Hey guys, Its been a while. I hope everything's been peachy on your end. I have more or less abstracted myself from communities and stuff like that, and I'm doing more development and studying hard because this guy right here writing right now only has 4 courses left to finish his bachelor's degree! Wooo! (Ric Flair in case anyone wondering) I've been away from linux land, sometimes I miss it. I've been wondering how's its been since Steam Machines and SteamOS launched. Any good news? Bad news? How is it doing? Are companies still continuing to support linux? That aside... not sure about you but recently... well, today I decided to stop using google's gmail service. I just couldn't stop feeling uncomfortable about it and what it entails in terms of privacy. (Wrote a bit about it) Two services that really called my attention were Posteo.de and FastMail. In terms of aesthetics and functionality (including support for 100 domain names) FastMail has the upper hand. Posteo.de didn't stop impressing me though, the lengths they go to protect your data and the transparency reports they post on their blogs are pretty darn great. On the other hand I'm on a miss or hit hunt. I _desperately_ want to get my data off Dropbox. I settled with Sync.com which seems to compromise when it comes to privacy, then there's SpiderOak which.... didn't really impress me... and their 60-days trial of "free account" killed it for me. Do note that I don't mind paying for storage, I mean, I'm paying FastMail at the moment. It's just that I don't need anything beyond <2GB most of it will have encrypted containers from veracrypt from SSH keys I use on my server and other stuff. All in all. Not sure if this tin foil hat looks good on me yet...
Hey Allen! Glad to see you are almost done with college... I loved college but also loved to go to work and be productive. its ironic, I went to college for a Fine Art degree and now I'm in IT... who knew? I've learned a lot more paid-on-the-job than I ever have paying for education. Linux and Mint 17.2 is going GREAT for me! I still have a little lag here and there with Cinnamon and Nvidia 352 drivers, but who am I to complain? Previously Mint was stuck on 331 drivers for over a year. I'm currently playing Mass Effect 3 and will be posting a Guide in the morning. I haven't thoroughly tested it yet, but plan to this weekend. Origin is finally working with a few work-arounds, but Mass Effect 3 stops if Origin crashes. Did I ever say "I HATE Game Clients!!!" I'm just surprised it works at all... Mass Effect 3 was on my "waiting list" because Origin never worked in the past, but now it does. So I will be testing Medal of Honor, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and Dragon's Age: Origins Only because I don't have those on Steam. As for native gaming... I'm playing Minetest and Terraria a lot with my wife-n-daughters. We love em! Sandbox, crafting and action are a win win! I'm also testing native: Sir, You Are Being Hunted Unturned Costume Quest 2 There is a lot going on and I've read on Reddit that Zotac and Syber Steam Machines are selling out I'm not planning on getting one because I already have Linux boxes that run Steam just fine. We play a lot of cooperative games so TV gaming isn't going to work for us. It's good to see that they are selling... Hopefully the word will get out and Valve will do more advertising
Running Origin on WINE is a pain.... I remember because I couldn't get it to run correctly, and sometimes it would get stuck downloading things. Which is amusing because Origin is written in C++/Qt and Qt as we know works on linux... but... due to EA not covering linux games yet they haven't provided any linux binaries. I can't be productive... more like the job market here stinks and won't get better anytime soon. Well, I'm still studying on my end; it's true that you don't learn much on college, most of what I've learned has been on my own going through a lot of documentation and trial/errors. That said, I still need to get a Bachelor's degree going out there if i want to land somewhere "nice", an associate degree doesn't cut it anymore. From what you describe seems like things are going steady, not fast but just trudging along.
