Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Wine
As I mentioned previously, Ubuntu doesn’t always have an application that fits my needs. Sometimes what I really need is a Windows application but I don’t want to have to boot back in to Windows to get it. The surefire solution to this kind of dilemma is to set up a Windows installation in a virtual machine (Parallels, VMWare, or VirtualBox), but virtual machines are slow to boot, and consume fair amounts of both disk space and RAM. As it turns out, there’s a better solution: Wine.
“Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems.” Unlike a virtual machine, Wine doesn’t install or run a complete copy of Windows in the background, rather it’s an implementation of the Win32 API designed to sit on top of *nix operating systems. The compatibility isn’t nearly as good as a virtual machine, but the trade-offs of lower resource usage and faster loading times are worth it. If I can use Wine rather than a virtual machine, then that’s the way I want to go.
I should note that Wine is anything but new (it’s some 16 years old now) and it’s pretty common too. Fully supported versions of it are sold as a product focusing on business applications (Crossover) and there’s quite a number of not-quite-native Mac games that are really Windows games with a Wine-based wrapper (Cider). But it’s definitely new to me. And I should note (having learned this the hard way) that Wine is not an emulator – the Ubuntu community really hates having it called that.
I originally intended to use Wine for 3 things:
- iTunes, so that I could sync my iPhone
- Games, in order to avoid the primary reason I dual boot
- Microsoft Office
iTunes was a long-shot in the first place, and it should not come as a surprise that it didn’t work. I had to settle on dual booting whenever I needed to sync (a virtual machine would have also worked, but I didn’t want to have to deal with two sync databases).
Gaming was a crap-shoot. I’m actually not going to spend too much time talking about this because we’re going to go much more in depth on this in our next piece, but I’ll mention it quickly to discuss usability. The two games I had a particular interest in were Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, and Team Fortress 2.
The performance on both games was below that on Windows. In the case of Team Fortress 2 running it with DirectX 9 graphics (Shader Model 2/3) was unbearably slow, and with DirectX 8.1 graphics it’s unbearably ugly (this being a product of TF2 simply looking a great deal worse without DX9 functionality). Technically I could play TF2, but it was going to be rougher than I could settle for.
As for Supreme Commander, the speed issue can be particularly problematic. The game is a CPU-eating monster, and it takes nearly everything it can get for its intricate simulations and AI routines. The loss here is that for whatever reason when bogged down the simulation speed was noticeably slower than under Windows, which while not technically unplayable can make a game so slow that it’s not practical to finish it. The other issue was minor graphical corruption with the icons; this was not a game breaker, but it was another sign to go back to Windows.
Now to the credit of the Wine development community, there are a number of games that apparently work well under Wine according to their application database, however the games I wanted on the hardware I had were not functioning as well as I’d like. Wine wasn’t going to meet my gaming needs. When we do Part 2 of our Ubuntu series and take a look at 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, we’ll take a more concentrated look at gaming inside and outside of Wine.
Finally, we have the success story in my use of Wine, Microsoft Office. As I stated previously when discussing OpenOffice, in spite of its abilities I missed Microsoft Office’s Ribbon UI. As Wine supports Word and Excel well enough to meet my needs, I was able to install those applications and use them as I would regularly use them under Windows. Their behavior under Wine isn’t perfect, as Wine’s application database will attest to, but the problems are not something that I encountered on a day-to-day basis. The biggest difference is that Wine + Ubuntu doesn’t have the same fine level of font anti-aliasing that Vista does, which makes it look slightly different. Meanwhile Outlook wasn’t as well behaved, but I already had Evolution which covered my needs in the first place.
Along with Microsoft Office, I also threw a few other assorted applications at Wine, which it handled without an issue. This includes some .Net 2.0 applications, which after installing the .Net framework in to Wine worked, and was not something I was seriously expecting. Although I wasn’t able to use Wine for everything I needed, it had a lot to do with keeping me in Ubuntu more often.
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Eeqmcsq - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
for your time spent on writing this article. I've made the jump to from Windows to Ubuntu (and Xubuntu for my older computers) back around 7.10 and 8.04 and I went through some of the headaches in adjusting to Ubuntu, but I eventually solved all of them and I'm quite settled in now.One comment about finding help in the form of command line instructions, rather than GUI instructions. GUI instructions for Ubuntu would not be useful for Kubuntu or Xubuntu, since they use different window managers. The command line solutions usually work for all three.
Also, boot times were noticeably improved in 9.04. Perhaps you can run a quick retest on it.
And you CAN install stuff when using the live CD. I've installed a couple of temperature monitoring utilities when I was stress testing my motherboard.
