The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

This is more of a Wine question that a Linux question, but I haven't been able to find the answer on WineHQ or by Googling. I'm using Ubuntu 7.04, vanilla kernel.

I'm trying to get Steam working in Wine, and everything goes smoothly (if very, very slowly), until it comes time to download the games. I start the download and it begins (at about 3.0 K/s, but I could live with that as a one time download, and I don't even think that it's a Wine problem), then after about 5 minutes Wine freezes and I get this:

code:

err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0xe5f4bd8 "?" wait timed out in thread 0015, blocked by 0025, retrying (60 sec)
err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0xe5f4bd8 "?" wait timed out in thread 0015, blocked by 0025, retrying (60 sec)
err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0xe5f4bd8 "?" wait timed out in thread 0015, blocked by 0025, retrying (60 sec)

which continues forever until I Ctrl-C in the console and then killall -9 wineserver.

Haven't been able to find anyone else with this or a similar problem.

edit: I'm using the Wine version from the Wine Feisty repository (0.9.35), but the version that comes with Feisty does the same thing. I've tried removing and reinstalling my whole .wine directory a couple times now, and the same thing happens with Steam each time. I run Diablo II win Wine and it works flawlessly, it's only Steam that I'm having a problem with.

fatcat fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Apr 24, 2007

# ¿ Apr 24, 2007 17:06

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:39

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

AlexHat posted:

Small question here, with the icons in the top righthand corner, a lot have the icon on a square of white or grey, making it look pretty unsightly. Anyone know how you can change this? It's not too important.

It's probably not gonna be possible for the uTorrent icon, at least. I don't know what the far left icon is, so I can't comment on that.

Additionally, why are you running Azureus and uTorrent?

# ¿ Apr 24, 2007 20:41

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 on a Thinkpad T43 with an ATI X300 video card, and I'm trying to use my S-video port to display video on my TV. It works, but it doesn't work perfectly. I want my screen to stretch on to my TV rather than mirror, but it only stretches at the GDM login screen. Once I login, it switches to mirroring. This is very annoying. Anyone know how I might fix it?

# ¿ May 9, 2007 02:46

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

teapot posted:

Enable Xinerama.

Well that did work, but now X just treats my two screens as one, which introduces some new problems. I guess my real question is, is there any way to get dual screens in Linux to act pretty much identical to dual screens in Windows? It seems like GDM before I enable Xinerama is close, but of course I can't correctly use that configuration in anything but GDM.

My reason for this is because I want to be able to watch fullscreen MLB.tv video on my TV while doing other stuff on my laptop (and the fact that MLB.tv, a subscription service that lets you watch every MLB game and uses WMP functionality, works under VLC in Linux is amazing to me). If Xinerama is the best that you can get, then I guess I'll have to deal with it.

# ¿ May 9, 2007 05:45

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

Maybe I'm just lucky, but the fglrx driver has never given me any trouble at all. I use a 9800 Pro in my desktop and an x300 in my laptop and both work perfectly (well, except for Beryl stuff, but that doesn't matter to me at all).

# ¿ Jul 12, 2007 21:12

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

Col posted:

It's funny you say that, I find it much easier to type 'apt-get install flashplayer' for example then go to the flash website, get past the adds, download the .exe etc Give it a little while, you'll soon appreciate!

If you don't want to type anything, Applications -> Add/remove gives you a prettified gui and System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager gives you a less pretty but more powerful gui to install packages from.

If you're struggling a bit with installing things, I would also highly recommend Automatix 2 - it'll make things like dvd support / video codecs, write-support for your windows drives etc etc a one-click matter.

http://www.getautomatix.com/

I realize that Automatix is helpful for some people, and lots of people don't care about proper system maintenance or administration or what have you, but Automatix can cause some pretty hairy situations and is pretty buggy. This page gives a pretty thorough rundown: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77440.html

Everything that Automatix does can be done pretty easily manually, and it results in a much cleaner solution.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2007 01:57

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

Twinxor posted:

What's wrong with debugging new code? Seems pretty useful to me.

uh oh

# ¿ Aug 22, 2007 22:06

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

Scaevolus posted:

To demonstrate, I found a random desktop, and exported it to JPEG with Photoshop CS2 and GIMP 2.4rc1

Original (lossless) png (from http://jamesthevicar.com/images/png/desktop-20050325.png)

Photoshop, saved with Save for Web dialog, Optimized, Quality 64 (384KB)

GIMP, saved with quality 85, optimized on, subsampling 1x1,1x1,1x1 (best quality), and DCT Method Floating point (387KB)

The one made by photoshop looks just slightly better. Feel free to tweak settings if you can make one that looks better.

Nice example. There's definitely more artifacting in the GIMP version.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2007 02:36

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

Accipiter posted:

You don't learn Linux installing either of those things.

So using Linux is a bad way to learn Linux. Hm.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2007 02:20

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

FreeNX is fantastic in that it lets me have a usable remote desktop over my slow-upload DSL connection, but I'm having some issues with it. First, from the Googling I've done, it seems like it's not possible to attach to an X session that's in progress, a la Windows Remote Desktop. Also, while I can tunnel VNC over NX, one of the primary advantages (for me) is taken away, namely the ability to run the session at an arbitrary (smaller) resolution.

If anyone has a solution to either of those issues or has a better suggestion, lay it on me. Otherwise, tell me how to use FreeNX effectively.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2008 17:06

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

JoeNotCharles posted:

Every time I shut down my computer without disconnecting FreeNX, next time I connect to that host I get a session list with the option to resume or terminate a running session. I usually just terminate, but I'm pretty sure resuming worked when I tried it.

Yeah, this works for me too, but what I would really like to do is be able to keep my stuff running (IRC client, Pidgin, other stuff) on my main display and attach the FreeNX client to it. Unfortunately I guess that isn't possible.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2008 17:38

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

I have lost the ability to right click on my desktop. Right clicking works as normal everywhere else, but does nothing on the desktop. I'm not really a newbie, but I don't have any idea where to begin attempting to fix this.

Ubuntu 7.10 X86-64
NVIDIA proprietary driver
Pretty much stock other than that

edit: nevermind, figured it out. nautilus wasn't started.

fatcat fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Feb 5, 2008

# ¿ Feb 5, 2008 03:23

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

I guess I'll ask this here. Is there a way to get Firefox 3's tabs to behave the way tabs in Firefox 2 and prior did? That is, is there a way to make it so when I middle click a folder of bookmarks, it closes all the other ones and opens the new ones in their place, rather than just opening the new tabs in addition to the old ones? I've tried a few settings in about:config, but none of them have done what I'm looking for.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2008 02:34

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

ZeeBoi posted:

Lovely. Ubuntu 7.10 does everything right except sound on my laptop. Sound used to work but wireless didn't, now it's the other way round.

Fedora 8 does sound but no wireless. Ditto with openSUSE.

Wee...

If you're not averse to living on the bleeding edge, you could give Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 5 a try. I'm personally running it right now and it works fine for me.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/hardy/alpha-5/

# ¿ Feb 25, 2008 00:54

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:39

fatcat: Jun 18, 2004; albert's lookin at you

Pardot posted:

I've grepped through the man pages with no luck: Is there a flag for tar that will make it not preserve the directory structure when extracting -- dump everything into the current directory?

tar -xf <file> I think... Preserving the directory structure is something you have to specify, not the default behavior.

edit: actually, looking at the tar manpage online, and being on a Windows machine at the moment, I'm just going from memory and could be wrong.

fatcat fucked around with this message at 05:29 on May 3, 2008

# ¿ May 3, 2008 05:25

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible