RPG Articles

So, I was trying to get some games running under wine. Now, with the new xserver, XGL is enabled automagically (this is Ubuntu Gutsy, btw), so you don’t need a special session. Fine. Cool. Now, I managed to install Dawn of War and Il-2 Sturmovik 1946. Il-2 ran fine. Dawn of War kept giving me a “spooge driver” missing error and suggesting directx wasn’t installed.

Finally it bubbled to the top of my brain that I had similar issues with games under XGL before, with or without beryl/compiz. Yeah, supposedly you can disable XGL from starting, but whenever I switched to metacity from compiz, it killed hardware acceleration anyway.

So I nuked it. Only way to be sure. This did cause me some issues. For whatever reason, metacity didn’t get set as the window manager, so my first reboot caused me to just not have a window manager. For those in a similar spot, open a terminal and use metacity –replace & to start metacity. I’m hoping it’ll stick, but if not I’ll be back with how to make sure it does.

So, ATI bit me in the ass again. I decided to update from Feisty to Gutsy today, and my working just fine, direct rendering ATI setup went kablooey. There was apparently some customized XGL stuff in Feisty (aka- hacks), that was corrected in Gutsy, but led to this issue here because of the malformed configs from Feisty. Make sense? No? Good, that means you’re paying attention.

Anyway. I just finished a clean install to a drive my roommate had given me. Installed, as per normal, and unlike Feisty everything just worked well once I enabled the restricted driver. So, hurrah.

Now to copy the important stuff from my home directory. And skip installing the MS Core fonts. This looks a lot better. I’ll just cram that junk into wine.

Now, I don’t just mean in Windows, but even from boot cd’s and built in utilities. The box was brought to my attention because it was giving an unmountable boot partition error. No trouble, either the drive is toast or it needs a good chkdsking. Chkdsk solved that, and the SMART data on the drive looked fine, so back to Windows.

Churn churn churn. Up yet? No? Ok. Play with my phone… stare at people… Up now? No? And so on. Eventually it opened up, this was getting into Safe Mode mind you, and just ran like a sack of broken legs.

It was slow in my bootdisc environment, but I checked for infections anyway, just to clear the path. Pretty clean. Hmmm….

Next step- yanking stuff out. First, hard drive… no change on the boot cd. Next, the other optical drive. No change. Switch CD to tray two.. ok, that one is actually broken anyway, it’s not the culprit, but it’s disconnected on GP. Ok….

Fiddle… faddle some… decide to run memtest. Everything is going… what the hell? The L1 cache is running at 37MB/s ? That isn’t right is it? L2 at 36MB/s??? Huh? Note, the clock speed was fine, at 2.39 some odd gigahertz.

Now, at this point, I only vaguely recalled what numbers I usually see there, since they normally aren’t what I’m interested in, but it nagged me because it was obviously too low.

Back into the BIOS. CPU Information… numbers look fine. What is this Mode setting? It’s in Compatibility, with a Normal option. Change it… numbers look the same. Well, maybe it doesn’t update until a reboot. Make it so!

Huh. Numbers are still the same. Let’s try memtest again, for giggles. L1 cache? over 19000 MB/s. Hot damn! Back to the house of pain, er, Windows!

Soars like an eagle!

The only thing I can find are vague indications that this was for some Windows 95 install issues, but why you’d worry about that on a later model P4 is beyond me. Why someone fiddling with the BIOS would turn it on also is beyond me, though I fear it’s just the default setting.