Comment Re:Curious about Ubuntu (Score 1) 678
I play World of Warcraft and I recently switched my home laptop from Windows Vista to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.
I switched because my little laptop has 1 GB of RAM. I couldn't afford more. Also, I found Vista to be slow, clunky, paranoid, stupid and amazingly hard to work with. You can't customize it, you can't tweak it, and WoW on 1 GB of RAM on a 512 MB shared memory video card was playable, but just barely. A number of other things that one would assume would work didn't (Media Player doesn't come with DVD codecs, so movies didn't work), and the Vista TV-interface thing (no idea what it's called) hiccuped playing my DVD's.
I know my laptop isn't a fast box, but let's be reasonable here, you don't need a ton of power to run a DVD player. The fact it froze and hiccuped playing my Law and Order: SVU DVDs is inexcusable.
I realize that I could have loaded XP. But then I would have had to find a copy, get a friend to give me a key, and still not have Office or the DVD burning software that came with Vista for my drive. There aren't any free DVD burning software solutions for Windows.
So, I loaded up Ubuntu 8.04, after copying off all my stuff to a USB drive. I loaded Wine onto Ubuntu (via Add/Remove), and it installed the package and configured it and put Wine in my main menu. Then I copied my WoW directory into my new Program Files and double-clicked the WoW.exe icon.
The Blizzard downloader decided I needed the patch they'd just released, so it downloaded it and installed it and started WoW as per normal. I logged in to test performance.
It ran about the same speed as on Windows, and I was disappointed, before I realized that Ubuntu had decided to crank my resolution as high as my LCD would support. On Vista, I'd had to turn down my resolution to 800x600 to get it to run anywhere near 20 fps, and that was with effects, spell effects, death effect, textures...basically everything turned off. If I had it set to 1024x768 or anything higher and ANY effects turned on, I could take a step and wait 20 seconds for it to catch up.
On Ubuntu, with all effects turned on, at the highest possible resolution, it ran about 20 fps. Still not terrific, but definately playable given that my video card is piddly. I'm sure that if I turn it down and remove some effects, it'll run better.
Ubuntu's not for everyone...but I was amazed to find that my little cheap laptop from Wal-Mart worked out of the box (I had to load a newer driver for my wireless card, but it was literally one click), and that my new interface is both shiny, pretty and FAST.
Plus, Ubuntu comes with all sorts of free software...I spent hours upon hours loading and unloading anything that looked cool. In the process I found a ton of cool games and other neat utilities and music players and burner software...
Anyway. If you're not sure about switching, there's a tool called WUBI (http://www.wubi-installer.org) that will load a complete Ubuntu install into a file on your Windows drive...then you reboot onto the "Ubuntu" side and play to your heart's content. Wubi comes with the latest Ubuntu, or you can download it for free.
I made the switch for good. I'd tried previously in the past to switch to Linux, but found myself going back to Windows for "one or two things." Now, Ubuntu is my primary at work and at home...I've yet to rebuild my big machine with it, cause that one still runs XP, which works for right now.
Now, I never have to switch back...cause the only game I play regularly works under Ubuntu...seamlessly. And in the event I need something that Wine can't handle, I can load up a virtualbox for free.
I switched because my little laptop has 1 GB of RAM. I couldn't afford more. Also, I found Vista to be slow, clunky, paranoid, stupid and amazingly hard to work with. You can't customize it, you can't tweak it, and WoW on 1 GB of RAM on a 512 MB shared memory video card was playable, but just barely. A number of other things that one would assume would work didn't (Media Player doesn't come with DVD codecs, so movies didn't work), and the Vista TV-interface thing (no idea what it's called) hiccuped playing my DVD's.
I know my laptop isn't a fast box, but let's be reasonable here, you don't need a ton of power to run a DVD player. The fact it froze and hiccuped playing my Law and Order: SVU DVDs is inexcusable.
I realize that I could have loaded XP. But then I would have had to find a copy, get a friend to give me a key, and still not have Office or the DVD burning software that came with Vista for my drive. There aren't any free DVD burning software solutions for Windows.
So, I loaded up Ubuntu 8.04, after copying off all my stuff to a USB drive. I loaded Wine onto Ubuntu (via Add/Remove), and it installed the package and configured it and put Wine in my main menu. Then I copied my WoW directory into my new Program Files and double-clicked the WoW.exe icon.
The Blizzard downloader decided I needed the patch they'd just released, so it downloaded it and installed it and started WoW as per normal. I logged in to test performance.
It ran about the same speed as on Windows, and I was disappointed, before I realized that Ubuntu had decided to crank my resolution as high as my LCD would support. On Vista, I'd had to turn down my resolution to 800x600 to get it to run anywhere near 20 fps, and that was with effects, spell effects, death effect, textures...basically everything turned off. If I had it set to 1024x768 or anything higher and ANY effects turned on, I could take a step and wait 20 seconds for it to catch up.
On Ubuntu, with all effects turned on, at the highest possible resolution, it ran about 20 fps. Still not terrific, but definately playable given that my video card is piddly. I'm sure that if I turn it down and remove some effects, it'll run better.
Ubuntu's not for everyone...but I was amazed to find that my little cheap laptop from Wal-Mart worked out of the box (I had to load a newer driver for my wireless card, but it was literally one click), and that my new interface is both shiny, pretty and FAST.
Plus, Ubuntu comes with all sorts of free software...I spent hours upon hours loading and unloading anything that looked cool. In the process I found a ton of cool games and other neat utilities and music players and burner software...
Anyway. If you're not sure about switching, there's a tool called WUBI (http://www.wubi-installer.org) that will load a complete Ubuntu install into a file on your Windows drive...then you reboot onto the "Ubuntu" side and play to your heart's content. Wubi comes with the latest Ubuntu, or you can download it for free.
I made the switch for good. I'd tried previously in the past to switch to Linux, but found myself going back to Windows for "one or two things." Now, Ubuntu is my primary at work and at home...I've yet to rebuild my big machine with it, cause that one still runs XP, which works for right now.
Now, I never have to switch back...cause the only game I play regularly works under Ubuntu...seamlessly. And in the event I need something that Wine can't handle, I can load up a virtualbox for free.
