I bought received Doom 3 for the PC as a gift, way back in 2004 and really dug it’s dark, brutal, visually twisted and genuinely scary vibe for an FPS game. I got stuck fairly close to the end and never managed to finish it and some time later, I bought an expansion for the game, but never installed it. Since I was running a dual-boot between Linux and XP (strictly for video games), I eventually backed up my save files and uninstalled it to make room for newer games and kind of forgot about it.

Yesterday, while sorting through some old shit for a trip to the storage center to grab some summer clothes, I found the game in a pile of CDs. Remembering that the Id Software guys were into supporting Linux with their titles, I checked to see if a install package for Doom 3 on Linux was out. Sure enough, there was one, so I decided to try it out.

I found this FAQ and following the instructions, downloaded the install package, ran it and installed the game to ‘/usr/local/games/’ and then copied a bunch of files off the game CDs I had to the same directory. I still had to enter the software key off the game’s jewel case, but the result is a very fine looking Doom 3 running under Xubuntu. Totally fucking sweet.

I still have a Windows partition on my laptop and there are some games installed on it, but I rarely have the patience to boot it and rely mostly on my beloved Wii and PS2 for gaming fixes. The more Linux install packages I can get for PC games, the more money I’m going to
spend on the industry. I’m not really into paying a monthly fee for Cedega so I can run Windows games and I rarely have the patience to attempt to get a game running myself using Wine. I wish more game companies did this for Linux users.

This past weekend, I bit the bed-rail and picked up a copy of World of WarCraft. Having been a moderate EverQuest and EQ2 junkie, I’d thought I quit the MMORPG habit cold, but after seeing some statistics stating that over fifty percent of the MMORPG players worldwide are on WoW, I decided to give it a try. It seems the numerous weekends spent chained to a computer, fingers nervously twitching from an overdose of caffeine, nicotine and sleep deprivation while farming beasts to improve my leather-working skills was just not enough for me.

As with EQ, the install and initial update took well over an hour to finish and the monthly account fee is the same fifteen bucks I could be donating to save some village of crippled, blind children in Africa, but hey…I’m already going to Hell anyway.

In EQ, my main was a Wood-Elf Druid and I really got to liking the soloing capabilities of that class, so in keeping with tradition, I chose a Night-Elf Druid to be my first character. The huge Minotaur-like Tauren, Trolls, Orcs and Undead were really appealing since I generally like to keep it evil, but I decided to stick with what I know, at least for now. I’ve played Druids for about two years and I know that class’s place, alone or in groups pretty down-pat. Tree-hugger, I am not, but I know what I know.

I was very surprised to see how very similar WoW is to EQ2. The gameplay and mechanics are in many ways nearly the same. You’d think someone at Sony would’ve sued by now. Maybe they have or perhaps Sony ripped off someone else first—I’ve no idea, but the similarities had me up and running right away, killing and running all over the place.

The only real differences I see—aside from the basic stuff like graphics, races and zones is that questing seems to be better set up in WoW. I rarely finished any quests in EQ, but over the course of the weekend, I’d managed to get something over twenty complete quests under my belt in WoW. In a matter of a few hours (I did get some sleep), I managed to work my way up to level 12.

I missed MMORPGs. There’s a reason EQ was dubbed EverCrack. I’m not sure what the slang for WoW would be…”WarCrack”? I’m not sure how long I’m willing to invest in playing WoW, but for now, I’m all about it. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop me a /tell. My main’s name is Abbath (ripped straight from the Norwegian Black Metal gods, Immortal) on the Anvilmar server.

I bought a brand-spanking-fresh-copy of the FPS game, Prey, after waiting for it for almost a year. All the videos, screengrabs and rants I’d seen had me thinking it was going to be the coolest shit since duct tape.

After installing to my desktop’s XP partition (and subsequently spending 40 minutes running updates and patches since I never boot Windows anymore), I gave it a whirl and was greeted with a jerky, shitty looking game with the lowest frame-rate I’ve ever seen. A little deeper digging and I found that my NVidia GeForce 5200 wasn’t supported and closest I could get to smooth gameplay was by running at the lowest graphical settings, which were horrible. I wasn’t happy.

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Ever since I saw my first screenshot of what using a compositing manager can do to your desktop, I’ve been itching to try my hand at it. With my recent upgrade to Kubuntu Dapper Beta, along with my trusty NVidia card, I now had nothing but procrastination holding me back. Naturally, this means I’ve been sitting on this project for way to long, but today I sucked it in, strapped myself to my PC, bit the leather and gave it a go.

I figured it would be a big hassle, but following this guide found on the (K)Ubuntu forums, I was up and running composite windows in about five minutes. Everything looks good and stable. It’s fucking sweet! I now have configurable glass-like window translucency, drop-shadows and a really nice fade-in/out effect that a screenshot obviously cannot do justice.