Finally, thanks again for writing such a thorough look into your Ubuntu experiences. It was a great read in seeing how far Ubuntu has come and what it still lacks.
fepple - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
Yeah, you can set the APT sources to use a CD. There is an option for it 'system' > 'administor' > 'software source', or you can edit the /etc/apt/sources.list fileclarkn0va - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
[quote]since SMB is the predominant protocol for consumer file server gear, it’s a fair test of such use.[/quote]While this comment is not false, it presents a lazy approach to comparison; it's a one-sided contest, and Linux, pitted against Windows on home turf, doesn't stand much of a chance.
You as much as acknowledge this in the article, so why not provide some counterpoint? For example, consumer file server gear, even if it supports SMB almost ubiquitously, is usually *nix-based. So instead of just showing Windows and Linux clients interacting with Windows servers, show them interacting with *nix servers as well. Do some NFS transfers as well; NFS is well supported in consumer NAS these days.
You also really missed the boat on the video drivers. 8.04 was not the first Ubuntu release to include the Restricted Drivers Manager (known simply as "Hardware Drivers" in later releases). This handy app will identify hardware, such as AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, that can take advantage of proprietary drivers, and will offer to to install the same via synaptic (APT) with just a click of the mouse. No CLI, no headaches.
Still, a thorough review, and generally well-researched. I'm looking forward to the 9.04 follow-up.
Since you mentioned hardware HD decoding, I recommend taking a look at smplayer from the testing ppa (https://launchpad.net/~rvm/+archive/testing)">https://launchpad.net/~rvm/+archive/testing). Unfortunately vdpau doesn't work with the nvidia blobs in the default Ubuntu repos, but I believe there's a PPA providing vdpau-compatible blobs for anybody not wanting to do CLI installs.
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VaultDweller - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
[quote]While this comment is not false, it presents a lazy approach to comparison; it's a one-sided contest, and Linux, pitted against Windows on home turf, doesn't stand much of a chance. [/quote]This isn't Linux pitted against Windows on home turf, it's Linux pitted against Windows in the real world.
clarkn0va - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
Well, no doubt SMB is the dominant method of sharing files for consumers in general. Obviously comparing Linux to Windows makes sense in a world where Windows is the incumbent, but it's not the whole story.I hope Part 2 will address some of the objective benefits of Ubuntu, and not fall into the trap of "worse because it's not the same as Windows".
VaultDweller - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
I agree in principle, but there has to be a distinction between "Worse because it's not compatible with Windows," "Worse because it's not as easy as Windows," and "Worse because it's not the same as Windows." Die-hard *nix advocates tend to dismiss the first two as if they were the latter, and this tends to undermine their argument.Also, in some cases "Worse because it's not the same as Windows" can be a valid point, because the public has been trained to the point that the Windows way is the "intuitive" way. Of course, this isn't truly intuitive, as people who learned Linux first would find Linux methodologies more intuitive - but that's largely a moot point, as that's not the reality we live in today. You could say the same thing about the color red - in the western world, when we see red we can intuitively guess that it means Stop, or Warning, or Error, etc. The fact that this is not an understanding we're born with but rather a socially acquired intuition does not mean it would be any easier to suddenly change the color of traffic lights and expect people to adjust without problems.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
All of the NAS gear I can get my hands on is either SMB only, or is a Time Capsule which is SMB + AFP. I don't have anything that does NFS, which isn't so much a comment on testing (I could always set up another box) as it is usefulness. NFS just isn't common on consumer gear; SMB is a more important metric if you're looking at file transfer performance, because that's what most people are going to be working with. This doesn't preclude doing NFS at a later time though.And the Restricted Drivers Manager is limited to the drivers in the Hardy repository, which means they're a year+ out of date.
amrs - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Interestingly, if one checks the SmallNetBuilder NAS charts, it looks like out of 87 NAS devices, 49 have NFS. 56% in other words. And you say NFS isn't common? Really now? Seems a little biased to me.ekul - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
While a lot of your issues have complicated solutions or lengthy technical backstories I can solve your complaint of smb shares mounted in nautilus not being useful in non-gtk applications in one simple command (or as you seem to hate commands the gui can do it too).theory: make a symlink to the directory nautilus mounts to so it can be easily accessed. Symlinks to directories or files are transparently (to users and applications) identical to the location they refer to. Windows doesn't have symlinks (only useless shortcuts) so it isn't surprising you were not aware to do it.
howto: gvfs uses the directory /home/$USER/.gvfs as a mount point so link to it:
ln -s ~/.gvfs ~/linkname
howto gui: in nautilus go to your home folder then choose view -> show hidden files. Right click on .gvfs and choose make link. Then you can rename the link to whatever you want and hide hidden files again.
hint: symlinks are your best friend. My home dir is littered with links to places on the filesystem I visit a lot to avoid a lot of clicking/typing
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
I suddenly feel very humiliated...The symlink is a very elegant solution, I'm embarrassed I didn't think of that myself. It's a bit of a lousy solution in that there even needs to be a solution, but as far as things go that's a very insightful suggestion.