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So many people have left
1 min read
I pop on every once in awhile, sometimes I check to see if any of the people I used to follow, or who follow me are active at all. But it seems more than a few of them have left dA pretty much for good, they removed all their deviations. 
Makes me sad.
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Back to Mac?
1 min read
Well, I am an OS buff as well as a computer hardware buff...
I have been building my own computers for awhile now, but when I saw that Apple was moving to RISC and their own CPU to boot... had to do it. So it is time to go back to Apple! I picked up a new Mac Mini M1, and an OWC expansion... Excited to get it. Coming a week after Christmas.
If you haven't read up on the technology, go take a look at it. I used Mac Mini's for YEARS before I started building out my own boxes because of their simplicity and because of the unix-based Mac OS X.
Prior to that my favorites were an old Amiga workstation, power PCs... etc. I had home-built Be boxes too. I just enjoy the tech.
So, despite the fact I will be taking a hit in my Steam games account (many of the games won't work well, at least for the first year or so I am sure), I am going to go for it.
I will post pics when I get it.
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Ubuntu to Pop
1 min read
Well now! Remember I said I thought I would try giving Ubuntu a year? That was before a Snap install/then deinstall hosed the entire system. Yes that is right. I installed some Snaps to do some work, once the work was done I decided to remove one of the Snaps and my system started behaving oddly. So, I rebooted.
Guess what never came back?
I was a little unhappy with that.
Pop!_OS (based on Ubuntu with tweaks) released their own 20.04 Beta so I decided to install that (I've used Pop for nearly a year solid at one point when it first came out - good distro). Pop enables flatpak but I do not believe snaps are on by default, but to be sure I am thinking of removing the snap daemon.
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Ubuntu 20.04 Beta
2 min read
Decided to check out the almost released next LTS (long term support) version of Ubuntu. When Ubuntu first came out, I hopped on board and ran it as my linux distro for several years. But things happened, stuff was changed, blah blah and I stopped using Ubuntu. In fact I am pretty sure I haven't really touched it in over a decade, except maybe I did install Kubuntu and ran it briefly.
It installed easily through the ubiquity installer. I installed alongside of Windows 10 (gotta keep Windows around for a handful of games, and sometimes to test ideas for work). Canonical has made some changes to the default theme, including a new icon set. Looks decent. Performance has been good. I tweaked the UI to suit my needs a little, of course, and am worried that when the final release comes, it might blow away my tweaks. I guess we will find out.
For those of you who do not use linux but are curious and tempted to make the jump, distributions like Ubuntu are a great choice. They have a large community, and tend to be well-made and easy to learn for newbies. Honestly, FOSS operating systems, linux-based systems in particular, have come such a loooooooong way. For example, I feel that the font rendering in Gnome (a linux user interface) is superior to both Windows and Mac OS X. It sits somewhere in between the two.
And the software repositories... wow. They are huge. You can find everything you need (well for most folks anyway) in the linux "stores". Anyway, I am rambling, my apologies!
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Star Stable Online - on Linux
2 min read
The SSO community is large. I imagine, like many out there, many players prefer to use linux over Windows. I had used linux for years while playing SSO and other games via Steam or Wine/PlayOnLinux.
About a year ago SSO introduced a new launcher and that launcher broke gameplay in linux. Or so I thought. I ended up taking on the Wine game status for SSO and was glad to see that a number of people were testing and trying various things to get it working again.
It turned out to be quite simple in the end. Apparently there is a problem with the fonts (requires Microsoft Core Fonts) using PlayOnLinux. For most applications the POL font installation works fine, but not for SSO. The workaround is to create your container through POL (PlayOnLinux) but to not install SSO. Then once you create the container, from the command line, use WineTricks (another very useful tool) to install the Microsoft Core fonts.
Once they are installed, start up POL and then perform the SSO installation. That is it. Works like a charm.
So:
1. install winetricks
2. install playonlinux
3. download your wine versions
3. create a container (recent version of wine preferred) and name it something like SSO (for ease of use)
4. exit POL
5. start up winetricks specifying the container you just created
6. navigate to install font, select core fonts, and just answer the prompts (take default, just hit return)
7. when fonts are installed exit winetricks
8. start playonlinux
9. click install new app
10. select existing (that lets you select the container you already created)
11. select "install another" or whatever that link is at the bottom
12. select the starstable installer
...and you are basically done.
Here is an example of how to install fonts through winetricks from my own setup:
1. Created SSO 64 bit WINE container through PlayOnLinux... then in terminal...
2. env WINEARCH="win64" WINEPREFIX="/home/mitch/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/SSO" bash winetricks
3. Then selected default prefix
4. Selected Install Font.
5. Selected corefonts... let it do its thing.
2. env WINEARCH="win64" WINEPREFIX="/home/mitch/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/SSO" bash winetricks
3. Then selected default prefix
4. Selected Install Font.
5. Selected corefonts... let it do its thing.
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