Howto's, experiences and more

On addition to my first post about this subject, after close to 2 years it is time to revisit and revise the whole manual to get World of Warcraft running on Wine.

So, let’s make a few assumptions here :

- You have a system running at least Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx, fully updated.
- You want to play World of Warcraft on it.
- You came here for an in-depth guide on how to get that done.

Alrighty, let’s get cracking then !

First thing you need to do is make sure that you have the right drivers installed for your video adapter and that you actually have hardware OpenGL support up and running on your system.

This is usually accomplished by running System->Administration->Hardware and then installing the proprietary hardware drivers for your particular videocard.

OpenGL hardware capabilities are also referred to as DRI, which means Direct Rendering Infrastructure. Without it, OpenGL will heavily lean on your CPU for all it’s calculations instead of your GPU. When you run a rather CPU intensive program, such as a computer game like World of Warcraft, you really do not want to do without it.

Read more

With the new Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx in hand, it was time to evaluate how much would work out-of-the-box on it. My last experiences with this were less than satisfactory, but I also was aware that Linux came a long way since then.

So, jumping off the cliff, I installed the 32bit version on my laptop, and to my surprise, the installation was quick and painless and the system booted up smoothly and almost everything just worked !

So instead of giving you a list of what works, here is a list of what does not work :

- Wireless network
- Fingerprint authentication
- Some hotkeys like rotate screen.
- Automatic screen rotation when put in tablet mode.

So this means that the touch screen capabilities of this laptop work out of the box. Well done developers at Ubuntu / Gnome / etc !

So, how do we get the other things to work then ?

First thing i did was to get the wireless up and running. You will need to download a few things so you need another pc with internet connection and a usb stick, or if you have dualboot you can use windows to download it or you can plug in a network cable as that works fine out of the box.

Read more

OpenSSH is the default means of accessing a unix based server nowadays, and so it should be, because OpenSSH is safe, fast and stable.

However, as always, the weak end of a secure system is always at the user end. Therefore we are going to need to tighten up OpenSSH even more than it already is, which is quite easy to do.

First thing you need to look at is if you are using an up to date version of OpenSSH. At the time of this writing, version 5.3 is the most recent one so when reading this post, it needs to be at least that.

To determine the version, type $ ssh -V

It will produce some output with a version number, most likely with added information about the distribution of linux that you are using.

When you ensured that your version is up to date, it’s time to get to work and tighten the thing down :

Read more

This is a small list of how to harden your TCP/IP stack on your linux server.

Most modern server distributions already have a more hardened stack, but most of the time, you can even tighten it up further, which is generally a good idea in my humble opinion.

This list is by no means complete and I welcome more suggestions for further tightening down.

Read more

This is the first part of a complete series on how to build virtual server platform that will run virtualised  High Availability servers. For the complete index of this series, please click here.

The base OS of this solution will be the Ubuntu distributions, which can be found here.

First thing you need to do, is of course, set up the platform that will run the virtual servers we are going to build.

My choice for that was the 64bit desktop version of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, which is the 10.4 LTS distribution. LTS simply means Long Term Support. Which will ensure that the coming few years your distribution will still be supported.

Why did I choose for a desktop version to run my virtual servers ? Well, basicly, linux is linux, and the type of distribution doesn’t really matter if you build a server out of it or a desktop. I chose for the desktop version because it comes with a fully pre-configured X/Gnome installation, and doesn’t contain anything I don’t need on the base platform. The only thing i needed to do was install OpenSSH to ensure that I have remote access to the machine.

However if you want to go hardcore and install a non-gui distribution like Ubuntu Server on it, that’s a perfectly valid choice as well. Although administrating the thing might be slightly harder to do, especially when it comes to installing the virtual servers. So i highly recommend the desktop version to get it all running, and then later you can just switch runlevel to 3 instead of 5 to get rid of the GUI overhead. Although I have to add that the GUI doesn’t give you much overhead apart from like 100MB extra memory load to run X/Gnome and like a half % cpu load in the worst case for X/Gnome just sitting idle.

For the virtual servers I chose Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.4 LTS Server. This can be either 32bit or 64bit, depending on your hardware and what VirtualBox will support on your platform. I will get back to VirtualBox later.

So now that we sorted out what OS’es we are going to use, let’s look at what we need to get the server base platform running and ready to accommodate virtual servers :

Read more