[Gilrond]

Pangaea said:

I'm a bit befuddled about Humble Bundle tbh. It only seems possible to buy whatever games are in the current bundle.

Pangaea: Not exactly. They are in the process of making a regular store (i.e. non promotional). And you can buy many games that way already, though you have to hunt for them (they don't have central page for it). Search for Humble Store widget.

Here is a partial list: http://pcgamingwiki....ki/Humble_Store

[.Volsung.]

That's the problem. Programs are either for Windows or for Linux. A Windows game won't work on Linux or OSX, but thanks to Wine we can *try*. What we need are real Linux versions.

As a gamer and not a computer enthusiast you have to realize that. A game is not just a game, it's a game for Windows or Mac or Linux. Imagine the frustration trying to run Mac binaries on Windows.

And you can get many Indies through the humble store directly on their websites. Not on sale though.

[.Volsung.]

Sorry for double posting.

Good news, Pangaea. Humble Bundle 6 is here and includes games for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. What else could you ask for!?

http://www.humblebundle.com/

[Glaroug]

Speaking of starting them out young, wouldn't it be interesting if Pangaea's favorite game's vendor, Steam, released some timed Linux exclusives? For example, what if Left For Dead 3 had a Beta release that was only avaible for Linux?........or, dare I mention its name, Half Life 3 had a simlar preview for Linux users only? I never even considered considering a Playstation until Red Dead Revolver. No way Linux is getting a big name exclusive any time soon but maybe something like this could stir curious cats to at least try Ubuntu or something (and hopefully amazon doens't frighten them off).

In light of the "news" portion in the title, while fighting the never ending battle with Intel-Amd cards, I saw something about ubuntu and custom drivers or something?...

EDIT: Wayland, that's it.

[Gilrond]

Drivers wise, everyone waits for EGL drivers to come. Right now all the drivers are for glx. All distros wait to switch to Wayland, and Ubuntu is switching to Mir. These will replace Xorg display server. But they require new drivers (using EGL). So far neither Nvidia, nor AMD released such drivers for the desktop.

I think this is going to be the major disruption in the Linux world, and soon. Not sure how it will reflect on gaming, but most probably in a significant way. The fact that Canonical decided to reinvent the wheel with Mir increases the mess, but hopefully Wayland and Mir can at least share the same drivers.

[Glaroug]

I wonder if there connection with Steam will have a significant affect one way or another with regards to the big name GPU companies and drivers catering to Ubuntu and its fellows. It seems kind of wonky to stear away from the others like that, especially when you said things like OpenGL are getting even better. In fact, if things are getting better, switching seems downright foolish. I guess that means all the focus is now on the "cloud" thing with the phone, computer and tv. Boy, if ever distro did that I guess open source drivers would be a tangled swampy mess.

[Gilrond]

Switching away from current Xorg has valid reasons. It's too riddled with legacy stuff and overheads. And Wayland offers way leaner and flexible server, which is especially useful on mobile devices (and will be used by mobile Linux in the future for sure, for example in Sailfish and Tizen).

So switch Xorg -> Wayland is kind of in the process for a while (except that Nvidia doesn't play good, and ignores it yet). The strange part here is Canonical's Mir. Canonical decided that Wayland isn't good enough for them, and bascially reinvented most of it from scratch. Some consider it NIH syndrome, or just desire for in house control. Hopefully though, the udnerlying drivers infrastructure between Wayland and Mir will be compatible. If Canonical can convince Nvidia to release EGL desktop drivers - that would benefit everyone, despite the rift they created by Mir.

Here is a good video about Wayland and Xorg relations:
http://mirror.linux....yland_and_X.ogv

[Pangaea]

Can this be related to Unity and Ubuntu's move in a fairly unwanted direction in the open source community? Re: Unity, Amazon, etc. From what I've heard, people are rather upset about it, and are moving away from Unity as a result. Perhaps Canonical wants to "integrate" more such solutions into Ubuntu..?

Been struggling more with POL today, failing to get games to work. There was talk of mono packages earlier. What are the ones I need named? Saving in BG2 doesn't work, so I hope I lack some packages that may solve it.

Cheers for the new humble bundle Volsung. The only game that looked interesting was Broken Sword, however, and I already have that.

[Gilrond]

Installing BG2 now, I'll see how it goes (I downloaded it first, but probably will just test it. It's better to play BG1 first I guess?).

[Gilrond]

OK, I started BG2 - everything went fine. I didn't have any options for changing the resolution, so it remains fixed. Is there any way to change it? Created a character and started the game. After that saving worked fine. Nothing weird so far.

I'm using Wine 1.4.1. No default native overrides used, except for gdiplus (needed for GOG installer). I do have a pile of stuff installed under Wine already, so not sure what's else affected (like .NET, OpenAL, VC++ redistributables and etc.).

[.Volsung.]

Gilrond said:

Installing BG2 now, I'll see how it goes (I downloaded it first, but probably will just test it. It's better to play BG1 first I guess?). ›››

My recommendation is: if you have time, play BG1 first. But if you are tight on time, BG2 + ToB will satisfy all your cRPG needs.

Gilrond said:

OK, I started BG2 - everything went fine. I didn't have any options for changing the resolution, so it remains fixed. Is there any way to change it? Created a character and started the game. After that saving worked fine. Nothing weird so far.

