Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

So a few days ago I caught an article on digg that talked about a very simple utility called Play on Linux. It’s kind of like WINE-Doors, in that it allows you to install a select number of Windows based applications, mostly games in this case. A list of applications it is capable of handling can be found here. Some of the titles that caught my eye include:

• Portal (via Steam)
• All the Half Life games (via Steam)
• World of Warcraft
• Max Payne 2
• Command And Conquer 3
• About 40 or 50 more to pick from…

Granted, the very latest and most high-end games out there like Crysis don’t run on WINE well, but the same thing was also said about the above titles at some point. So Crysis may very well find its way to the Ubuntu desktop in the near future. Though due to the current baby/bathwater tossing contest going on at Microsoft (regarding Crysis access to DirectX 10 in Vista; or XP if you hacked it)… Sorry, I was about to go off on another rant about how much I hate Vendor Lockin business models.

Downloading Play on Linux is as simple as downloading the deb file and then running it to install the program. Once installed and run, you’re given a very simple menu:

To install software, you simply click on the Install button, and select the software you’re wanting to install from a list. It works in a similar fashion to WINE-Doors. I used this program to install Steam, which allowed me to spend some money on:

So I went ahead and threw Valve Software $20 to download Portal via Steam, despite the fact those assholes canceled my previous account because I stopped using it for a year. After a little bit of experimentation to see how high I could get my frame rate, I settled for the defaults it had originally selected for my video card and hardware setup. (This was on my laptop, mind you. It’s a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 with 768 MB RAM, and a GeForce 5600 Go with 128 MB video memory…. pretty crappy video card by todays standards; probably only worth 30 or 40 bucks).

I experimented with GNOME failsafe because I wanted to see if game performance would improve with Compiz Fusion disabled. Surprisingly for me, Compiz had very little impact on the frame rate of the game, which held average at about 20 to 25 fps. Though it would dip down low at certain parts of the game because of the nature of the game (rendering portal loops can really take a lot of GPU overhead).

All in all, I was quite impressed with how smooth the install of both Steam and Portal went. I did encounter a bug after attempting to load Portal again after having used and closed it. But restarting the PC seems to be the temporary solution to that little problem. Otherwise the game runs perfect, as do many other games. Another one I tested out recently was Warcraft 3, but I didn’t do much more than load the first level and attempt to join a multiplayer game. But it works, and you should try it out if you’re bored looking for something to help kill time. For extra credit, play your favorite game in front of a Windows gamer, and brag about the fact that your OS is free of a price tag and viruses. He’ll pretend to miss your point, when in truth, he’s oozing with jealousy.