Bioshock under Linux/Wine: better than Windows! OMG!

Yesterday I found myself in the mood to play a game again. So I turned up my Windows 7 partition and tried to play Bioshock. But: there was no in-game sound. After the very first cut-scenes (the airplane crash) you float in the middle of burning water but mute. No sound, no beep.

So I googled around to fix that issue and discovered there is a ton of people suffering from the same problem. I followed several recommendations but nothing changed. There is even a YouTube video for the very dumb with several tips, but none (none!) enabled the sound. It took me about 1 hour along with several reboots and changing Windows 7 core components. Finally I gave up, frustrated. And I’m not alone with that. It seems that Bioshock under Windows 7 (or Vista) is a No-Go.

Today I tried the same game under Linux and within 5 minutes going for the mouse fix I had it up and running! With full sound enabled!

OMG!

I can’t believe that applications made for Windows do not run under Windows but under a Windows Emulation on Linux. This is crazy. One should expect that applications should run better or at least with equal performance on both operating systems. But having Linux being superior to Windows on Windows own playground … is this yet another sign of dying M$ technology?

So, everyone wanting to play Bioshock but is suffering from the sound problem: get yourself a Linux installment! I guess any will do. Bioshock does run on your machine – but not under this operating system.

Copy 20GB to a remote server: no luck.

On my laptop my harddisk has started to fail. =(

So I wanted to backup my crypt file holding all my valuable files. This crypt file has 20GB. I tried to copy this file at once on our server. No luck.

Tried within KDE (4.9.0), no luck.
Tried in bash with

$ cp crypt-file smb/server/home

(I use to mount Samba shares in ~/smb/SERVER/SHARE)
No luck.

Tried with scp: no luck.

The effect: at a certain point of time the transmission starts to either abort or – in the case of scp – is stalled. That is when I got around 11GB on the server. So scp got stalled and I tried it with the -l option:

$ scp -l 8192 crypt-file user@server:

But this takes an eternity for 20GB! And there is no guarantee of success either.
No luck.

Next, I dropped the TCP SACK ability, which occasionally causes scp to get stalled:

# echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_sack
$ scp crypt-file user@server:

No luck.

*sigh*

Finally I mounted the crypt and went for rsync

$ rsync -avuz crypt/ user@server:backup

and encrypted there by using gpg the tarball of credentials holding passwords.

*sigh*

So rsync is the salvation. But then it is put there in plain on the server. I admit: this *has* some advantages but the drawback is: that you have to go and find all your precious files which ought to be protected and find yet another way to encrypt them. With the help of $ gpg -e FILE this is ok but cumbersome.

phpBB3 multiboard + VirtualServer

… simply doesn’t work at all. Investigated to much time for this (some hours) without any results but this: it’s totally broken. What a pity. OTOH the phpBB3 devs do not support multiboard on VirtualHost in the first at all. So the Debian people tried hard but failed to find a convenient way to do this.

What a pity.

To have a multiboard running on the machine it is best to kick the update possibilities offered by apt (*sigh*) and go for the plain, manually install into the VirtualHost’s folders. Each with an unique phpBB3 installment. Yes, this works, but leaves the user with the nightmare in upgrading each board in separate, which is very, very cumbersome.

I hope the phpBB3 devs some day realize that multiboard and/or VirtualHost support is needed right out-of-the-box.

Theming and FTP of WordPress

I decided to go for “Grey Opaque 1.8.1” Theme: it’s mighty, elegant and really mets me (well, ok, I modified some parts of the CSS …) During installation and browsing several themes I noticed that WordPress tries to get a grip on my FTP account to “automatically” install the themes … huh?

No, are you serious?

Found a way to bypass that by adding:

/** sets up 'direct' method for wordpress, auto update without FTP */
define('FS_METHOD','direct');

In my /etc/wordpress/config-dyle.org.php wordpress installment of my Debian Squeeze 6.0.5.

… and this work’s like charm! No passwords, credentials, setup of FTP, no nothing. You just click “Install Now!” and WordPress does all the work without any need for any secrets. This works because WordPress now downloads all stuff into the /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content folder directly.

Didn’t know WordPress is that easy to manage and expand. I must confess: I’m pretty much impressed.