You know Windows Live is such crap.  I mean that.

Firstly there’s the email which doesn’t do it’s job on junk mail filtering.  Then when you try to mark it as junk the server doesn’t respond.  And that’s half the issue with their email, it is frequently down.  Nowadays all I get is junk there, I simply don’t use it.

Then there’s Games for Windows LIVE which I truly despise.  Fallout 3, an otherwise excellent game, uses this awful system.   When I first installed Fallout 3 Windows LIVE was automatically setup in Xbox mode instead of PC mode and I very nearly wasted money getting a game expansion which would only be available for the Xbox version of the game.  After berating Microsoft for it they helpfully advised me they’d not have refunded my money or even my ‘points’ if I made the mistake of trusting them.  They also didn’t bother to help me fix the problem.  Fortunately Google search solved that one for me.

I recently reinstalled Fallout 3 on Windows 7 which, despite coming for the same company, is a decent job.  However, again Windows LIVE struck.  This time a bug in Windows LIVE and Windows 7 made the game fail.  Don’t these people have any internal communication?  That problem too was fixable via Google search.

I do use MSN messenger, another Windows LIVE branded product.  This one has not been such a disappointment but I’m trying aMSN again which seems to be better implemented and doesn’t have adverts.

There is a windows nuisance which seems to be getting nearer crisis point.

These are overheads, or if you like computer maintenance, which comprises of several wasteful mechanisms which sap you computer productivity, speed, responsiveness and your personal time.

What I’m talking about is everything on your system that isn’t core to your service. There’s always been this in effect in various ways. For example, boot up, shutdown, time to launch an application etc.

But now we have a whole new layer. It all started with antivirus updates and Windows update which were at least loosely useful. They became automated, mostly because the majority of computer users would never update unless it was automated.

But then everything else jumped on the bandwagon. MS Office updates. Silverlight! I didn’t even install Silverlight yet there it is pooped on my Windows system. Windows media updates, what a joke! Windows media has stunk for perhaps a decade now. And windows updates is excruciatingly slow.

And it isn’t just Microsoft, no. Quicken and Google and Abode and you name it have updates galore too. Even games do it. It’s not just updates, it’s the advertising, the known and unknown info passed back via the net, the forms and permissions and terms of agreement and read the privacy document first. How about discovering the hard way the program only runs in admin mode. ‘Error 412, Would you like Microsoft to try and find a solution to the problem?’ We all know how hard they try. It is indeed very trying. How about the User Account Control (UAC)? It ensures installing something takes much longer and locks up your system more than the installation process itself. And that’s not even including the never ending permission prompts.

Then there’s the need for antivirus, anti rootkit, anti trojan, link blockers and spam canners. Defragmentation which takes hours, cleanups for files and sloppy registry entries.

All in all there so much superfluous rubbish in Windows it’s no wonder Linux is so much faster. It’s not just the software it’s the focus on getting things done rather than making money from the masses.

Linux does have some of these issues too but on the whole it’s not near crisis and each problem is better managed. So what I want done gets done. On Windows the capacity to do what I want is hampered by amazing levels of inefficiency.

If you really want to get the most out of wine this article is for you. Here I show you my experience in getting more games to work under wine and the general pattern of how it all works. A basic knowledge of the command line interface (CLI) really helps. Try this tutorial if you want to learn more about CLI. This is a very long post so be warned.

For those of you who are new to Linux, and the dreaded command line (CLI) in particular, you can use wine in the try and pray mode. As I’ve said before around ¼ of games will work like that.

However to get a higher success rate and an easier installation process you should consider using one of the GUI (graphical) interfaces which both simplifies the wine process and ensures you don’t have to touch the CLI.

There are a couple of options to do this but unfortunately none of them stand out as problem free. I’ll list them here;

1) Use Cedega, a commercial product which is not really wine. As best as I can determine it is a very old fork of wine meaning it is based on wine some time ago but has altered significantly from wine since it split off for better or worse. I do not recommend Cedega because it has a dreadful reputation for both support and running games and because it costs $US45/year.

I cannot personally vouch for or against this product except their Eve game bundle failed to work. They also offer a Mac flavour called Cider.

2) Use PlayonLinux, a free open source product which uses clever scripts with recent versions of wine. There seems to be a significant language barrier from English users there but otherwise the community looks active and friendly.

I have not tried it out but might do so sometime.

3) Use Crossover. Crossover comes in three flavours. The stable office/business Crossover Linux, the more leading edge Crossover Games and the Crossover Mac version. Crossover is really the official commercial level of wine and it is a positive thing to note that Crossover and wine try to work together.

