Martin Juhl's Blog

And so I got Beta access to Blizzards newest game, Hearthstone.. And as always, I play it on Linux…

Installation:

Download installer from you Blizzard Battle.net account.

mkdir /home/username/Games/Heartstone/
WINEPREFIX=/home/username/Games/Heartstone/.wine winecfg

In winecfg, override “dbghelp”-> disabled and “msvcp100”-> Native under Libraries.

then run:
WINEPREFIX=/home/username/Games/Heartstone/.wine winetricks wininet

And then install:

WINEPREFIX=/home/username/Games/Heartstone/.wine wine Hearthstone-Beta-Setup-enGB.exe

click->click->click->click…

Game installed, and running beautifully.. Good job Blizzard.. Again.. next best thing to native Linux games, are Windows games that just runs..

And I must say, that Hearthstone is also a very nice game so far…

So.. I decided to try to promote Linux as a gaming platform…

I know it might not be as easy for some games as it could be, but I try..

Follow my gaming experiences here: http://www.twitch.tv/im60erWell.. så har jeg besluttet mig til at prøve at reklamere lidt for Linux til gamere…

Jeg ved godt at ikke alle spil er lige nemme at få til at køre.. men jeg prøver så godt jeg kan…

Følg mine hyggelige timer med at få diverse spil til at køre på Linux her: http://www.twitch.tv/im60er

So… just wanted to share with you guys, that I received my OUYA OpenSource Android Based Gaming Console…

I’m definitly going to post some reviews of games.. but for now, let me just say that i’m very impressed with the hardware quality…

Sure, there are still improvements to be made in the software.. but it actually works pretty great…

And one of the good things about OpenSource: If you don’t like it… Fix it… and Share it…

Hoping that I will have the time this summer to look into creating applications for the OUYA or even do some development on the interface.. I have some ideas, but right now I’m just enjoying the small box..

Also, I just want to mention that I have installed XBMC on the OUYA.. which works great together with my tvheadend backend, and streaming both 720p and 1080p.. The WIFI in the OUYA lacks a little speed on streaming 1080p movies, but Wired network works perfectly..

If you haven’t heard anything about the OUYA, or want to purchase on.. this is a good place to start: https://www.ouya.tv/

It finally arrived!! Last week the Beta-version of Left 4 Dead 2 arrived on Steam for Linux..

I (as well as many other gamers) have been waiting for months for this glorious game to hit the Linux platform.. Even though the game is now about 4 years old (released late 2009), the gameplay is still worth spending the £19.99 that Steam charges for this game, if you haven’t already purchased it for Windows..

Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) was the first game that Valve (the company behind Steam) ported to the Linux platform in the fall as a proof-of-concept.. but it took them more than half a year to get it ready for the Beta level..

Also the speed of the game as been increased from the Windows Direct3D implementation, so former Windows users will get a performance boost for those FPS-hungry types out there…

I think this is a big step towards more Linux games and this together with nVidia’s decision to offer support for their Optimus chipset, tells me that hardware companies as well as the gaming industry has finally accepted that gaming on Linux is a reality, and not something they want to miss out on..

Happy Zombie-slaying out there!!!

In November, the game-deployment-platform Steam, launched their closed Beta for Linux…

Just before Christmas the Beta was opened up to the Public…

And I must say, that I’m impressed.. It’s working great…

Right now “only” 57 games are available for Linux, see here, But more are arriving every week..

The only free game right now is Team Fortress 2, but a lot of the other games here are pretty cheap.. And I don’t mind spending a little money on games if they are worth it…

Steam can be downloaded here for Ubuntu, and should be convertable to other distros by just unpacking the file..

Happy gaming everyone…

Hi all

Just wanted to share some good experience, and I hope that this info will help some of you..

I just reinstalled my primary gaming machine from Windows 7 to Kubuntu.. Have had two seperate machines (1 windows and 1 linux) for years, but since the release of the Steam beta, I’m now convinced that I can use Linux on the primary one…

Primary computer:
Dell Precision 490
2x Quad 2.66 GHz Xeon processors
16 GB Ram
nVidia GTX 560 TI

I installed Diablo 3 by creating a wine bottle with:

WINEPREFIX=<bottle path> WINEARCH=win32 winecfg

then installed:

WINEPREFIX=<bottle path> WINEARCH=win32 winetricks vcrun2008

and Diablo:

WINEPREFIX=<bottle path> WINEARCH=win32 wine <diablo installer>

After waiting for the installer to download and install, the game started fine, but after entering a game, I noticed that the performance was horrible.. about 10 fps…

I fooled around with all kinds of wine and nvidia tweak settings, as well as taskset for locking the game to one physical CPU… this only gave me a few extra frames…

I then noticed that when disabling window effects in KDE (Shift+Alt+F12), I got a HUGE performance boost…

Now I’m running at about 40-70 fps, with all effects maxed…

On windows I have had alot of problems with microstuttering on Diablo, but I seems to have completely vanished on Kubuntu…

Happy gaming everyone…