Linux guide I wrote a while back

Hey guys,
Possibly not entirely WoW-related I know, but this was a little guide I threw together prolly a year or two back to help someone learn about Linux from the ground up. I'm aware that this won't be for everyone, but some of you might be interested. This doesn't explicitly mention setting up WoW in Linux, no...but by the time you've gone through the six steps here, you'll know that much about Linux anywayz that you'll most likely be able to figure it out on your own. If you can't, ask me. :)

This also might take a couple of weeks for you to go through, a bit at a time. Another reason why you might want to look at it is because Vista is pretty much a complete flop. (As explained here by someone who's apparently a fairly hard core Microsoft fan) I'm still primarily with XP myself, but either Linux or FreeBSD will almost certainly be my next OS once XP hits end of life. Anywayz...here's the guide. :)

1. First of all, grab Knoppix, burn it to a CD, and spend a few days (or a few weeks, whatever you feel comfortable with) playing with it. Unless you go into the install option, the base CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, so you can't harm anything. For the purposes of these exercises, you might want to just run from the CD for a while and do them that way. This is a completely safe, non-intimidating way for you to initially get your feet wet.

2. While you're exploring Knoppix, there are a few things to read which will really help you. This [tldp.org] will give you a very good
introduction to Linux, in terms of a little history of the system, how to begin using it, and how some basic things work. Here [tldp.org] is another in-depth document about using Linux, leading on from the previous one.

3. Once you've gone through those two, (take as much time as you need) this [tldp.org], written by the same
man as the introduction, will introduce you to the Bash shell, the textual command interpreter where as a sysadmin in
particular you'll likely be spending a lot of your time. This will ease you into scripting in what I think will be a very
non-intimidating way. You will be able to try out all of these exercises with the Knoppix CD, and again, because the CD
doesn't install anything to the hard drive, you needn't worry about destroying your existing system's contents while you
learn. This [tldp.org] is another book on Bash
scripting which to a degree follows on from that one, and will go into somewhat greater depth. Both of these should lead to
you feeling very comfortable writing shell scripts and moving around to a degree on the system.

4. Here [tldp.org] is where we get
to some meat. This document goes into compiling and installing generic Linux/UNIX software, and offers some basic
applications and examples. Once you've gone through this, coupled with the material above, you should now have sufficient understanding to be able to compile and install at least a basic application yourself.

5. The Pocket Linux Guide will take you step by step through the process of learning to make a small, bootable Linux system on two floppy disks.

Although compiling a basic custom kernel is part of this process, the Guide contains a link to another document which
explains very clearly how to do this, and given the background you will have received from the previous documents, this
should not be difficult.

6. Once you have completed the Pocket Linux Guide, you will then be ready to proceed to this [linuxfromscratch.org] site, which is the homepage of the Linux From Scratch Project. Here you will be able to read an HTML-formatted book which will give you the necessary information to successfully build an entire base Linux system of your own, and a more pure boot CD than Knoppix to initially build it upon. The Linux From Scratch Project also has a sequel book, Beyond Linux From Scratch, which describes how to install, among other things, a full graphical user interface with the X Windows system.

7. After you have completed all of this, although it is not crucial, I thoroughly recommend reading this [catb.org] book during idle moments. (It's still a good mealtime accompaniment for me) It will give you a detailed knowledge of the history and philosophy behind the UNIX operating system in general, which I am sure you will find enormously useful.

WoW in Linux

Recently I started having technical difficulties while running WoW. I'm in Australia, and in addition to the lag problems a lot of other people have mentioned, even with the Oceanic servers, I was also having problems where at times I'd get randomly disconnected from the server.

Like a lot of people, I initially thought the server was to blame. However, I'd previously installed WoW in Linux as part of a different project of mine, (I've been using Linux in some form or another for close to a dozen years now, on and off...although Windows has remained my primary system for most of that time) and had already noticed in passing that my latency seemed a bit lower under Linux. I went back over to it a couple of times recently when a lot of other people were complaining of lag or dropouts from the server...and lo and behold, for me those problems entirely disappeared.

My ping times are consistently under 400 ms, (occasionally under 300 for brief periods) I never experience the types of disconnections I used to under Windows, and the OpenGL rendered graphics are really gorgeous, and moreso in some ways than Direct3D in Windows. On the negative side, the currently experimental voice chat wasn't working when I tried it this morning, but I'm fairly sure that's due to my sound card.

Of particular relevance to Hunters though is the fact that a below-400 ms ping time means I have at least some chance of being able to perform a proper 1:1.5 shot rotation, which is the recommended rotation for Marksmanship or Survival, without anywhere near as many stray shots. The other reason why this is a good thing is because if I'm not having stray autoshots between my specials, it raises my odds of having crit specials dramatically...so I've started seeing scenarios at times at least where I can fire Steady, Arcane, Auto, and get a 1k+ crit on both specials in a row. Pretty awesome stuff.

If you're interested in having a crack at doing this yourself, you can download Ubuntu and then go to the WoWWiki page for more information. If you do a search in Google for "Ubuntu wiki wow", (without the quotes) you'll also find a link to the Ubuntu wiki. You might want to go to that wiki anyway if you're new to Ubuntu in general, and have a read up about it. It does take a little bit of doing, as most things with Linux do, and if you're not technically inclined you might want to leave it...but if you're feeling adventurous, give it a try. :)

For non-American players, the lag reduction is probably going to be the single biggest draw, although some of you might be interested in seeing how things look with the different rendering engine, as well. It's very nice.