C&C 3 on Linux

I’ve got Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars running on my Gentoo Linux installation with wine 0.9.34 by following the instructions here. I had to first install it on windows though, and copy the folder for the installer didn’t work, even with Crossover Office.

Except for (very glitchly) video and sometimes a crash everything seems to run. (Didn’t try multiplayer yet though). I had to put all quality settings to lowest, which makes me wonder whether that is my radeon X1400 being not so good as I expected or wine just being slow in emulating Direct3D.

ati-drivers-8.33.6 for Gentoo

This is a slightly adjusted 25.3 ebuild that will give you the 8.33.6 ati-drivers for Gentoo. Yes, it’s dirty. They aren’t in the main tree yet because they are considered broken, although it works just fine for me.

Download: ati-drivers-overlay-8.33.6.tar.bz2

Extract them to an overlay.

Update, the 8.33.6 drivers are in the mainline tree now, so you should use those instead of mine.

Xgl

After a long night wrestling with alfa source code, I’ve managed to install Xgl.

Xgl ownageXgl transparency

Xgl is a Xorg-X11 layer that uses openGL to achieve some nice stunning effects.

One of these is to be able to switch desktops by pressing ‘Ctrl+Alt’ and dragging your desktop-cube.

There are a lot of other things that I can’t show with screenshots. Take a look at the Xgl release post. These things include that all forms behave flexible. If I drag a form it’s like it’s made of rubber instead of concrete. Also every form pops up gently animated. There’s also a mac osX expose-clone, which is really helpfull.

If you want to install it yourself then the gentoo wiki article and hanno’s blog post should be very helpful.

selfish driver control panels

A week ago my windows was agonizing slow. Starting up would take ages, and getting those ‘windows is out of virtual memory’ messages was common, so I decided to reinstall windows.
When reinstalled windows was using 120 mb without anything special installed.. so I started to install my usual application: apache, mysql, mssql.net express, php.. etc..
At the point I got those installed windows was using 250 mb instead of 120mb! msSQL server uses 50mb`s (although that number isn’t displayed in the task manager properly (i guess due to modules). MySQL and Apache both 25mb`s…
So I put the apache/sql servers services off by default and made a little bat script to start those when I want and put that one on my desktop. I also made a backup of windows so I didn’t need that horribly slow reinstall..
I installed some basic drivers via the provided driver cd’s loading a lot of junk like tray icons on my computer. They did not appear to use a lot of memory in the taskmanager but when quiting them it saved 100 mb :-/. 100mb used by selfish driver control panels thinking they are the single-most-used application and the only one sucking that amount of memory…
So instead of using those horrible flashy flash autorun installers I let windows find the correct driver .inf files and install it.
This really saves a lot of performance.. (I’ve cut down my startup time by 4 times).

So, better let windows find the drivers you require on your driver cd’s instead of using those selfish flashy traybar spamming driver control panel installers.