Break has Arrived!

Break has arrived! As soon as I came in the door and dumped my books on the floor, I headed straight to the Wii to start playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It is great to be able to take a break and play games without high level thinking. I still find it hilarious that I can often win in a 5-life battle against a max-level computer player without paying attention. It is difficult to recall the last time I have played more than a few rounds of Brawl during the week.

After Brawl, it was on to StarCraft II. When I previously played this game on my big laptop it was incredibly slow because of my Windows setup. So I decided to install it on my Linux system through PlayOnLinux. The install worked perfectly, however when I tried to launch it, the launcher was distorted (see picture). This was not because of PlayOnLinux - it was because my graphics driver was out of date. Updating the graphics driver should be easy once I get around to it. For right now, I just want to chill, not think too much, and enjoy the first day of break. That is why I am ending this blog post, and going to watch TV.

Bonus Tech Stuff: PlayOnLinux - Easily Running Windows Games (and other software) on Linux

PlayOnLinux is a system that simplifies the installation of Windows programs. It uses WINE. PlayOnLinux has configurations for running various games (and of course other stuff) that are Windows-only. It automatically installs the appropriate WINE version and sets up a WINE configuration which has been known to work with that program. For some games, it can even automatically fetch the installer.

PlayOnLinux runs separate WINE instances for each program in order to prevent them from clashing and manage different configuration needs. These are called "Virtual Drives." To make it easier to use, PlayOnLinux has both a command line and graphical interface. It is written in Python. There are Python scripts for each game which configure WINE to work with them.

#slice2016