Holy Cow! A year since my last post?

(Blows dust off of keyboard)

Cough...Cough...Okay..Where was I?

Ah, yes. Slackware, wine, and WoW.

Well, many changes have happened since my last blog.

• WoW has come out with the much anticipated Cataclysm expansion, with it's new areas, redone old areas, and way too many changes to even contemplate, including updated graphics and other eye-candy (And the resultant greater stress on video cards, etc.)
• wine is up to version 1.3, and seems, at least to me, to be more stable and 'snappier' than 1.2
• I have switched to Ubuntu as my distro of choice for Linux. (Not that Slackware was bad, Not at all. But the INCREDIBLE ease of use and updating/package manager and GNOME as the default desktop make it slightly easier for me. Installing Mangler, a Vent client, in Slackware was next to impossible)
• My hardware has changed some. Not alot, but some. I currently run a AMD 5200+ dual core proc, 4GB DDR2 PC5300 ram, and two harddrives, one a 500GB SATAII, and the other a 250GB SATAII drive. Video is well served with a Nvidia 9600GSO PCI-X16 card, with 768MB DDR2 memory.
• And 5 new kittens running on my keyboard.

Most of the info in the previous post is still valid. But I have noticed, and PROVED, that WoW/wine/opengl is FASTER than WoW/Windows7 64bit/D3D.

Check out this video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQFBK1yNIxE

That was made just before Cata came out. I'm in the process of leveling new 'toons, and getting my 80 level characters to 85. Maybe a couple of weeks.

3am..Will update soon, and tell:

• How to get Ubuntu, and install it, and basic configuration to get you started
• How to get wine, install it, and configure it for WoW
• How to get World of Warcraft, install it, and basic configuration.

All of the above will be fairly general guides, due to your hardware and other things being different (For example, if you only have slow broadband, downloading the ENTIRE WoW install of 12GB+ of files and updates might be silly)

Stay tuned...

First post....Thought it might help

I thought I might blog about my experiences with Slackware, wine, and World of Warcraft...

First off, what is Linux? To me, freedom from being 'stuck' with an operating sytem that is primarily designed by a committee that decides what I want, and how I want to not only use it, but how I MUST use it. If you need more in-depth answers than that, please feel free to search the web.

What is Slackware? It is the "oldest" Linux distro out there still being maintained/developed. It is STABLE (As is rock-solid), and leaves you with the choice of what to do with it. After you install it, it doesn't even assume you want a GUI. It actually (GASP!) dumps you into the CLI! (CLI=Command Line Interface...Windows users: Think DOS). After that, it's up to you. Do you want a GUI? Then configure X for your hardware. Do you want a Webserver? Then configure the conf file, and start it. After getting the basics down, it won't take you long until you're zipping along at breakneck speed, and breaking the OS every 5 min. But, since YOU setup the OS, YOU can also fix it. To me, this = FUN!

What is wine?

If you are not a Linux user, then the term "wine" may mean either:

• An alcoholic drink, usually accompanied by cheese and terribly old music
• The sound of someone complaining with a nasally voice (If this is your thought, then you should learn how to spell "whine")

In a nutshell, wine is a Linux program to allow you to run many Windows programs in Linux without an emulator ("Wine Is Not an Emulator"). It provides many of the necessary 'hooks' for programs to run natively in Linux, but were written for Windows. Thus, it actually uses your hardware, instead of a "virtual machine", so allowing much faster speeds. (More on this later)

In future posts, I'll add the topics of:

• Slackware: Getting it, installing it.
• wine: Where is it? Compiling, and installing
• Methods of installing World of Warcraft

For now, I've got to go....Tuesday afternoon, you know, and the servers will be back up soon.....