Scattered Mind

Just to give you some background on why I started posting here.  Recently a fast one was pulled on me, I was made junior linux administrator at work, that with Zero linux experience ect.  First thing I was concerned about was the fact that I have to un-install my Windows and install a linux OS.

Now being the hardcore gamer that I am, second concern was, is my world of warcraft going to work and how do I get it on seeing that linux does not work with .exe files.  When I asked my senior, the server admin what to do, the only reply I got was..”Google is your friend”.  And after browsing through hundreds of pages and chewing my finger nails to the bones, mainly because I had now idea what all this stuff meant I started with my installation.

So 2 months later and after a couple of re-installs I’ve finally got it to work, run smoothly and not giving me any hiccups.  So to spare some unlucky guy out there the agony of what I had to go through, here it is a step by step on how to install World of Warcraft on you linux machiene.

Please note though that there is a lot a options ang guidance available on google and this is only to show you how I did my insallation. I am using ubuntu  and wine for this installation

First things First.

Installing Wine
Fastest way to do this is to go the following route.

System, administration, synaptic packet manager

In the search bar type wine, and select it underneath for installation proceed with installing wine.

Make sure you have the latest version of wine installed, you can google for how this is done.  Basically all you need to do is add a certificate and get a public key, it is going to take you less than 5 min to do.

Installing WOW

First you need to create a directory

eg. mkdir wowinstall

Now we will install World of Warcraft. Get out your cd’s and copy all of the first CD to a directory, after this copy the MPQ’s from the rest of the CD’s to the same directory.

eg. CD1

cp /dev/cdrom/*

eg. Rest of CD’s

cp /dev/cdrom/*.mpq

Now you can start to run the instal

eg.

wine /directory/were/you copied the cd's/installer.exe

Go through the installer, i would suggest taking out all the spaces in the directory where its installed, for easier acces in the future.

Once you have installed WoW, the /World of Warcraft/wtf/Config.wtf file needs to be modified. Add the following lines:

SET gxApi "opengl"
SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "100"
SET gxColorBits "24"
SET gxDepthBits "24"

Now if you did this right, there should be a icon on your desktop, you can just double click the icon and your wow will launch with wine, dont update your account yet as we first have to install the expansions.

Installing wow Burning Crusade expansion

The steps to install

At the start of August this year I attended TechEd Africa.
As some of you would remember I was the lucky winner of one of Hewlet Packard South Africa’s giveways at the event, unfortunately I did not get the prize as I was not present at the drawing of the prize.

A few days ago, a representative, Samantha from Hewlet Packard contacted me with great news, they saw my grievance on my blog and decided to give me the same server with Windows software!

At the event they actually sold these machines(only the machine) for a giveaway of R499, so I already bought two(which was the minimum).

So now after I recieve this one as well, I will have 3 x Hewlet Packard Proliant M110 G5 servers.

I’ve already installed one of my machines at home with FREENAS, which is running smoothly, though just a “glorified” file server.

Good quality and reasonably priced(not the same as the TechEd prices though) for anyone wanting to buy an entry level server for their small SME or organisation.
This is a very sturdy and compact system, with enough additional space for adding a couple of more drives in. The G5 also come with RAID( 6 port SATA controller with embedded RAID (4 available for Hard Disks)) support which is a good start to experiement for from home.

With these machines, you get 250GB SATA HDD and 1 GB RAM as well.

Thank you Hewlet Packard for getting back to me on, great to see companies following the web and finding and helping out consumers with their problems.

Gr8 video explaining Sharepoint to normal users

SharePoint in Plain English

UPDATE : Hewlet Packard has contacted me and offered me the same server and software as I won at TechEd, you can read more here.

I am currently at TechEd and have not had time to post for some time, not due to connectivity problems but actually due to not having time to get to it, being busy with session upon session.

Yesterday I entered into a competition at the HP stand here at TechEd Africa 2009 in Durban.

Later the after whilst in my last session for the day at around 17h15,  that goes on till 18h30.  about 18h10 I checked my phone and saw a missed call and a voice mail.

