So this weekend Windows gave up on me and after some horrible filesystem corruption problems it decided not only to stop working, but also to stop letting myself reinstall after formatting the full HD. At least my data was safe on a secondary HD, so my only problem was finding a way of getting an operative system in place so I could use it…

I was about to try and install Vista (for some reason the installation for Vista didn’t throw a blue screen and non meaninful error code to me like the one for XP did) when I remembered that I had the CDs for the Intrepid Ibex Ubuntu release and hadn’t used them since the last time I reinstalled the computer. It’s an extremely user friendly linux version, with an interface very similar to Windows or MacOS and very easy to install, configure and update. I really would recommend it for the everyday user that just wants to check their emails, the internet, play films and doesn’t need Windows specific software. Also if you ever need them the user community is very active and helpful.

Even if you need to use Windows software, there’s this little application called Wine that you can install with two clicks from the “add a program” menu and will run your programs emulating Windows. This application is free and open source, but there’s also a commercial derivative called Cedega that is more oriented for gaming.

So far it all sounded good, so I set myself to installing Ubuntu, a 15 minutes mostly unatended flawless install with all the information gathered at the start so the user can forget about it and go doing something else. Then I let it update itself and installing Wine from the applications menu. All my hardware was detected automatically, including my ATI Radeon graphic card that required some non open source drivers from ATI that were installed on a single click. Loads of open source software available, some of it I had been using on Windows already so overall I was cheering at the prospect of being free from my Windows dependency.

But then my problems started. One of the reasons I use Windows is because I like gaming. Current main games include World of Warcraft and some city building single player ones. But I had Wine so it all was going to work fine!

Well, it didn’t. After checking a few how-tos and troubleshooting guides about how to running World of Warcraft on Wine I started to tweak and configure my wine and WoW installation. Main problems were that Wine hasn’t implemented DirectX fully yet (so I had to use opengl libraries, which WoW doesn’t really use very well) and that ATI propietary drivers for linux are, generally, lacking and badly supported. Since ATI won’t release their specifications for their graphic cards, the linux community cannot really provide open source drivers for those cards.

After a lot of tweaking I managed to make WoW run on the Ubuntu OS, but not at a playable level. The framerates were down to 5 to 10FPS on cities, and dropped as low as 3FPS on raids (Tested it on Naxxramas 25) which made the game experience similar to watching a slideshow and made things extremely difficult. My usual framerates for my current machine (Which isn’t high end but definitly good enough for WoW) on Windows are around 20-40FPS.

So after seeing this I decided to go back to trying to install Windows, and after a memory test (that returned everything as ok) and a long and boring installation I got everything back to the status before the HD failure and Linux is back to its own partition as a dual boot system for the times I am working or just not playing windows games.

I’m looking forward to the above issues being corrected so I can go back to using Ubuntu full time with my current setup (seems the NVIDIA support is much better, but for some reason I’ve always preferred ATI cards) but I guess it can take a while.  But for now I’m afraid I need to keep that Windows installation so prone to corrupting itself At least after spending all weekend playing with installations, partitions and tweakings to the xwindows graphic settings I hope to have learnt something about them. And it was also fun to run WoW from a console and see all the funny error messages/FIXME that I never get to see on Windows.