I was going to put this up as a status, but assumed it wouldn’t be appreciated there, and is much too long for those purposes either.
Pre-story build-up: I want to play this one game “Terraria”, I’ve got it fixed in my mind like an obsession. I’ve been riding a teasing rollercoaster for what feels like days, probably because it’s been several days. I got an hour-long taste of it this last Sunday, and now I’m eager to try out more. Issue is, capable system. The computers at work could probably run it, except they’re all locked down. Admin needed for this and that– and at this point, I really don’t plan to defy my employers trust, it’s just not a good move. So my alternative? Laptop.
Can it run it? Theoretically, yes. But it took me about 2 hours of looking through the forums to determine that. My video card is capable of it.
Can Ubuntu run it? Well, I don’t have any immediate testimonies say it’ll run as my setup is concerned. People have played it in virtualbox, and people have played it on Ubuntu machines, but if 8 hours of hardware debugging with both Virtualbox and Ubuntu’s Wine didn’t leave me with anything substantial… well then I’m going to have to take an alternate route: Dual-boot.
I wasn’t going to re-partition my harddrive’s freespace until I was guaranteed the survival of my data. Thus, the backup. I was excited to get to work where my boss had a spare HD for me to store my files, but first things first– I was gonna create a big-old compression file to make the transfer an easy-peasy drag-n-drop. Right? …right?
I suppose it almost worked; I think. After having the compression running for 5 hours, my hard drive space gets exceedingly low, and I start trimming the fat to make way for this compression file. Woe is me, I didn’t specific the root directory, so eventually I ended up reaching my own massive file again. I palindrome I. Well I ended up gagging on the tail end of it and maxed out my space. Not a single byte to spare. So, here I thought: “Well, I’ll just open up the extracted file, like a zip file, and pluck out the .iso’s or video’s I don’t mind losing if things go south. They shouldn’t have been in there to begin with, compression don’t help much with pre-compressed files.
I shall note, that my compression format was .tgz … and doesn’t come with a central indexing system. You can’t just go in and navigate without loading the whole document. Which simply wasn’t feasible at 44GB, of course I learn this fact, after the fact… and end up having to restart my computer. After which my computer refuses to login, blathering something about gnome-power-manager failed to load… and I should contact my system admin. *gulp*? — I attempted the basic means to repair the package, assuming it was what had failed. An hour or so later, I find that having a maxed harddrive can also cause the problem. Doy.
So I navigate via Command line to where the file was… and see that it isn’t there anymore?! My command line knowledge base isn’t very strong, so after pulling out whatever commands I could use to locate the massive file, all were for naught. The next two hours were spent attempting to figure out how to mount the external and find this invisible mass… which, after I had a live CD in, and had some browsing… found the file buried in a hidden folder, in the directory where I left it. Oy vey. After simply eliminating the file, I could then work at porting over a few of the files I simply could not be without. Documents, pictures, etc. Now at 10:30pm, I’m finally resizing my current partition, and creating another for XP to run on.
Then, after all of the hours of effort, will I be able to install .NET 4.0 and XNA, and hope and pray that Terraria will run, and run at a speed which I will not cry. Cause you know how you’d feel if a loved one were to die? You’d grieve, and come to accept it? How much worse that they survive, but live as a vegetable or in tremendous pain the rest of their life? Wouldn’t you simply want to closure to say goodbye? — Yes I’d like it if the game could run, but only if it’s acceptably fast.
That is my story.
