new thing with the new version of wine AFAIK. wine-1.7.25

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

& Testing with new version of wine:
 

#!/bin/bash
date
env WINEPREFIX="/home/john/.wine" \
wine "C:/Program Files/Maxis/SimCity 4 Deluxe/Apps/SimCity 4.exe" \
 -intro:off -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 -d:directx \
 -CPUCount:2 -f &>~/sc4.log
date

 
The program does multi-process.  Here is a system monitor snap.  I have two cores, and for the program to get more than 50% CPU shows that it is using both of them.  This is running my largest city.

Click image for full size.
 


That's 58% of two processors, which says that both processors are in use by this process.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Just a note: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

 

I've been keeping my system up without a boot now for several months only booting when updates required it.  Today I did a vicarious boot because they system had become sluggish.  Maximum time up around 12 days.

[Lokimaros 0]

I have downloaded, installed and registered gmax12 on my Fedora 20 system, but gmax12.exe crashes when I try to run it:

fixme:ntdll:NtLockFile I/O completion on lock not implemented yet
fixme:ole:RemUnknown_QueryInterface No interface for iid {00000019-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}
wine: Call from 0x7b83bbec to unimplemented function msvcirt.dll.??0ifstream@@QAE@PBDHH@Z, aborting

Is running gmax itself actually needed at any stage, or does BAT just need files from it and not the binary itself?

 

If gmax itself needs to run, how do I find a fix for this?  A first search online only revealed this bug https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22616 to exist for over 4 years, but no fix or workaround.

  Edited August 31, 2014 by CaptCity  
Moved here.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The BAT is a gmax gamepack and gmax runs with it.  gmax is broken on wine.  Reference: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=4190 and has been for some time.

 

I spent some time trying to get it to run, and most of it does.  However, the material editor fails on some OLE problem and so is unusable for modelling.

 

To get as far with it as I have, you need to fix your problem with msvcirt.dll either with winetricks or by downloading that DLL directly and adding it to your wine environment.  I did a lot of fooling around getting gmax to run at all and under early versions of wine it doesn't.  I am on wine-1.7.25 with UBUNTU 14.04 LTS.

 

Here is a copy of my run log from wine:

 

fixme:service:scmdatabase_autostart_services Auto-start service L"dxregsvc" failed to start: 2

fixme:dwmapi:DwmIsCompositionEnabled 0x6b33a4f0
fixme:iphlpapi:NotifyAddrChange (Handle 0xd9e328, overlapped 0xd9e340): stub
fixme:ntdll:server_ioctl_file Unsupported ioctl 9800012c (device=9800 access=0 func=4b method=0)
fixme:winsock:server_ioctl_sock Unsupported ioctl 9800012c (device=9800 access=0 func=4b method=0)
fixme:winsock:WSAIoctl unsupported WS_IOCTL cmd (_WSAIOW(IOC_VENDOR, 300))
fixme:ntdll:server_ioctl_file Unsupported ioctl 9800012c (device=9800 access=0 func=4b method=0)
fixme:winsock:server_ioctl_sock Unsupported ioctl 9800012c (device=9800 access=0 func=4b method=0)
fixme:winsock:WSAIoctl unsupported WS_IOCTL cmd (_WSAIOW(IOC_VENDOR, 300))
err:ole:COMPOBJ_DllList_Add couldn't load in-process dll L"C:\\windows\\system32\\quartz.dll"
err:ole:CoGetClassObject no class object {cda42200-bd88-11d0-bd4e-00a0c911ce86} could be created for context 0x1
err:ole:COMPOBJ_DllList_Add couldn't load in-process dll L"C:\\windows\\system32\\quartz.dll"
err:ole:CoGetClassObject no class object {cda42200-bd88-11d0-bd4e-00a0c911ce86} could be created for context 0x1
err:ole:CoCreateInstance apartment not initialised
p11-kit: couldn't load module: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-key
ring-pkcs11.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
fixme:ntdll:NtLockFile I/O completion on lock not implemented yet
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000000 at address 0x1331a82 (thread 0037), starting debugger...
Could not load wine-gecko. HTML rendering will be disabled.
wine: configuration in '/home/john/.wine' has been updated.
p11-kit: couldn't load module: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-key
ring-pkcs11.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
fixme:ntdll:NtLockFile I/O completion on lock not implemented yet
fixme:ole:RemUnknown_QueryInterface No interface for iid {00000019-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}
fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x224e558,0x00000000), stub!
fixme:heap:RtlCompactHeap (0xd90000, 0x0) stub

 

gmax does come up on my 64-bit wine prefix, but that problem, AFAIK, still exists.

 

If you were planning to do some BAT work, you'll have to find the solution to this or revert to (gasp) windoze.

[BrandonThomason 0]

I recommend this to be stickied...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Actually, we should probably move the Linux section to the Linux Corner thread.

[Mayor of Tempest Lake 34]

Which Linux Distro are you using?

Slackware from 2001-2007; Ubuntu for a brief time in 2008; Suse 2009-2010; Mint 2011-

Which desktop environment are you using?

Xfce on the Mint, KDE for all others; GNOME2 was butt ugly.

Do you like Linux? Why?

Not the matter of like or not, I just like playing with new things.

Do you play SC4 or another game, or even run Windows software in Linux?

No, I have the gaming rig for that, and I will never change that to Linux since it requires too much effort to make sure all the games run on it. However, I do have Cygwin on it.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

Does anyone know why Civilization V for Linux does not launch in Mint Qiana?

--Ocram

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Probably not.  Are you running with wine?  Try looking in the wine data base for this app and see if anyone else has posted it.

[eugenio1982 6]

it's an old news but it just caught my eyes so ......

probably you'll be happy to see this project : http://rootgamer.com/11403/news/directx-linux-gallium-driver

 

credits to another italian :  Tiziano Bacocco