PlayOnLinux

A couple years ago I discovered a program called PlayOnLinux. It is a front end for Wine. When I looked at it before, it sucked. I forget the problem. I believe it just didn't work in the distro that I was using and was buggy as hell. I'm hearing much better news out of it now. I hope it will fix my issue.

Wine is not a Windows emulator. Wine is a library based back end for Windows based programs to run on. That means, Wine runs in Linux. There is no Windows involved. Wine is not a copy of Windows. Wine will not run programs unless all the commands and objects and such have been written in to Wine. This is an important distinction because it explains why everyone has such a hard time running games and complex software using Wine. Not all the bits are there at any given time.

PlayOnLinux is simply a frontend for Wine. It has a GUI and several prebuilt scripts that allow you to customize Wine including version for each program. Wine works for a huge number of popular Windows software packages including games. The trouble is you have to tweak it like a nutter for everything you run. This is where PlayOnLinux comes in.

Normally, I don't care about running Windows software. The only thing I cannot get some equivalent for Linux is games. Well, I want a first person shooter. I've found Battlefield 2. Apparently Crisis and a few others play under the PlayOnLinux platform.

I need to kill some bots. I'm a very weak player. The thing I'm after here is to dial the bots to stupid and blow their heads off with sniper rifles and rocket launchers. They have choppers in this game as well. The single player portion of the game kind of blows, but I don't care. maybe I'll find someone to play with online. I also want to get some driving game working. Maybe Grand Theft Auto. That is kind of a driving game.

Steam is listed as well. I hear you can download it and get a game without paying anything. This would be great for testing. So much for sleep.