vicfryzel.com Articles

Fixing Skyrim's sound in wine

2011-12-27T23:26:15-05:00

Like me, you may be having a problem with the sound while running Skyrim in wine. The problem is that the sound skips or ticks multiple times per second.

Some guides and blogs have mentioned that to play Skyrim, wine must be set to Windows 7 mode. For me, this causes the sound problem. To fix this problem, I've found that simply setting wine to Windows 2000 mode in winecfg resolves the sound issue.

True fullscreen in xmonad

2011-12-26T20:33:30-05:00

For a long time, I have been dealing with a minor issue that has prevented fullscreen applications from displaying in a correct 16:10 resolution (or other standard resolution). This problem can be caused by xmobar occupying the dock area in my primary workspace. This problem can also be caused by window borders occupying extra pixels. In Starcraft II in Arch, xmonad, I modified the resolution of the wine desktop to account for the dock area and window borders.

Messing with the resolution hasn't been required for a while now, but today I got around to fixing the problem while getting Skyrim running in Linux.

To display windows as true fullscreen in a workspace, use the following layouts.

:::haskell
import XMonad.Layout.Fullscreen
import XMonad.Layout.NoBorders
-- ...
myLayout = avoidStruts (
    Tall 1 (3/100) (1/2) |||
    Mirror (Tall 1 (3/100) (1/2))) |||
    noBorders (fullscreenFull Full)

In this configuration, the Tall and Mirror Tall layouts avoid the dock area, because they are within avoidStruts. Since noBorders (fullscreenFull Full) is not within avoidStruts, it allows windows to overlap the dock area. The noBorders layout, as the name implies, removes borders from the given layouts.

Once enabled, cycling through layouts enables a true fullscreen layout that occupies the entire workspace, hiding borders and dock areas. Each window is rendered fullscreen, and windows can be cycled through as usual.

StarCraft II in Arch, xmonad

2011-02-27T02:05:45-05:00

I bought StarCraft II today. It took me an hour or two to get it running with Wine, mostly because of some out of date lib32 packages in Arch. It might save you some time to know that if you enable the multilib repo in Arch, be sure to pacman -Syu first, because you may have installed some lib32 libs prior to enabling that repo.

To get StarCraft II displaying well in xmonad, you have to change some settings in winecfg and in the game itself.

:::bash
WINEARCH=win32 winecfg

In the Graphics tab, select a desktop size of 1678x1024 if you're on a dual screen 1680x1050 setup, with a 20px xmobar and a 24px Tabbed layout on the game desktop. When in game, go to the Options screen and select Windowed (Fullscreen). You should get something like below.

If you have skipping sound (like I did,) in winecfg select "Emulation" under Audio > Hardware Acceleration.

xmonad with fullscreen Flash video

2011-02-26T23:32:22-05:00

For ages, although loving Xmonad, I've been plagued by an issue without being able to fullscreen Flash video. Finally, I stumbled upon this FAQ, and the following line has changed my life.

:::haskell
isFullscreen --> (doF W.focusDown <+> doFullFloat)

So exciting. My web video consumption just increased a lot.

collective: blog engine with minimal core feature set

2011-01-08T02:42:42-05:00

I just launched collective, which is what I've decided to call the blog engine I built to back vicfryzel.com. I cleaned it up a bit and added some documentation. It's pretty easy to install in a separate instance, I've done this a few times now and have had no trouble.

I'm actually kind of proud of this project now. It's a nice solution to the problem I had of finding a working, minimal blog solution.

Let me know your comments! If you try it, I'd love to hear from you.