[June 1st, 2010]
Sims 3 on Lucid Lynx
Post relates to: installing Sims 3 on Ubuntu 10.04 using PlayOnLinux. Game play has not been smooth. Lots of 'without warning' crashes. One second it's there, next it's not. Found no fix yet. Maybe the following will work for you, or maybe you should just take it with a grain of salt ;)
The little guy wanted to play Sims 3 on his computer. "His" being a Dell Dimension 8300 circa 2004, running Ubuntu 10.04.
Specs:
P4 2.6Ghz
1 Gig RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 256MB
Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)
Checked Wine AppDB. Sims 3 was there and looked very do-able. Sat back, did some further research, and ran across some people who dared to claim the process only taking 10 minutes. One guy @2 minutes. How hard could this be? *wink-wink nudge-nudge* Weeeeell, I weighed in at 3+ hours. And here were the steps taken...
First, install PlayOnLinux (in terminal)
sudo apt-get install playonlinux
Start PlayOnLinux: Applications > Games > PlayOnLinux
Install Sims 3
- Have Sims 3 disc in the DVD drive
- In PlayOnLinux, click "Install" button
- In left nav, click Games
- Scroll down to and hilight Sims 3
- Click Apply. Right here, for me, the window doesn't disappear but instead grays out and seems to hang. After clicking the x to close the window and choosing "Force Quit", it began installing.
- PlayOnLinux installs DirectX 9.0 and .NET for you :)
Somewhere later in the install process, I believe while it was doing "updates", the install stopped prematurely (I had stepped away for a bit and left the 11 yr old in charge). Anyhow, going back through the same install steps above, the install process picked up where it left off, doing updates, and successfully completed. (I've also installed it a 2nd time without updates. To do so, uncheck the Download Manager box during the installation process.)
Fired up Sims 3 through PlayOnLinux: Applications > Games > PlayOnLinux > Choose the 1st Sims 3 choice "The Sims 3" (not the 2nd choice "The Sims 3 Launcher") > Click "Run" button
There was sound, but NO video! Problem lied in the driver for my NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500
Updated the video driver
- System > Administration > Hardware Drivers
- Hilighted NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 173)
- Clicked Activate
- Restarted computer
Sims now had sound AND video :)
Everything went well up until the point when we could actually start playing the game, then it asked for the disc, but wouldn't recognize there being a Sims 3 disc in the drive. The answer to this is a No-CD patch, or in this case No-DVD.
How to: visit this site and follow his directions.
Tip: when at the site to actually download the No-DVD file, click the Floppy Drive Icon. Even though he says to click the Floppy Drive Icon, I still made the mistake of not clicking the Floppy Drive Icon.
After accomplishing the No-DVD patch, and firing up Sims 3, the entire screen went black. Got screen back by:
CTRL+ALT+F1 (gets a terminal, aka console)
Logged in with username & password
Ran command to find Sims 3 process
ps -aux | grep TS3.exe
Killed the process
kill <processID number here>
and CTRL+ALT+F7 to return to the see-able again desktop.
The patch wasn't the problem. Did a computer restart and Sims 3 starts back up normally. The problem seems to be anytime we exit Sims 3, then attempt to start it gain. If the game has already been played once, the computer has to be restarted before we play it again, else the black screen.
That hasn't been the only problem. Sound stops working and it runs a bit slow (which could be attributed to the video card), both of which we could live with. But most annoying, the game crashes ALOT with no warning. One second it's there, next it's gone. Am still looking for a fix.
[May 15th, 2010]
VMware Player 3.0 & Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)
Post relates to: login password & sudo password not working, lock screen not working, and installing VMware Tools.
Last week I installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx in VMware Player 3.0 (WinXP). Everything seemed to go good. Was able to login. Then came the first sudo command, and it wouldn't take. Deleted and created a new Ubuntu vm. Sudo password wouldn't work again. Out of frustration, when yet another "try again" appeared on screen, I hit enter. Only enter... and... Woah! What...? It worked! Your kidding. As long as I didn't enter anything, all was good. Figured it must be a VMware issue.
