Switching to Linux

[ProjectKITT]

Definitely a learning curve... I reinstalled Kubuntu once after I did something that made the CD drive completely disappear. I'm still not sure what it was but I think it had something to do with Wine.

A few other things that I'm having some trouble with: a 3D modelling program. I installed Blender and Wings 3D. Wings 3D uses "subdivision" modelling, which I've found to be a bit tricky. Blender seems to be more mesh-based like Zmodeler but the interface is somewhat daunting; reminds me of 3DS Max. I'm looking for some good tutorials for Blender now, in the meantime I've been switching to a Windows computer to work on 3D models, and also to create PDFs. The Linux print-to-file option doesn't seem to be very good quality (I'm going to look into that further).

One last thing: I just discovered that my computer won't print from Inkscape. I tried Gimp and it printed right away; then I tried printing from Inkscape on a Windows computer to the same printer and it worked I need to look into that more too.

[Maltedfalcon]

with wine, parallels vmware, etc... you can associate a device with an operating system. so if you associated your cd/dvd with Wine so that Windows could see it, Linux would pretend its not there, so as not to cause conflicts.
Its relatively easy to give back in the wine preferences then restart wine.
Same with Parallels or vmware.

I have to be careful with parallels (I have a mac running osx with Ubuntu and Windows as VM's if Ubuntu or windows is open and I insert a CD/DVD it will present to whichever VM is active and then the other "machines" cant see it

[imcold]

Originally Posted by ProjectKITT

Wings 3D uses "subdivision" modelling, which I've found to be a bit tricky.

Don't forget to use hard edges, if you're trying subdivision. It's a way of controlling which areas get subdivided and which don't.
Also, one can use Wings as a mesh modeling tool with one restriction - your mesh has to have a (enclosed) volume. I.e. you can't have a 'planar'/2d object like a single triangle, or a single vertex just floating around without connection to any object.

[John Bowden]

imcold............ I'm trying to learn Wings3D also......... how do you use hard edges?

Am I'm learning that you can not use a single vector or connect tme in a line and then rotate around a center. So I used cylinders to create my object.

But the unfold was a giant mess. I think if I could have set a hard edge it would not have been such a mess.

[imcold]

Select edge -> right click menu -> hardness -> pick hard. Hard edge will be orange-colored by default. Nice video showing hard edges and smoothing/subdivision right at the beginning: UV Map - Cutting the mesh with hard edges (Part 5) - YouTube
I haven't used Wings for unfolding, though I think one can achieve an unscaled and unwarped UV map, that could be used as paper model pattern.

[ProjectKITT]

Maltedfalcon, thanks for the info on CD drives! That makes perfect sense. Now if it happens again I'll know how to fix it

Here is as far as I got with Wings3D:



That's my second attempt after about 2 hours. It looked like a nice simple model to start with but that much time in Zmodeler and I had the mesh completely finished. I think I'm getting ahead of myself with Wings3D and should try following some step-by-step tutorials first. Worked well in the past The same with Blender, except I haven't even tried modeling with that yet.

[ProjectKITT]

FINALLY!!! After plenty of toying around with it I got my first program working in Wine! Transformers the Game in Wine 1.4 with Winetricks. I'm going to submit a test report on WineHQ once I make sure it's actually working as well as it seems to be.

Opening the TF_DVD in Dolphin and double-clicking on setup.exe runs the installer with Wine. It installed fine until the very end, where it exited with an error (but is actually okay) like an earlier WineHQ test stated.

Running the game came up with... an error! "Please insert the correct DVD and restart the application" or something like that. I should mention here that this is one of 2 games I tried installing, both from legitimate commercial DVDs. I mapped out the CD Drive in Winecfg for both of them. The second game sees its DVD just fine when it's in the drive (but has other problems), however this game for some reason just cannot find it. I had to use a no-cd patch to get it working (gray area, I know). If anyone can help me do away with that I would be grateful

Anyway, once the game was running the sound seemed to be fine (WineHQ warned about that), but I had to change some settings because it was REALLY slow, the graphics looked like everything was getting a glare from the sun, and the camera was jumpy. I turned off all the graphics settings and hi-res in the game menu and that took care of the graphics and speed; setting mwo=enabled and mwo=force in Winetricks fixed the camera. Good to go!

[ProjectKITT]

I've got something to add to my list of stuff to fix: the print preview doesn't work in quite a few programs, including Gimp and KolourPaint.

On the flip side, Ultimate Papercraft 3D appears to work in Wine right out of the box