So here I am, a linux user of about 8 months now, happy as a clam and very content using Linux (Slack 9.1 to be exact) for all of my daily needs. I haven't booted into Windows for over 6 months, and I don't miss it at all.

Last night though, I found myself in a pickle. I cleaned out my games collection (which included some games that came on floppies) and stubled across a copy of System Shock 2. I remeber playing SS2 a little when I bought it, but I never finished it. So I decided to load it up and give it a go. According to what I have read, some people have gotten this going on Wine, but I was apparently not so lucky. My Wine install works fine for Jedi Outcast and Half-Life, but SS2 just wouldn't run.

So, not to fear, I still have a Win2k install that my wife uses, and so for the first time in 6 months I boot up into Windows, and install the game. All is well, and within a few minutes I am playing SS2 and having a blast. This is a great game. Lots of strategy mixed in with some basic first person shooter stuff, and even some role playing elements as well. And Scary as hell. Probably the scariest game I have ever played. Most of the game is spent walking around a derelict starship about 68 billion miles from earth. The ships crew has been infected by an alien presence and now roams the ship bashing things with large pipes and referring to themselves as 'the many'. The games creators went out of their way to make the game freak you out. There are times when you will look behind you and see nothing, only to turn around again 2 seconds later and have someone chasing you screaming 'THE MANY ARE STRONG!!!'. Truly freaky, and truly a great game. Highly recommended if anyone can find it on the bargin shelf.

Anyway, so here I am, at about 11:30PM, fully engrossed in this game and loving every minute of it. I am about 3/4 of the way through one of the 'missions' that your character has to complete, and I am entirely focused at the task at hand. So focused, in fact, that I have neglected to save the game.

I'm sure by now you know where this is leading.......

All of a sudden WHAM! It happens. The screen is frozen. Keyboard and mouse are unresponsive. Ctrl+alt+del does nothing, and I am left with no choice but to do a forced shutdown and restart. Then it hits me. I have just spent 2 hours playing this game, and I never saved it. Not once. I am lucky that the autosave that the game does was only about 20 minutes before the crash happened, but that still means that I have to replay about 20 minutes of the game for no reason.

Now, I know some of you will flame me for not being smart enough to save the game on my own, and you are correct. That however, is not why I posted this.

I posted this for those who have felt this kind of pain before. We have all been there at one point or another. We have all either played a game/worked on a project/written a document and forgotten to save, only to have an simple, and sometimes unrelated, application failure cause the entire OS to puke it's guts out. This time, however, it just seemed that much more painful. I'm not sure exactly why, but I think it is because I no longer accept random system crashes, frozen applications and forced shutdowns as normal functions of an operating system. I have been so spoiled over the last 8 months that I actually forgot what it felt like to have my system crash. Slack has been rock solid, even with applications running under Wine, and I don't think that it has ever crashed on me since I have started using it.

It seems somewhat ironic, I would say, that 2 hours into using an OS that I LEFT because of stability problems the system crashes.

Just wanted to share.

slight

It was a game!

Steve

Sounds sort of like my ex-roomate that would get pissed when his game he'd been playing for about 30 minutes would freeze up on him.. I'd just be down stairs laughing to myself.

I don't have this problem cause I'm glad to not be a gamer..

I don't game all that often (I have a 2 month old that takes up 90% of my time), hence the reason I was cleaning out my game collection. That made it even worse. I finally found some time to relax and play a game that I hadn't played in god knows how long, only to have the thing die on me during the best part.



slight

I am downloading Slack 9.1 right now because some of the features in my laptop that don't work are fixed in Slack 9.1

I was using 9.0

I can't wait....

I then will need to get Team Fortress working in Wine so I can play just about the only games I like.... Counter-Strike and TFC

Peace...

AFAIK, CS and TFC stopped working on Wine as soon as Valve changed over to Steam. This could have changed, but I stopped playing CS because of this. I ran a CS server for almost 2 years (on RedHat 7.3), and had played CS on Linux ever since I started using Linux as my main desktop about 8 months ago.



slight

slight,

That sux bigtime. I too run a CS and TFC server. It's running on Windows 2003 server, but that's because it has to run some other things too.

I am quite pissed at the Steam thing right now. I however redid the whole server and it is running CS 1.6 now and it is all steam.

I will see if I can get it working via WINE

Never know

Thanks for the info though.

So true...