Month: March 2008

How I made Steam play nice with my Ubuntu

Db02 Comments

I tspent last afternoon trying to make this damn program work normally but for some reason I was always getting stuck when trying to register an account. Eventually I traced the problem with wine’s iexplore version which for some reason would freeze as soon as I start it. It would ask to download the gecko engine (if I hadn’t already downloaded it) and then display a white screen and become unresponsive. I tried various things, even testing it on a clean profile, but nothing fixed it (Wine 0.9.56 btw). This not working IE caused in turn Steam not to work well. It would open but it would also crash when clicking on the “create account” button.

Hopefully a quick googling directed me to the Ubuntu Forums and from there to the IEs for Linux page. Fortunately, that version of IE worked in my PC (PS: I was amazed by the simple and easy installation. Props to the developer!). Unfortunately I couldn’t it run through my normal wine installation. As it is installed on a different .wine directory, I tried linking to the iexplore.exe over there and replacing the one coming with wine but apparently due to different dlls, it didn’t work out. In exasperation, I renamed my .wine directory to winebak and copied the .ies4linux dir as .wine. I then installed Steam in that and started it.

It worked. And it worked perfectly. I was able to run it, create and account, log in and buy a game (which was the sole reason why I wasted my time making wine work) via a credit card (because paypal didn’t work).

Unfortunately, even though navigating steam worked very well, playing the game didn’t 🙁 Steam would vehemently complain that I didn’t have the current DirectX version when trying to run the game, even though I knew from the cracked version that it works without a problem. I could see no way around this unfortunately as I couldn’t figure out which .dlls are necessary to make Steam think I’ve got the correct one.

So, once again in exasperation, I renamed the current .wine dir to winebak2 and renamed winebak to .wine. I then copied the Steam client (which has Audiosurf installed) from winebak2 to .wine and tried again. Now steam would launch but would crash as soon as I logged in due to the annoying iexplore problem. Very fortunately for me, since Audiosurf created a program shortcut in the wine menu, I run it from there and lo and behold! It worked. (Albeit with the same problems as before)

So I now finally have an up-to-date version of Audiosurf and can finally submit my scores to the servers (which seem to running at a crawl, I guess do to the unforeseen popularity) . I must say that I’m loving it. A great luck that the game run on wine out of the box 🙂

Lawful Evil

Db01 Comment

I have now seen the true face of Corporate Ethics first hand.

See how low the music recording cartel industry and their cronies will go to attack file sharing networks. They have now added domain stealing as well as licence and trademark abuse to their wonderful repertoire of threats, cracking, brainwash and extortion.

There is simply no limit to their immorality; and the latest case is just a wonderful example of how rabidly they are fighting against their inenvitable demise (which they have brought down upon themselves). It’s like the thrashing of a cornered beast. Now that they have decided to shit all over the GPL however, is where I draw the line.

Not only did they threaten an innocent person (the domain holder) with legal action in order to get him to pass the domain name to them. Not only did they subtly modify the site in order to trick regular users to please their corporate masters. Not only are they now giving away a (almost certainly) spyware infested propriertary client (in order to poison the credibility of Shareaza). They are not trying to get the trademark of “Shareaza” in what must be the sleaziest move yet. And they know it! (what with them opening a Cypress shell company to do it so that the true perpetrators won’t be litigated against).

All you D&D players reading this, take note. This is how lawful evil should be role-played.

At this point there are a few things all of us should do:

Finally, my personal idea is to put pressure on these scum. What we could probably do is use the Six Degrees and find out who is behind this. Once we do then their friends and families should be informed of their behaviour and perhaps given the appropriate social treatment they so deserve.

Seriously, the law is not our friend here. These people are using the law in order to go against the spirit of it. They are hiding behind shell companies and lawyers because they know they are in the wrong. They deserve no mercy and like Mediasentry before them, they will eventually get what is coming to them.

In Solidarity.

SHAREAZA™ IS THE PROPERTY OF THE SHAREAZA DEVELOPMENT TEAM.