CinnamonPirate.com

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And seriously, NEW? WINE has been in development since 1996. Its support for software is very hit and miss. There are some guides to getting specific games running, but if you want to just fire it up, good luck.

As far as WINE goes, I use it to run CMD.EXE, Notepad, Windows Calculator, Internet Explorer 6.0 (for those sites that just will not work in Swiftfox/Firefox), Tile Layer Pro, FaTILEty, WindHex32, PE Explorer (and its disassembler) and Qianhong Xiangqi.

I\’ve managed to get some games like Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and Feeding Frenzy 1/2 running in it, but it\’s quite hit and miss. It will not run 仙剑奇侠传 for anything–I run that in a VMWare session with XP installed. My 2GHz machine is enough to easily guarantee full speed on that–even when I drop down my clockspeed.

Just don\’t expect it to run EVERYTHING or even MOST things. You might want to \”acquire\” Cedega, a special version of WINE hacked to run a lot of mainstream commercial games. It runs almost perfectly all 250 or so games in its game list, and it performs a bit better than WINE on some other games.

One thing about WINE I have yet to fix: it entirely flakes out on anything with Chinese fonts.

If you want to talk in more detail about this, get me on MSN or something and I\’ll try to help you out. Right now I\’m running xubuntu, but you can install that from within Ubuntu if you want to try it. Basically Ubuntu is GNOME-based, kubuntu is KDE-based and xubuntu is Xfce-based. Xfce is, of course, the fastest and most light-weight of all the above. KDE is probably the most bulky.

Poke around at screenshots and decide what you need in a window manager. The current Xfce is very similar to Geoshell if Geoshell was configurable by a GUI instead of registry hacks. You can configure your windows to have whichever buttons in the title bar you want (maximize, minimize, control, close, shade, sticky, etc) and whenever you want them. The compositor control in Window Manager Tweaks lets you do stuff like rendering all inactive windows transparent, or making your window frames translucent–quite nice features that GNOME lacks. It\’s very hotkey friendly too, but I can\’t find a way to make it use built-in keyboard audio controls like GNOME can.

GNOME as Ubuntu packages it is a bit similar to OSX. You have a main bar at the top of the screen and everything is controlled off of there. No dock. Easiest way to make a dock would be install Xfce-panel on top of GNOME and run that centered at the bottom. It has about the same functionality. The plain vanilla GNOME Ubuntu is the most supported of all Ubuntu versions, and most of the Ubuntu-specific programs are written for GNOME–of course they run in Xubuntu or Kubuntu too.

KDE … is Windows for Linux with all the bloat and some of the ugliness.

If you want a Vista equivalent, run Beryl, which is even nicer than Vista but still kind of beta software. You need a really nice video card to get the most from it. In my opinion, it\’s best feature is the ability to manage virtual desktops as a huge rotating polygon. You can even make your desktop translucent so you can watch what is happening on desktops on other sides of the polygon \”through\” your desktop. It\’s very, very pretty, and when I run that, it grabs eyes.

In my opinion, Xfce is the most practical, but if you look through my blog you\’ll see I have a seven year love affair with the mouse-like one. Your mileage may vary.