Troodos Rally 2004: Section 6


As I have already mentioned, Cyprus Automobile Association (CAA) has sent me the itinerary for Troodos Rally 2004. Tomorrow, the last day of the event, has two sections – Section 5 and Section 6. Races of Section 5 are way too early in the morning, so I guess we’ll skip them all. Section 6 though is a bit later and it does progressively gets closer to Limassol. I am thinking of watching one race, either from Delikipos at 10:00am or from Monagrouli at 11:15.

In case you are interested in the event, I have pinned down few points of tomorrow’s Section 6 on this map of Cyprus (2.6 MBytes JPEG with 3232×1993 pixels).

WineX 3.3 on Fedora Linux Core 2

Being uterly bored today, I decided to try WineX to run a few games on my home Fedora Linux Core 2 workstation. WineX is a commercial version ($5 USD) of Wine project produced by Transgaming Technologies. WineX is mostly Wine, plus a few goodies, like better support for DirectX.

It seems that Transgaming Technologies website is partially closed for renovation. Including the part of the store where you can buy WineX. So, I searched the web and found a stripped down version of WineX which works on Fedora Linux and a couple of other distributions. It comes in RPM format, so all the installation and configuration thingy is pretty much minimized.

When I tried to run this and that executable I started to get all sorts of debug and error messages. Brief search on Google also provided me with an answer, which, pretty often, was to go to DLL-Files.com website and download this or that file.

Most of the games I tried ran the installation just fine. Everything was installing pretty nice, but I didn’t succeed in actually playing any game except for Sierra’s Half Life. It was getting stuck every other time after accessing main menu, but when it was working – it was perfect. Age of Empires II, Sims, Singles, Colin McRae, Midtown Madness, and a couple of others – all refused to work, reporting problems about unhandled exceptions.

It seems that some people do succeed in playing some of the games I failed, but I am certainly not alone. Overall, I think that the progress is very noticable. Last time I tried Wine/WineX I could only install Counter Strike at best. I have no idea if the commercial versino of WineX is any better, but judging from the impressive list of supported games it must be.

I will try it again later and probably will pay my $5 USD. These guys are doing a great job and they need all the support they can get. Meanwhile, I am back to Quake III Arena and a whole bunch of Linux games.