Today's Linux #4

3/04

Diablo 3

    It's been a busy Monday for me. Really, it's been a busy few weeks for me. Lots of school, lots of tennis, lots of Linux. 

    I'm at a point now where I use Linux exclusively, except for the occasional hour out of my day where I play Diablo on my Windows partition. Now I'm finding out that it's in the realm of possibility to play on Linux as well.

    I first found this out when I learned about W.I.N.E. A program that stores the necessary DLLs for most Windows applications to work. It's not like a Virtual environment, or VM, it's just a program that allows Windows applications to community smoothly with the Linux kernel. (They really stress that Wine is not an Emulator).

    At first, it seemed a little daunting. Not only are there a ton of versions of WINE out there, but there are a lot of things that need to be installed through WINE for things to work. Different libraries, different variations of WINE, different sets of resources. It was all very overwhelming...luckily there exists a program called PlayOnLinux, and through some sort of Witchcraft, all  you have to do is look up your application (or in this case game) on its' extensive list of  supported software, hit 'install', and then select the .exe Windows installer. This front end does all the heavy lifting, and finds the best WINE configuration. 

    When I booted it up for the first time, it is a little sketchy. The launcher was encapsulated in a big oblong black box, and it sat at 0/0 0.00mps for about 10 minutes, but once it started, it was pulling the normal 6+, and downloaded great. 

    In terms of performance, it runs comparable to Windows. I have a pretty hardy system, but I get best results on medium settings, with shadows off. It'll usually dance between 35 and 40 frames.

    It makes me wonder; "Wouldn't it be in the essence of Linux to optimize this?", I mean...how totally awesome would it be if we never had to request a native Linux client...we just made Linux run Windows games? I'm sure there are massive hurdles along this line of reasoning, but it's something.

    I'll be updating a little more frequently now, I've got some time on my hands. I've been having a lot of fun with my Nexus 7, and I just ordered my first ARM PC from Sparkfun, so I'll inevitably be posting some of my projects here; The first being getting a working install of any variation of Linux that's running kernel 3.0+.