Listening to the voicemail it was HP that were trying to contact me, the missed call being at 17h17.

So I quickly went to the HP stand and they told me that I won the M110 G5 Server that was up for grabs. Gr8, but then the bad news.  They say they couldn’t get hold of me and gave the prize to someone else.

The 1 time I thought I won something and my excitement for nothing!

This however is a bit unorganised, as almost everybody is here to attend the sessions which are presented and not to stand around waiting for prize draws.

I do feel a bit ripped off though, but they did say they will send me something to Joburg – probably a stressball or something, but I’ll wait and see if that happens….

Well, now to attend the next session, will post some pics later, here is me earlier today…  [link to pic]

UPDATE : Hewlet Packard has contacted me and offered me the same server and software as I won at TechEd, you can read more here.

Thanks again HP!

So I’ve ordered a new skin for my Lenovo Z61m laptop.

It arrived about 2 weeks ago and I’m very happy with the purchase I’ve made from MySkins.co.za and they delivered in their 7 days as stated on their website.

And here it is in action

Plaxo.com has been providing Contact synchronisation and management of contacts between different devices and machines for quite some time now.

I’ve joined Plaxo about 3 years ago as a tool to help me keep my laptop and desktop applications in sync when working with my address book.

At the time I believed only in 3 social networking/web applications, namely

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• AND Plaxo.

One of the main features I liked about Plaxo is that you could have multiple email clients and then sync it to one repository online.

I used to run Mozilla Thunderbird and Outlook and would just sync each to the central repository.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve one would have noticed the following message when syncing your contacts or when starting up your machine.

Now it seems they are taking this the commercial root, and now you have to fork out money to have the sync capabilities.

I have actually concidred buying their premium package before for halping me out with doubles etc. but now it feels like this company has been taking me for the FREE-PAY -later ride.

I feel that this type of “business model” is unfair towards the un expecting end user and can cause one to rely one’s whole life on a service set as free and then being later locked down as a paid service.

Google however has perfected this as they’re adwords are floating around their applications and keep generating them money, and probably the latest recession has seen Plaxo having to make this decision that could help them generate extra money but also loose a lot of fans.

I assume their business model was based on the “hope”/prediction that at least a certain percentage of their FREE users will go for the premium memberships, but eventually stuck with the free service, and then they probably pulled on the shortest string.

Are you looking forward to the next Sharepoint after MOSS 2007, well the first sneak previews have emerged, looks like it’s definitely going to be a hit, again!

Check out the overviews and sneak peek here.

My laptop has been looking terrible lately, as the protective layer has been fading away, and now it looks like I’ve been eating “Fish & Chips” on my laptop cover.

Luckily MySkins.co.za has come to the rescue, with their unique offerings where you can get unique stickers or skins for your electronic devices from IPods, laptops to Playstations and DSTV Decoders.

There are quite a lot of these sites online, but this is the first online shop that I’ve seen with such a large variety of skins for various different models.

After browsing through their designs, I found the one that I reckon would fit me the best, “Pulse”. You can also design your own and send it through.

I’ve ordered this one for a bit steap price of R250, but it looks quite promising, so expecting my order to come in the next 7 days.

MySkins.co.za was featured on CNBC Africa’s show Tech@Work on Sunday the 29th of July 2007.

Just a quick bit of news, Google has announced their new project …

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

This is rediculous, Blizzard announced yesterday, that they will not be supporting LAN in their upcoming much anticipated sequel to Starcraft, Starcraft 2 which hopefully will still be released in 2009.

Living in a country where bandwidth does not come cheap, it is appalling that Blizzard has made us fall in love with Starcraft, and now take it away from us, just by making you play online, where it will mean us forking out a lot of money out of our pockets to play for FREE on their Battlefield.net server.

One of the reasons why they made this decision is bacause of piracy, but I think this make the “hackers/crackers” to target Blizzard software for making these decisions.

If this will continue and Blizzard does continue with the implementation of their plan, they will be loosing a lot of respect from their client base, and loosing loyal players (and buyers) of Starcraft.

This is my #FAIL for today.