It has been an expensive weekend in EVE.
First it started out on saturdays that we needed to transport a tower down to our new place in Fountain. I logged on my alt in our transport Corp. Checkd and good – no wardecs or anything so that should be safe to travle in empire.
On Saturday it was time for the London meet up of my online corporation NIX (Phoenix Industries). We have been talking about meeting up quite some time and now it was finally time.
I trawled to London earlier in the week so i was kind of in place at our office out in Harlow already but Wollarie was coming in from Germany in the morning and Lasha was travelling down from the Midlands in the morning to. And I took a train in. We were supposed to meed with Blan and Alexej also but they got IRL things to take care of and as usuall the IRL business has to take precedence over internet spaceship.
So yesterday the new version of Wine (the windows emulator for Linux) came out. I have not had very much problems with the old version 1.21, the only problem is that the autopatcher for new versions of EVE-Online did not work. And one person has reported that the only thing that was wrong with that was that the code was trying to call a function for setting the priority of the download and that was not implemented in Wine so the call returned an error and the download failed.
But he fixed that, wrote a small stub function that only returns OK, and that is now included in the 1.22 version so I would liked to have that going.
So i let the upgrade program do it works and had wine 1.22 running in no time.
Started up eve and “Oh No” – when I was inside the station i only had a black screen – no interior at all. So out in space and my show is permanently cloaked – even for me 
So reading a bit in the forum it seems that this is a bug in the ATI driver and there is a patch for it, and apparently it should work on Nvidia cards. It might be the fact that i am running a bit old version of the Nvidia drivers. I am running the 169.12 version and the new version that is out is 180.51 so perhaps it is time to think of upgrading that, but as i am about to upgrade the whole system (I don’t like it and don’t have the time, but have to eventually) to the new version 9.04, I think I will do it then.
So now I need to downgrade to version 1.21 to have my game going as I whant it. I can live with the fact that I have to download the patches manually.
Downgrading wine
First i need to download the old version. You just go into the link on the wne HQ page and go to the Ubuntu pages and the old archives (here) and download the old version (1.21).
Then you install that with dpkg:
sudo dpkg --install wine_1.1.21~winehq0~ubuntu~8.04-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
Next thing you need to do is to lock the version. if you dont do that the system will upgrade wine next time you run the upgrade program. And you do that with:
echo wine hold | sudo dpkg --set-selections
And if you as me have Synaptic package manager installed, you can go in there and lock the version also.
This now get me a god working wine that pays my eve, and I have to live with the not working autopatcher for now.
So its time for Apocrypha 1.2 in EVE. This is the new version of EVE online that was released to day. So I hade to patch ofcuase. And with Wine and Linux its not allways that straight forward and easy.
First you cant use the normal new download in the client. It will not work. But thats not a problem. You can go into the EVE online site, Go to downloads patches and manually download the patch. The file anme for this new patch is evepremiumpatch86756-88517_m.exe.
So new kernel out. With all the problem that can give. I have refrained from installing it during the week as I did not want to much interruption during normal workdays. But now on a Sunday I feel i can afford the time to do it.
So first of all i start installing the updates and the kernel. I’m a bit chicken and not going to install wine yet.
The upgrade works as it should. Still no built in support for the network cards so I have to compile and install that module again. Not a big deal.
And then i have to install/configure vmware modules also. Still not a big problem. And now all things is working as it should. Sort of.
So its upgrade time in EVE. Usually it works OK but sometimes it fails so its always a bit scary. As I am running the client in wine and not on windows there is always a chance that it will fail, and ofcourse – one cant blame CCP for not testing it as they do have a official eve client that runs under Linux, even it its using cedega.
So downtime and setting a long skilltraning and wait. And wait…. And wait.
And finally the download it up and running. Answer yes and download the new patch. After the download is done – not to big – 9.2Mb so it was quick. And click on yes to stop eve and install. And noting. The game hangs. So after waiting for 15 minutes if its just slow, i decided to kill off eve and wine and start the patch manually. The patch get downloaded to the cache directory. So you can go there and start it manually. i have it under ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/CCP/EVE/cache/ so its just to go there:
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/CCP/EVE/cache/
So having got the sound to work on my Acer Aspire 8920 there was one small annoyance left and that is that I can only use one sound application at the time. It does not sound as a very bad thing, but its annoying. Like when i playing my game and someone sends me a msn message, kde tries to sound a audible warning or notification and I cant here then – all will pop up when the game closes down.
When reading about pulseaudio it seems to promise to solve all the problems, multiple applications and even individual volume controls for each application, so it seems promising. The only problem is that kde is not handling pulseaudio direct so there might be some work necessary to get the kde notifications going.
First thing ofcuase was to get the sound to work at all. Without ALSA working i dont think this would have succeeded at all. I did found 2 notes/links to information about how to do this so i followed that and added some things of my own.
So most of you know that I’m playing EVE-Online on my machine and have been doing that on my Linux since I moved over over a year ago now. And it has been interesting and more or less very good.
When moving over to the new machine i installed Wine version 0.9.58 as this version worked and had almost no bugs. I have been trying new versions on and off when they come out but so far I haven’t found a newer version that was OK and worked well. So I stayed on 0.9.58. I have the Premium Graphics working and I can run 2 clients at the same time without the machine being to tired.
I did lock the version with both the synaptic package manager (package >> lock version) to lock it for synaptic but I also had to do a dpkg command to lock the adept package manager:
echo wine hold | sudo dpkg --set-selections
This was necessary for me so that the automatic updater would NOT update wine, but it was complaining all the time that there was a new release out there.
So the new version of eve is over us. Will this work on Linux and will my client survive? It always a nice question as running the official client before was impossible on my laptop and the only way to run it was via wine. It run perfectly, usually. But sometimes it broke during patches and it took some time to fix wine to get it to work.
So while the eve system was down I spent some time trying to sync over all data from my old laptop to the new one.
First thing was to get all the installed applications installed the same way on the new machine. I found some references out on the net on how to dump the installed applications on the old machine to a file and then use that to install the same applications on the new one. So i tried that and it almost worked. Not quite.
So the weekend has been a very hot one in Sweden. The temperature has been over 30 degrees and thats very much by Swedish standards and when one is not quite prepared for it it gets very hot.
We have been moving from the house to the apartment for the last month and the only real thing left now is to finish off the garden so its in hand over state. And thats what we have been doing during the weekend.
But there has been small times when we haven’t moved or carried things. And I decided to test the wine and premium graphics to see if I could get it to work. From what I have read on the forum the wine version of EVE runs without any big problems.
So i copied all the .wine directory over form my old laptop and used that as a start – that way I also would retain my old setting in the EVE client and thats very useful.