Ask the Experts / Linux

Alright, so I recently converted to Linux, after reformatting once again due to XP's bullshit.

I'm running the PCLinuxOS desktop distro, on a 100 GB partition. Finally got RCT2 running (sometimes) through WINE.

However, whenever I right-click in-game, it locks the cursor in place and the screen follows my mouse movements. In other words, I can't delete anything. Which is a bit of a problem when working on my solo.

Help?

-ACE

What's the value for you to switch to Linux? I tried it last night, zero wireless internet access, extremely hard to find resources to replace the great software for Windows, and some of the more recent upgrades I had weren't even being recognized.

The value of Linux is not having my OS randomly decide not to boot from BIOS and force me to reformat. With Windows XP, this was happening to me on the order of once every six months.

And the only Windows applications I haven't found a suitable replacement for are games. OpenOffice is the shit.

There are kinks to work out, but it's a whole lot smoother than XP ever was.

-ACE

you just need to know windows well and it'll be your slave.

try this. http://www.nliteos.com

Edited by posix, 07 February 2007 - 04:17 PM.

Right-clicking works fine for me. But I'd recommend just booting into Windows to run games, I don't really see what difference the OS makes when your only running a single program.

EDIT: I had the right-button problem with RCT2/Wine also. Installing a Win98-native copy of system32/dinput.dll, and running the emulator as NT 4.0, has fixed everything up for me. Can't tell if I'm in Windows or Linux while playing any more.

My original post is now kinda irrelevant, bit I'm going to leave the rest intact here, for reference in case anyone follows in these footsteps.
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For some reason [Wine's necessary trial/error approach to cloning the undocumented parts of DirectX], the game doesn't see right-button releases correctly most of the time. The screen scrolls because that's what right-dragging does. Clicking the right mouse button a second time should both clear this, and delete whatever's under the cursor at that time. At least it does for me. Why only that button? Who knows...

So, known (to me) possible solutions:

The quick-n-dirty, play-right-now workaround is just to watch what you're doing, and if the scenery didn't disappear, right click again real quick. It takes a steady hand, but a habitual right double-click will soon develop, and you'll only occasionally accidentally delete a piece of scenery.

If/when you actually feel like fixing things for real, you'll first need to make sure that your kernel has preemption enabled. Games need to be able to tell the rest of Linux to Back Off. I checked out PCLinuxOS and noticed that it does not install a preemptible kernel by default. They do appear to ship with one available; they call it "realtime" or somesuch from what I can gather about their installer. You want it - it smoothes out video playback a lot, and emulators can't really work right unless they have very high priority. Low latency is key.

If the problem is still there afterward, and you have Windows 98, you could try installing some native Windows DLLs. Using the Win98 dinput.dll in particular, instead of Wine's emulated one, has solved the issue for some people in the past. I haven't tried it, but the XP version didn't work for me, that I did try. The PCLinuxOS website actually has really good instructions for this kind of thing in their "Configuring Wine" section. Using native DLLs might be worth a shot at that point, and easy enough to undo if it doesn't help.

After that, I'm out of ideas. Let me know how it goes if you don't mind.

Edited by EastBayDre, 23 February 2007 - 03:20 PM.

^ Interesting.

I've gone back to XP for now, but if I ever re-install Linux, I'll look into that.

-ACE