Crossover Games is the cheapest and targets games only. It costs $US29.95/year. There’s a 7 day trial so you can see what it’s like.

I used the trial to test out Crossover and to foray into wine. Overall I found the GUI application to be quite nice and reasonably powerful and it included a few installers for supported games. It used a slightly older version of wine; 1.1.0 versus the current 1.1.13 at the time.

More than the GUI software provided, Crossover is a support service and offer support for a few popular games.

However Crossover Games has three problems I noticed;

1) It’s out of phase with wine. Some of the advice in wine can be useful but you must be aware of the version of wine Crossover is based on and you do not know any hidden changes made by Crossover. This, coupled with Crossover’s support based service, means wine users are not so willing to help a Crossover user. They expect Crossover to do the job. The games database in Crossover is OK but is too incomplete to really supersede wine’s software database.

2) Crossover Games has bad support. I contacted them about a few issues including on supported games and received replies 2 days *after* the trial ended which were also less than satisfactory. It’s was very bad pre-sales service and a sign of later service should you actually cough up the cash. There is no support for games outside the few officially supported as well so the support you pay for is very narrow.

3) The software does menus in KDE very badly even deleting other game links when installing a new game.

Given the primarily support based nature of Crossover and my experience I can’t really recommend them.

These services are as easy as it gets with wine at this time and the overall result is passable but if you do have some basic skills you can get a cheaper and improved outcome.  I’ll help show you how in an upcoming post.

I’m going to introduce WINE which is all about running Windows based applications on Linux and other operating systems, such as the Mac. WINE is open source.

The ability to use Windows based applications is very useful for many Linux users. For new users this mitigates the learning curve of so many new applications at the same time as the operating system. It also broadens the application base which can be important in areas in which Linux is not well supported, such as games, or it can make speciality applications usable on Linux which can often be useful to business.

There are 3 real ways to achieve this.

1) Run Windows as dual boot. This is my primary route and easy to do. It lets me run whichever operating system I like. The cost is the time delay of rebooting into whichever OS I desire and the waste of hard drive capacity implicit in running two operating system and often two copies of the same application, one for each operating system. I also have to pay for Windows.

2) Run Windows emulators or virtualisation software. These exist but I’ve never tried them and the drawbacks are significant.

3) Run WINE. Wine runs Windows based applications natively which, needless to say, is not trivial. However it’s got a lot of advantages, particularly speed. Speed in getting things going and speed of the running application.

Wine has a long history. Since 1995 it’s been reported to run MS Office and currently runs it near flawlessly. However MS Office has become less important to Linux users since OpenOffice is just as good in practical terms. It also has some degree of popularity and can load and save native MS Office documents anyway. But there’s more Windows applications than MSOffice.

Recently WINE has leapt forward in development and, more importantly, functionality. I am quite late on the bandwagon having only heard of it since version 0.9 or so and used it since 1.1.0. It’s now up to 1.1.14.

I’ve been astounded at how good it is, though it certainly has a long way yet to go. I play a lot of games and in my experience with using it the results have been very approximately this way;

Around ¼ of games will not run whatsoever. Around ¼ can be run but are either virtually unplayable or require rather complicated steps to get working for a non-expert. The next ¼ run with some reasonable tweaking. The final ¼ run out of the box.

I’ve also noticed some preconceptions that might need correcting;

1) Only older games and applications work well: Actually the game’s age doesn’t really make that much difference to the success rate. I’ve had old games fail on me where more modern games might work fine. The only exception to this are games that require directX10 components.

2) Applications running on WINE are slow: Nope. Since it runs natively, if there are no serious slowing bugs, the games will run at speed comparable to Windows. Sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower. Practically speaking I’ve only noticed slowdown in 10% of games I’ve tried.

3) Applications running on WINE are less stable: Well it’s like this. The games that do not run or do not run well are definitely not stable. But those that do I have found just as stable if not more so than on Windows. If a game is known to crash on WINE it will usually be reported.

4) WINE is hard to setup and use: Actually WINE is very easy to setup but it can be hard to use for those who have little expertise, especially if you want to get that extra ¼ of applications and games to work.

5) WINE is an emulator: No no no! This one is so hated that WINE has the acronym Wine Is Not an Emulator.

I would encourage Linux users who want to try running Windows based software to give WINE a go. I will be posting updates related to WINE in due course. I hope to cover support, how to set things up, useful information, common issues and maybe some specific games.