So I lived with my sudo no-password password for a week. Then yesterday, at the initial login screen, I pressed the login button without entering a password, and it logged me in. Woah, again, dude! What's up with that? And here's where Dude gets to feel really silly. All the other times, when entering my password, no secret dots would pop up with each letter entry, but disregarded it as a bug. After realizing I had never been entering my password, utter stupidity befell me.
Searching this login "bug" brought me to the no-keyboard problem, which is fixed with this command:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
Login was re-attempted, secret dots now showed up, and know what? My password, the supposed to be real one, was not accepted. Just like the sudo no-password password, this is also a secure password-less feature. Since my vm is kept on an external harddrive, which could be, hopefully never, theived... and if the unscrupulous individual understood vm's... and fired up my vm... and some how bypassed the "security"... then they'd have access to a whole bunch of scripts containing real passwords... well, CRAP! Could've simply gone back to my 9.04 vm, but couldn't let this rest.
And here's the answer. Simply as it may be, it took a bit of googling this morning to find it.
The problem lies in VMware's Easy Install. When creating the vm, do not use the first two options.
Instead, choose the 3rd option: "I will install the operating system later."
Thereby creating a blank virtual machine.
After going through the steps, and your back to your starting vm screen > put disc in the drive > make sure the new blank vm is selected > choose Play Virtual Machine > then install Ubuntu 10.04. Installing this way fixed everything. No password-less passwords and no missing keyboard at the login screen. Beauty!
Installing VMware Tools
While logged into the Lucid vm: on top bar click VM > choose Install VMware Tools.
VMware Tools icon appears on desktop. Cannot extract the file because it is read only. Copy the files then unzip them.
In the Terminal, cd to VMware Tools directory
cd /media/VMware\ \Tools
Copy zipped file to tmp directory
cp VMwareTools-x.x.x-xxxx.tar.gz /tmp/
Right click the desktop VMware Tools icon > select eject.
Back in Terminal, change to tmp directory
cd /tmp/
Extract zipped file
tar xvfz VMwareTools-x.x.x-xxxx.tar.gz
cd into extracted directory
cd vmware-tools-distrib
Run VMware Tools installer
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
For each choice, select the defaults (press enter)
Reboot when finished. Now thy screen auto re-sizes.
[April 27, 2010]
Bellingham's Google Fiber Commercial
In all honesty, I was expecting something cheesy, but this is very cool. Impressive, inspiring, and elegantly simple. Not to mention the young lady. Her expressiveness gives it such wonderful appeal, even with the sound turned off.
[February 24th, 2010]
Rounding Corners
I've always wanted nice child friendly rounded corners, but have been too lazy on the graphics side to produce them. So there I was a week or so ago reading up on HTML5, SVG and CSS3, and I learn this:
-moz-border-radius: value in px or em; /* firefox */ -webkit-border-radius: value in px or em; /* safari */ -khtml-border-radius: value in px or em; /* konqueror */ border-radius: value in px or em; example: -moz-border-radius: 15px 0 0 15px;
In the above example, -moz-border-radius: 15px 0 0 15px;, the first value starts with the upper left corner, then flows around to the upper right corner, lower right corner, and lower left corner, which produces rounded corners on only the upper and lower left sections of a box. I could yak more, or you could just visit the-art-of-web and read all about it. It's important to note that each browser engine implements border-radius a little differently, which the linked article explains really well.
Anyhow, excitement ran rampant, and in a couple days, Dude's rounded re-design. Displays curvatures in Firefox, Chrome and Konqueror. I'm assuming it displays correctly in Safari and the iPhone, but have not verified. Opera v10.10 does not support border-radius, but v10.50 beta does, and without needing to make any changes to my CSS. That's because Opera is working off the pure unadulterated border-radius: property. Niiiice.
Of course, that leaves one last browser, and it does not support. So IE users will only see me as a dangerous sharp cornered environment ;)