I found that doing this workaround for now, fixes the Origin issue for me. this is for wine but I'm sure it can be implemented in Playonlinux. Symptom: The login prompt shows an error message "Online login is currently unavailable." Origin uses the "GTE CyberTrust Global Root" (1024-bit) certificate. This certificate was removed by Mozilla and many Linux distributions because it is insecure. The only real solution for this is EA to use a new and secure certificate (the current insecure one will expire in 2018). This issue is tracked in bug #35828, but can't be solved in Wine. Workaround: Download the certificate from the bug report. wget https://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=52785 -O gte_global.reg Install it in your wineprefix. (Only there, but not systemwide on your Linux/Mac system.) wine regedit gte_global.reg Now restart Origin and you should be able to login. Source: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=26175
I tried to install that Jade Empire last night, it installs but Origin develops a crash report with Origin Crash Code: 8b70 it probably needs a few other things before it will launch. Plus it will only install on a 64bit prefix. As for games I am running right now I have: Native: Stunt Rally, Unvanquished, hcraft, Solarus Wine: Smite, The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot, Steam, Far Cry, Far Cry 2, Fallout NV, Skyrim, Survival Crisis Z, Team Fortress 2, Path Of Exile, Uplay, Might & Magic Duel Of Champions, Origin and Battle.net. POL: Guild Wars 2 and probably a couple of more I forgot to add.
I've been running Arch testing for a few months now, also switched to the i3 window manager which I am very happy about. There have been some native Linux releases lately, some big ones are: Shadows or Mordor, which runs great. It was a lot of fun, although I found the gameplay to become tedious after a while. Still a highly entertaining game with a very good native Linux version. SOMA, first person horror game from the makers of Penumbra and Amnesia. It runs perfectly, and the atmosphere and story of the game made it into one of my definite favorite recent releases. Alien Isolation, this is one really amazed me. I am able to run the native Linux version with all settings on ultra, and it looks gorgeous. I was impressed by the graphics and that it runs so smoothly. Another game with a very good Linux version. I was really looking forward to Barman Arkham Knight, but it got delayed. Not very surprising considering that the Windows version of the game had a lot of issues. The Linux release has been announced for Spring 2016. And still no word on when the Linux version of The Witcher 3 will come out. It has been confirmed that there will be a Linux version, just not when it can be expected. Personally, I do still tend to mostly play old favorites, although I have not had much time for gaming lately because of studies. But now that the exam is done, I can play games as much as I'd like. I have also thought about getting away from several of the services I use that have questionable end user privacy, but convenience has kept me with google still. I use the pidgin client for google's hangout which has an encryption plugin available, pidgin-otr. If two are chatting with this, then the content of the chat messages are encrypted. This of course only works when both use the pidgin chat client with the otr plugin. There is also the enigmail plugin for Thunderbird, which lets you encrypt emails no matter what email provider you use. There are of course other options available
Oh.... they finally decided to do something about The Witcher 3, they sure took a while to decide. Alien Isolation looks pretty cool! I've been meaning to play Shadow of Mordor but... part of me doesn't want to get any more games I have to finish my Steam backlog first, and I'm working on it at a turtle's pace. As for services.... I plan to delete all the emails in my main (and old) account. I moved all services I use to use the new e-mail address. Mailing lists as well too. At best I just want the data to be decentralized and replace them with privacy-conscious ones. As for Thunderbird.... I'm not sure what will become of it in the future. Mozilla want or plans to drop it. I'm sure a group of developers will maintain a fork like it always happen. Most e-mail clients on linux are pretty bad, imho. Thunderbird was pretty much -the- e-mail client for many of us. Some would argue to switch to a less featured one with a very primitive interface or jump to a terminal-based one which is something I'll never do. Regardless... I do hope a new breed of e-mail clients appears for linux. Geary, a GNOME app (and main e-mail client for eOS) is looking really, really good in terms of modern interface. Yet it's under heavy development and doesn't have plenty of features (or enigmail to begin with).
By the way, just posted Mass Effect 3 guide in Origin, see homepage Mass Effect 3 runs perfectly (as expected) but if Origin crashes, the game halts. Origin will crash randomly, but I was able to get an hour's worth of gaming in... So good enough for a guide to me! The initial problem with Origin is the InGameOverlay: igoproxy.exe igoproxy64.exe Rename those or delete and Origin works fine. I even downloaded the entire Mass Effect 3 game and it crashed at the end, but downloaded fine. Origin is the main reason I have put off a few games. It just doesn't play nice with Wine
It helps for sure, but Origin still crashes without renaming igoproxy64.exe If you don't rename igoproxy.exe it will pop up with errors every time. So I renamed both. Of course when you update Origin, they come back. So the best thing to do is play Origin offline until you are done with your game