I'm using Wine 1.4.1. ›››

You have to run a separate executable for the settings. It's called Config.exe, and it should be in the same directory as BGMain.exe. There you can set up resolution, difficulty, and so on.

Edit: Sorry, it's BGConfig.exe. However, I recommend you install the G3 widescreen patch and Ghostdog's larger fonts patch. Then use the G3 patch to set your desired resolution. I recommend 1280x800 with slightly larger fonts.

Edit2: you can also play in a window if you like. Just don't go crazy with the resolution, graphics are pixel based and everything will get tiny.

[Gilrond]

I changed the resolution through BGConfig.exe to 1024x768 - no issues. I'll take a look at the patches, but it seems that Pangaea has some problem that I don't even without those patches. No idea what that can be though, except that I have a different series Nvidia card and later driver. Ah, and installation was straight through Wine with GOG installer. I didn't use PlayOnLinux.

[.Volsung.]

Gilrond said:

I changed the resolution through BGConfig.exe to 1024x768 - no issues. I'll take a look at the patch, but it seems that Pangaea has some problem that I don't even without those patches. No idea what that can be though, except that I have a different series Nvidia card and later driver. Ah, and installation was straight through Wine with GOG installer. I didn't use PlayOnLinux. ›››

PlayOnLinux simply matches a Wine version to a windows program, in a bottle, similar to what Crossover Games does. I don't think that is the issue. I just wish I could sit in front of Pangaea's computer and fix it. He could pay me in Norwegian beer.

BG2 works great without any patches. The only cosmetic patches I recommend are the G3 (to play in resolutions higher than the officially supported, including 16:10 and 16:9) and together with G3, the larger UI. Otherwise it is close to unreadable. You'd be surprised at how well the game plays in widescreen format. Other than that, vanilla BG2 is perfect. Some people install mods to disable traps, others increase the amount of stackable ammo and potions to 99 (limit is 40), but I think these are game elements that add to planning and management. Vanilla BG2 is already perfect

[Gilrond]

Just looked around PlayOnLinux - it's pretty interesting actually. It uses distro agnostic Wine builds it seems and provides a whole ton of versions, which can be useful (since Debian packs only current stable wine and wine-unstable, which is a new addition and didn't make it to testing yet). So I might use it too, since as you said it also isolates wine version and prefix for each game, which makes it a cleaner environment.

I used to just use straight one wine prefix and didn't play around with multiple versions at the same time yet, but this can be handy when some stuff doesn't work or there are regressions in newer versions.

[Pangaea]

Great to hear it is working on your end. Saving worked too I presume? That crashes on my end (but not with BG1, oddly).

Just wish these games worked on my end too. Do you think it would help to do a full re-install?

I would recommend to play BG1 first. Though it is much better to play it in the BG2 engine via easyTutu or Baldur's Gate Trilogy, and I have no idea if it is possible to get that working in linux. BG2 is fine as it is out of the 'box', but I do prefer to mod it a little, to make inventory management easier.

If you bunker down to play them, you are in for one hell of a ride

[Gilrond]

Pangaea: Saving/loading worked fine. You can try using other Wine versions, may be that affects it - hard to say. If you could replace your graphics card to some newer generation Nvidia, I suspect that could improve things, but it's not a quick and easy fix.

I'll download BG1 and start with that. They look like deep RPGs with involved story, so it would better to follow them in order.

Pangaea said:

Can this be related to Unity and Ubuntu's move in a fairly unwanted direction in the open source community?

I think these are all parts of the same trend - Canonical wants more controlled and in house development approach. Which has its benefits (for them), but it usually doesn't sit well with the wider community. Unity thing is kind of moot - but I don't really care, since Ubuntu users still had an option of using KDE or Gnome for example (I'm not even talking about privacy issues in Unity, that's a totally different story). But Mir shift is already running deeper. Meaning that once Ubuntu will shift to Mir, other DEs won't work with it, and it will be even more isolationist. Ubuntu derivatives (such as Kubuntu) already discuss this potential problem: http://www.phoronix....item&px=MTM4OTU

These kind of things made me avoid Ubuntu from the start.

[Gilrond]

https://lwn.net/Subs...86605c6ca6de22/

[Pangaea]

Sorry to bother you with yet more questions, but how do I install the latest PlayOnLinux (4.2.1)? Followed the recipe on their site, hoping that would get the latest, as the Software Manager 'only' gets 4.1.1. But their terminal recipe also got 4.1.1. I did manage to install it using the .deb package, but then I'm lacking dependencies, like a 32-bit openGL library (POL complains about this upon launch), and perhaps others I don't know about.

I am hoping the latest version will somehow work better on my computer. Buying a new-ish graphics card now, with my finances, isn't really an option. Instead, I'm waiting and hoping to get next generation's graphics card and CPU at a reasonable price.

This is their online recipe btw

wget -q "http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg" -O- | apt-key add 
-wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_squeeze.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list
apt-get update
apt-get install playonlinux

[Gilrond]

I'm not using PlayOnLinux yet, so I'm not familiar with it. How exactly does it complain about missing OpenGL libraries?

By the way, we have a thread dedicated to howtos and these kind of issues (and this one was originally intended for news and discussions about general Linux developments related to gaming). Let's continue troubleshooting discussions in the other thread for more readability:

http://en.thewitcher...-hints-and-tips