The wedding is now over, and the honeymoon taken, so it’s time to get back to work.  Part of that means getting back to work on my blogs and other things that have languished in the past few months as my attention has been directed elsewhere.

As part of that, last night I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the windows drive on my home office workstation from an aging Windows XP installation to the Windows 7 RC.

Since there’s no real upgrade path from XP to Windows 7,  and since I really had no desire to KEEP Windows XP,  I decided to reformat the XP drive and do a fresh install.

The installer was inexplicably slow,   especially since it was running on a Intel Core 2 Quad with 4 gigs of ram – certainly a beefy enough system to run it, and fast.  It took several minutes to get to a point where I could even start the install, and then the installer would hang at some points for absurd amounts of time spinning it’s wheels and appearing to do nothing ( it may be that it was processing in the background, but it honestly gave no indication that it was doing so).

After reading online that some people have had absurdly long install times (measured in hours) I got worried.    Especially since they indicated that after the install finished Windows failed to even start.    Thankfully, after the install completed Windows started just fine and everything seems to be working without any issues.  It would appear Microsoft needs to polish the installation a little bit more, but they’ve got some time to do that before the general release in October.

For me, the next (and last) gotcha was that this was  a dual boot windows/linux system,  and now the Grub bootloader stopped working.

This wasn’t a surprise to me – I actually expected it.   Typically, when you install a dual boot system you want to install windows first, THEN install Linux.   That’s not always feasible though, as seen in my case where I was upgrading to a new version of Windows.     Once you install windows, the bootloader no longer shows up and you can’t boot into Linux.

All is not lost!   The reason this happens is because Windows inserts it’s bootloader into the Master Boot Record (MBR), and set’s it as the priority after POST,  so instead of GRUB (or LILO, etc) loading first, the Windows bootloader does – and it doesn’t know about (or care about) Linux.

Luckily, this is ridiculously easy to fix.

The first thing you need to do is find a Linux Live CD,    in my case since I’m running Ubuntu 9.04 x64, I downloaded an ISO of the Install CD from Ubuntu.  Burn the ISO to cd, and boot to it.

Once you’re booted into the Live CD, open a terminal and type the following:

Sudo grub

This launches the grub prompt, and you should see “grub>” on your screen.   Once you see “grub>” , enter the following commands, pressing enter after each command.

Find /boot/grub/stage1

setup (hd0)

quit

In the above commands,  the first one will tell you the location of the stage1 file that Grub needs to determine where all of it’s files are.   It will return a location in the format of something like (hd0,1) use that value that it returns in the second command.   Continuing my example that would be root (hd0,1).

The second command tells grub that it’s files  are on a particular partition of a particular drive (in the example it’s partition 1 of drive 0).

The third command tells grub to set itself up on hd0, and when given without a value for partition grub then installs itself on the MBR.  hd0 is the label grub uses for the first drive’s MBR.

Quit is self explanatory

After you’ve finished that you can reboot the computer, remove the live cd and enjoy a working grub bootloader.

Friday night,  after spending a few hours playing rock band and call of duty: world at war with Trevor, I decided to install Ubuntu on the second hard disk on my workstation at home.  I had downloaded the X64 version of their 8.10 version a couple weeks ago but never got around to installing it.

I was pleased to note that installation was just as easy as it always has been, and it seems even easier to get up and running than it used to be. This could be a result of actually knowing all of the steps I need to take now (whereas with some previous versions I had to do some digging first).  

Saturday I took the time to get  World of Warcraft (including Wrath of the Lich King) up and running under wine.  That proved easy, as I had a guide to follow (that I wrote after the last time I did it).  

I also decided to see if I could get VALVe’s Steam service to run in Linux, as recently I picked up the Half-Life 2 episode pack (for $10) and wanted to see if I could play those in Linux as well (hint: yes, yes you can). 

Steam prooved to be easy to install.  I had to search for SteamInstall.exe (the steam website has a .msi, which will NOT work).   Just run the installer in Wine and poof, Steam is installed.   It was pretty easy. 

Since I already had the episode pack for HL2 associated with my Steam account, once I had Steam installed I simply had to select the game (the one I tested was HL2: Episode 1) and tell it to install.  Steam handled the rest, and handled it beautifully. 

When the time came and the game was installed,  I went to play it and…… success.    Sort of. 

It played all the way through until just after the beginning of the second chapter – direct intervention – and then began stuttering and the performance dropped dramatically.   At first I thought it was just the game acting up, so I saved and exited (which was a monumental feat by itself).   Upon re-entering the saved game it was still messed up. 

After doing some digging I found that the following registry entries resolved the issue for me completely, and gameplay has been awesome ever since.

Navigate to:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D  (if the Direct3D key doesn’t exist in the Wine folder, as was the case for me, add it).

Under the Direct3D key, add the following String Values

OffscreenRenderingMode, value: fbo
PixelShaderMode, value: enabled
UseGLSL, value: enabled
VideoMemorySize, value: ammount of video ram your card has, in megabytes.  Mine was 256.

These settings in the registry have most certainly fixed the issue I had and I have not had any since.  The game is 100% playable (and quite enjoyable too). 

I’m happy that, for me anyways, the games I want to play I can do so via Wine and Linux.  It’s certainly not for everybody, and it’s still much easier to simply play these games in Windows.  I’m a geek, though, and oddly enough I enjoy getting things to work on platforms they were not really intended for.