January 2005 – LonelyMachines

Code

Linux Myth #483: It’s no good for games

Wine’s been around for awhile, but when I first tried it a couple of years back, I couldn’t get it to work, so I abandoned it as an idea whose reach exceeded its grasp. Wine isn’t an MS Windows emulator so much as a Linux program that imitates Windows’ system-calls and attempts to run them natively in Linux. The idea was that eventually, it’d be possible to use those pesky Windows-only apps without having to reboot into a Windows partition.

When I tried it, it was a pain to install and a nightmare to configure. In the end, it just didn’t work. I hadn’t given it much thought since, until I heard from a friend who was using a Wine-based program called Cedega. He had World of Warcraft as well as several other Windows programs running seamlessly on a Suse box, so I figured I’d give it a try.

The folks at TransGaming distribute a program called Cedega, as well as a graphical frontend called Point2Play that handles everything from the installation to the actual program functions.

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Music

Great records of 2004

Last year was an odd one for music. Politics reared its ugly head during an election year, and musicians, who we all know are the real experts on foreign policy, seemed to come out of the woodwork to denounce “the war,” falling back on rehearsed soundbites and incoherent vitriol. The whole thing was made all the more disappointing by the fact that there simply wasn’t anything very good coming out from the major labels. U2 did an okay record with a ponderous title, but it traded mostly on nostalgia, and it appears that R.E.M. is just a hollow shell of its former self without Bill Berry.

As usual, there was some truly great work done this year, but it flew under the commercial radar. Thankfully, Emo appears to be dead, and we’ve finally seen the end of “Post-Rock” as the new Prog. Acts like Tortoise treaded water, while others redefined themselves and came out all the better for it.

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