I still have a good amount of tweaking to find that nice middle ground between sweet-ass eye-candy and usability, but one thing I realize right away is the need for a suitably cooler desktop wallpaper. Something heavy on the year 2535, I think—another project for me to procrastinate on.

Now with all this graphical sweetness all up in my display, all I have left to do is try my hand at setting up and running XGL and Compiz.

My nearly brand spanking new computer kicked it’s heels up and died on me this weekend. It looks like my power supply is shot for some reason. Luckily, I had the forsight to buy one of these extended manufacturer warranties. I spent an hour or so on the phone with a support guy who ad me ripping boards and wires out left and right, trying to get the thing to turn on. Finally, after eliminating any other possibilities, the guy set me up to have someone come to my apartment and replace the busted parts and get me running again. This is good. But, seeing as I’m leaving for a vacation in Vermont on Thursday and the replacement parts need to be mailed to me, I’m looking at having to spend over a week without this computer running. I have another computer that I run as a backup, but that too is completely fritzed. It’s just old and has needs to be taken behind the shed and shot. That leaves a G5 that I can use, but no Linux and no video games. Un-fucking-acceptable.

So, I did what any self-respecting antisocial computer junkie would do, which was immediately buy a new computer. I have a brand new laptop being express Fed-Ex delivered to me tomorrow morning. I intend to plug it it and immediately install Linux, throw out my old backup PC and use it as my new mobile/backup system. This should tide me over until my main beast of a machine is back up and running as it should be. I’m tempted to try running one of the preview releases of Ubuntu’s “Breezy Badger” (developers should never name distros. It sounds like an animal with gas.) as it’s got the latest hardware support and the final release is only a few weeks away. All the impending geekdom has me sweaty already.

This week, I decided to play mad genius and attempt a dual installation of Linux and Windows on my main computer. I already run Linux on my old computer, but it’s slow and I wanted to see what it would do on my souped up beast of a machine and besides, other than video games, Windoze sucks armadillo balls. I only keep it around because I’m a video game junkie and it’s just easier for me to boot up XP than deal with trying to get a game to run on Linux.

I’ve been using the Ubuntu distribution of Linux for about a year now and I decided I would stick with it for this install. I like it,but will admit that my experience with other packages is minimal. I’m definitely not one of those guys that after many long years of trying every flavor of Linux, thought really deeply and settled on one. Ubuntu works pretty good for me, at least so far.

No problem for a daring genius like myself, I thought. I have two hard drives in my main PC, so I figured I’d leave the one with XP installed on it alone, clean off the other, format and install Linux on it. This way, if there were any problems, my system and my files would remain intact on the main drive. No need for any real backing up, right?

Wrong. So very seriously wrong. Sometimes I can be such an overeager hairless chimp of a fucking retard.

In an effort to keep a long and boring story short, I’ll cut to the basics. I fucked up. I tried again and fucked that up as well. I ended up with Linux completely screwed and waking up next to grandma, buck naked as well as being unable to boot XP. After taking some advice from a support forum, I attempted a Windows repair. However, instead of repairing, it completely fucked me, resulting in a permanent blue screen of death.

So there I was with no working operating system, completely screwed for not having done a proper backup. For several minutes, I contemplated jamming my keyboard up my nose, strangling myself with the mouse cord or shoving my head through my monitor. I had five years worth of photos trapped in there, along with all my game save files. Horror!

Luckily, I had the poise to download and run a live CD so I could boot Linux and run it from the disc drive. I ran a little script called winmac_fstab that searches for and mounts NTFS drives or partitions. Bazoom! I had access to my files. XP is so fucking unsecure. It took me five seconds to bypass my login completely and get at my user folder, or any other folder I needed.

Armed with a USB flash drive, I reenacted the fall of Saigon and evacuated as many files as I could and pretty much got everything out and safely stored on a different computer. Finally, after rescuing everything important, I completely wiped both drives and tried again…and again…and yet again. All told, I think I ended up wiping my PC about three times.

Then, as if sent from a higher power, a thought came into my thick skull: Why not look for a fucking tutorial, you stupid fucking renegade herpes sore?

A minute or two of searching Google brought me to this tutorial on dual installing Ubuntu and Windows. I reinstalled XP and with the help of this rescue CD, resized the partition, leaving about 10 gigs of free space which I subsequently installed Linux into. It worked perfectly.

I now have the glorious experience of being asked which operating system I wish to boot, every time I turn on my computer. I can laugh my most evil laugh and say no to Windoze every time. Ubuntu loads and runs about ten times faster than XP and so far works great. All is well and back to normal. Next time, I swear I’ll consult a tutorial first.