I have seven years old Acer laptop Aspire 5920G with Windows XP, and after finding out that now Ubuntu can handle my games properly I decided to give it a try. I checked some Youtube videos with games I play, so they should now work under Ubuntu without a hassle, and I don’t use Office anymore, Google docs did the magic, Chromium will sync everything between all devices with a simple login and don’t ask any questions or offer stupid options. That was it, proper time to say goodbye to Windows and Office.
Installation was simple and fast, downloaded 64bit ISO 13.10, latest Universal USB installer and booted from USB. It’s is really simplified and everything worked without a problem, last time I tried Ubuntu ( 10.x or something like that) it had some issues/errors (can’t remember what was it exactly). Camera, mic, sound, lan, wlan, graphic, touchpad, bluetooth,… Did some small visual tweaks and updated latest patches. Of course I changed to NVIDIA propriety drivers for best performance (8600GT).
Apps I’ve installed: Chromium, Psi (IM/jabber), Steam, Skype.
And the latest one, Skype downloaded from official site was not working at all, didn’t want to install correctly so I just removed it and installed one that came with Ubuntu and that worked like a charm.
So, everything was in place but the last thing I need is to access my Windows “server” storage where all data (games / music / videos / pictures / etc) is currently stored. Ok, that shouldn’t be a problem. Open terminal, create credential file, modify permissions, edit fstab, add one line at the end:
//10.111.0.2/d/steam /media/steam cifs credentials=/home/zvonimirbuzanic/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
It worked like a charm, it was read/write so in Steam I added this directory as library and my games appeared. Voila! I did this share only to check how Steam games are working.
I tried to fire up few games but loading time was terrible. I have 1Gbps network and my transfer rate on Win XP was somewhere around 70MB/s or more. But this was slow, something from 10 to 30MB/s. It was a bit late so I didn’t investigate more.
Anyway, games are working really good under Linux now. There are some bottlenecks as games are using Direct3D calls transfered to OpenGL but it’s really playable and I had fun (ty Steam), hope we will see true OpenGL soon.
14.03.2014.
My ex. boos would love to say: “Get you combat tools ready!” meaning I should take all my IT stuff like USB disk with software, screwdriver, USB/SATA connectors, etc. with me. Software tools on Ubuntu system are still the same, in few minutes I was able to use my Keepass database runing under Mono which was stored on Truecrypt drive.
Keepass was easy to install:
sudo apt-get install keepass2
For Truecrypt I used this script:
http://www.truecrypt.org/download/truecrypt-7.1a-linux-x64.tar.gz
As I’m “maintainer” of Competition Doom I made tutorial how to build it, interesting enough I never tested if it’s working, well now I did, and everything went just fine:
http://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/Cndoom-branch#Building
If you are migrating Thunderbird from Windows to Ubuntu it’s pretty easy just find your profile and copy it over your Ubuntu profile. That’s it. Plugins, settings, accounts, everything is in place and working immediately.
Anyway, without any trouble I was able to use on my Ubuntu system xbmc, mc, keepass, chromium, thunderbird, firefox, truecrypt, psi, cndoom, steam,…