Linux

This situation actually came about because I can't connect to Tranquility using Windows anymore. It's also been a very bad year in my relationship with Microsoft.

I'm a 2009 player, but I took about a year off from the game. I'm also pretty experienced with Windows based systems. I worked as an industrial control systems programmer for about 10 years.

As we speak I'm downloading ISOs of the major freeware Linux distributions. Debian, Fedora, ubuntu, CentOS, OpenSUSE, and one other.

My goal is to see if I can connect to Eve as quickly and as painlessly as possible, but I know zip about Linux.

I'd like to leave this thread open for a while because I will have a thousand questions before it's all over.

First question: Which distribution should I use?

I also understand that quite a few people are running Eve inside of Wine.

Second question: can anyone give me a short course (Wine for Dummies) on how that works?

You can ask ten people and get ten different answers to that. It's a question of taste above everything else. I went through many distros over the course of a couple of years before I finnaly found one I really liked.

I personally prefer Gentoo, but that will probably not fit your definition of "painless", as with Gentoo being source based it involves a lot of compiling, tinkering and tuning.

Ubuntu and it's variants may be a good choice, as they have a huge active userbase and you can find a wealth of information about them everywhere on the internet. Kismeteer is maintaining a guide on how to get eve running in Ubuntu LTS, you can find it a few threads below this one. The default desktop environment, unity, is a little different from what you may be used to and many people (including myself) don't like it very much. For a leaner, faster and more conservative desktop out of the box, install Lubuntu or Xubuntu.

If you don't want to upgrade your OS every year or so and don't mind a little tinkering, there are also a few binary based rolling release distros, such as Arch Linux, which is brilliant but maybe a little difficult for a linux newbie, and the dev branches of certain distros such as Debian sid, OpenSuse Factory and Slackware Current.

Stay clear of Sabayon, it's pretty ****.




It's the only viable option, really. You may have heard of people using Playonlinux or Transgaming Cedega. However, PoL is just a management tool for wine, and Cedega is a closed source fork of wine and generally regarded as not very good.

You could also run a virtual machine with a dedicated graphics card, but that would involve running windows which I reckon isn't what you are after.




There isn't much to it. Get a basic understanding of how things in linux work (installing packages, using the terminal) and you will be able to figure it out eventually.

As for a crash course:

To run a Windows program in wine, you just type "wine yourprogram.exe", and if you are lucky, it will just work. Wine will create a virtual Windows like environment for your software to run in, called a "prefix". Per default it's stored in ~/.wine where "~/" is your user's home directory. However, if you are using multiple Windows programs and games, it's usually a good idea to give each it's own prefix to avoid trouble.

Copypasting from another post I made just a few days ago:

First make sure that you have up to date drivers for your graphics card installed. I recommend the proprietary ones, but the open source ones (nouveau, radeon) might work as well. This process will depend on the distro you choose, read the documentation or wiki, it shouldn't be too difficult in any case.

Then, assuming you have a 64 bit OS, in a terminal do the following: (# is root, $ is your desktop user)

Install wine. (this is also distro-dependant)

For Arch Linux:
# pacman -S wine

For *Ubuntu, Debian, Mint:
# apt-get install wine

For Fedora and maybe OpenSuse:
# yum install wine

For Gentoo (but if you managed to install gentoo, you probably know this already):
# emerge wine

Make sure that you have at least wine version 1.6. Depending on your distro, the official repositories may not have it. In that case, check the wiki/documentation to learn how to get a current wine. To check your wine version type:

$ wine --version

to install eve in a fresh prefix:
$ WINEDEBUG=-all WINEPREFIX=~/eve_prefix wine "/path/to/eve/installer.exe"

to start the launcher and update the game:
$ WINEDEBUG=-all WINEPREFIX=~/eve_prefix wine "C:\Program Files (x86)\CCP\Eve\eve.exe"

to start the game directly:
$ WINEDEBUG=-all WINEPREFIX=~/eve_prefix wine "C:\Program Files (x86)\CCP\Eve\bin\exefile.exe"

Be patient, the first launch can take a while, as Eve in wine has trouble loading up the EULA, but it will work eventually. Once you are on the character select screen, open the settings (escape) and set Eve to run in a "Fixed Window" and uncheck "Load Station Environment". You can check it again after you have entered the game, just keep in mind not to enter captains quarters, since that will most likely crash the game. Everything else should work.

If you want to run Eve in a virtual desktop (It can help with tabbing issues and multiple clients) you can modify the command like so:

$ WINEDEBUG=-all WINEPREFIX=~/eve_prefix wine explorer /desktop=eve,1024x768 "C:\Program Files (x86)\CCP\Eve\bin\exefile.exe"

Put in your screen resolution if you want fullscreen, otherwise you will get a window. If something doesn't work or you need help with one of the steps, copy/paste the command you entered and the terminal output here, so we can see what's wrong.

If your paste is too long, please use pastebin.com.

Ok. I'm using Firefox from Ubuntu 14.04 to send this.

Before I start doing things, I have a question. I have two monitors. For some reason it decided to use the VGA one as main instead of the DVI one. So I have to run the mouse pointer of the right edge of this screen in order to get to the other monitor, which is on the left of this one. How do I cange that and the resolutions?

It really depends on the window manager, and driver you are using. Start here:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/300670/is-there-any-ability-to-set-primary-monitor
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaMultiMonitors

The other thing to consider is running something other than the default window manager. Unity is okay, but it slows down eve a lot
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingKDE
(Be sure to disable desktop effects in system settings)
http://askubuntu.com/questions/243318/how-to-install-lubuntu-desktop-environment-and-only-the-desktop-environment
http://askubuntu.com/questions/223536/how-can-i-install-xfce-along-side-unity

Also I'd install the latest version of wine.
http://www.winehq.org/download/ubuntu

Lastly check out winehq for installing and configuring eve under wine.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=25823

Very helpful. TYVM.

This new launcher does that under windows too. It'll come up partially or fully blank at times, with no login field. So I don't think it's a Linux/Wine problem exclusively.

It seems like you chose Ubuntu. Its a nice distrib for when you are new to Linux systems, easy to use and lot of documentation, but I found that they are more and more leaning towards a Windows-like system. I don't like Unity at all and it ships with tons of software you don't really use though you can always uninstall them easily.

Personally I switched to Arch for some time now, and it runs like a charm. It is a rolling release system, which means that updates are available everyday as soon as contributors update them on the repository so you are basically always up-to-date.
The packet manager is really nice too, and you really control what is running on your system.
Their wiki has tons of information and it is easy to find what you want to know there even if you are a beginner.

The downside is that it may not be easy to go through the install the first time, though it is part of what is great about this distrib : you HAVE to know what you are doing so you learn a lot in the process.

So, go for Ubuntu for a while if you want to jump quickly into Eve, and when you're ready to master your system, find a distrib like Arch and don't look back ;)




Yes, it is possible that your ISP has blocked only some protocols so you can still ping it but the connection is blocked.
Either that, or your firewall (if you use one) or even your router configuration.

EDIT : Or it may be a DNS problem if you ping with the IP and the game tries to connect by resolving a domain name. Check this topic https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=326121&find=unread

I was wondering what window manager that was. I clearly need to spend some time away from the computer

I don't think many people want to treat their computer as much more than an instrument - you usually tinker not in a hammer but with a hammer, don't you?

I would certainly recommend Ubuntu or one of its derivatives (Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Mint) for new converts

I'm used to say that you'd get eleven different answers... That's where the real fun starts.

Choice is both a solution and a new problem.