Do you want to know more?

I’m not sure if I’ve done a post before that has nothing to do with the Eve universe, and this may also not be one, but as I don’t want to trawl through 70 posts I can neither confirm nor deny.

So about half the time I use an Ubuntu computer for my Eve Online and other things when my main machine is busy, typically with work.  The machine has an AMD Phenom 9550 quad-core CPU, 4Gb RAM, 8500GT Display card and other stuff that makes the machine run, including a TV Card for those POS hits.  Using WINE as we don’t have an Eve Linux client anymore (and it sucked) it runs pretty well, especially after the recent o/s update.

I was previously using 10.04 LTS which is the long term supported option, reliable but slower.  So once 10.10 was released I (arguably) updated to that from 10.04 LTS.  After the update I had a few issues, not unknown after an update.  Mostly the issues revolved around display problems, which I subsequently narrowed down to x server doing something strange, quick modify of that and change to Nvidia’s TWINVIEW and my display problems mostly went away.

One of the Eve issues I had with the 10.04 LTS install was sometimes Eve would start slow.  It was easy to see when this happened as on the login screen several objects move quickly in the background to give it some kind of dynamic look.  When it started “slow” those objects would be much slower than normal.  I would than have to restart the Eve client several times to get back to normal speed mode. Now with 10.10, the more recent Nvidia drivers and using TWINVIEW it runs much better.

For chatting most of the common chat clients have a Linux equivalent so no issue there, though I have run the chat client on the Windows machine while the game was running on the Linux box.  However the Eve sound likes crashing WINE, especially the Jukebox so I run Eve with no game sound, not a real problem.

I said the display problems mostly went away as MythTV, a program used for watching TV (OMFG really?) decided to crap out after the upgrade, probably caused by the upgrade, so Google a fix, turns out it is a configuration thing in MythTV, fixed that and all good.

So to wind this up, why do I use Ubuntu?  Well I still have a Windows machine, but use Ubuntu on the second machine, and on a laptop.  Essentially it is because I don’t need a Microsoft operating system for those computers as they are used for web access, skyping and Open Office for the typical office tasks.