Yesterday I booked myself tickets on their maiden flight between Johannesburg and Auckland, with a stopover in Melbourne.
(I still don’t get the “FREE” stopover idea yet)

If anybody is planning on flying over, I’ll recommend you have a look at the flight costs for the launch of this new route which is on the 13th of March 2010. I bought tickets for 2 adults and 1 infant Economy for around R19000 return. Compared to some of the other airline costs this is quite low.

Our first concern flying with this new airline was the fact that it is a new route and would they be reliable. We were reassured by the call centre lady as it is falling under Richard Branson’s Virgin brand it would be top notch.
And they are using the reliable and standardised Boeing 777-300ER.

Look at this, a Boeing 777-300ER being put together very quickly

This week, I found the Thomson Airways Safety video which they play onboard which is quite cute, although not so funny

And then for the laugh today, I found a Music Video Spoof for Twilight : New Moon

Enjoy your Friday!

Found this video on the internet this morning.

Halfway through the guy calls his friend to go fetch his wallet, he wants to give this guy even more money for singing the song . Classic.

…. just found this one as well … lol … what people will do for a good tip

Now being the hardcore gamer that I am, second concern was, is my world of warcraft going to work and how do I get it on seeing that linux does not work with .exe files.  When I asked my senior, the server admin what to do, the only reply I got was..”Google is your friend”.  And after browsing through hundreds of pages and chewing my finger nails to the bones, mainly because I had now idea what all this stuff meant I started with my installation.

So 2 months later and after a couple of re-installs I’ve finally got it to work, run smoothly and not giving me any hiccups.  So to spare some unlucky guy out there the agony of what I had to go through, here it is a step by step on how to install World of Warcraft on you linux machiene.

Please note though that there is a lot a options ang guidance available on google and this is only to show you how I did my insallation. I am using ubuntu  and wine for this installation

First things First.

Installing Wine
Fastest way to do this is to go the following route.

System, administration, synaptic packet manager

In the search bar type wine, and select it underneath for installation proceed with installing wine.

Make sure you have the latest version of wine installed, you can google for how this is done.  Basically all you need to do is add a certificate and get a public key, it is going to take you less than 5 min to do.

Installing WOW

First you need to create a directory

eg. mkdir wowinstall

Now we will install World of Warcraft. Get out your cd’s and copy all of the first CD to a directory, after this copy the MPQ’s from the rest of the CD’s to the same directory.

eg. CD1

cp /dev/cdrom/*

eg. Rest of CD’s

cp /dev/cdrom/*.mpq

Now you can start to run the instal

eg.

wine /directory/were/you copied the cd's/installer.exe

Go through the installer, i would suggest taking out all the spaces in the directory where its installed, for easier acces in the future.

Once you have installed WoW, the /World of Warcraft/wtf/Config.wtf file needs to be modified. Add the following lines:

SET gxApi "opengl"
SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "100"
SET gxColorBits "24"
SET gxDepthBits "24"

Now if you did this right, there should be a icon on your desktop, you can just double click the icon and your wow will launch with wine, dont update your account yet as we first have to install the expansions.

Installing wow Burning Crusade expansion

The steps to install the BC expansion is exactly the same as above.

1. Create folder

2. Copy entire cd one to folder

3. Copy all .mpq files to the folder from the remaining cd’s

4. run the installer

Once again do not update your account as there is still one more expansion to install, Wrath of the Lich King.

Installing wow Wrath of the Lich King expansion

This installation has to happen a bit different than the original World of Warcraft and Burning Crusade installations. The way the DVD is setup is a bit more difficult to copy the files over.

Create a new folder on your desktop for the files I named mine wowlk

Place the Wrath of the Lich King DVD in your DVD drive. When it comes up notice that you cannot just drag and drop all of the files off of the DVD into a new folder on your desktop or anywhere else for that matter. You will receive an error message that will inform you that the DirectX folder cannot be handled because of permissions.

On top of all of this you will notice that there is only one directory (DirectX) and one file (Installer.exe) listed.

Right click the Lich King icon on the desktop (which is the mounted DVD) and select properties. Now click on the volume tab. Make note of the Mount Point of the disk and then type the following command into the terminal window:

sudo umount /media/cdrom0

(if you have to change the /media/cdrom0 to the mount point name that you recorded from the volume tab of the Lich King Properties window.)

the Lich King Icon on the desktop should disappear. From the terminal window now type this command:

sudo mount -t udf -o ro,unhide /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom0/

(the /dev/cdrom might be different on your system in which case you will have to learn the device name in order to input the mount point command.)

You should now have an even more intertaining WoW Wrath of the Lich King icon on your desktop.Click on the Lich King icon on the desktop and notice that now you see all of the files on the DVD.Even that this point you will still not be able to drag and drop copy the files you need to your directory.

In the terminal window type the following command:

cd /media/cdrom0

(make sure that you use your mount point if its different from mine.)

this command changes directory to the root of the DVD.

Now type:

sudo cp -R * ~/Desktop/wowlk

(change the name of the directory if it is different then mine.)

This will begin to copy over all of the files that you need. After it is done type the following:

cd ~/Desktop/wowlk

(again adding your directory name if different form mine.)

Then type:

wine Installer.exe

This will being the installation wizard for Wrath of the Lich King. Follow through with the install. Run the program file the icon on the desktop and expect to wait a bit for the new updates to download and install.

And that is it, bellow is a list of problems I picked up during my installation.

You have to make sure your wine is the latest version otherwise your accept button on the EULA agreement does not activate.

Using your synaptic manager install windows fonts other wise you wont be able to see the writing in the EULA agreement or in your wow installation.

Make sure you have the latest screen card drives installed for your screen card, I had a lot of trouble with this as I’m running an ATI card and ATI stopped supporting drivers for linux.  This will be best if you google this as the installation for this is quite difficult.

I can also recomend that you visit the official wine website http://www.winehq.org/download/deb here you can also find a heap of info and trouble shooting guides.

Hope this helps

Enjoy.

He has been pushed into the Linux unexpectedly, and thus can maybe even associate with some of the guys out there.

He will basically be writing posts of his experiences with Linux and how he is learning new things in this area.

Welcome Anthony and hope to see great knowledge articles coming our way from your corner, as I know you as a gamer, this first post of your did not surprise me

Cofounder and creator Michael Monty, said in his blog post on Monday that Oracle should sell the open-source database MySQL to a suitable third party, to resolve the antitrust concerns over it’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

The key objective by Widenius is to find a home outside Oracle for MySQL, where the database can be developed and compete with existing products, including Oracle’s, according to Florian Mueller, a former MySQL shareholder who is currently working with Monty Program AB on this matter.”

This is now getting a bit crazy, if MySQL starts changing “hands” too much it could start to influence the quality of the product and then we may see it dying altogether, but hopefully that won’t happy and we will see MySQL to become the competitor everybody dreamed about.

via

Husqvarna Forest & Gadern, a Kwazulul Natal-based company are now selling Automower™ Solar Hybrid lawnmowers here in South Africa.

This is what this creature looks like:

And the features:

Automower™ Solar Hybrid is the world’s first fully automatic lawn mower that is partly powered by the sun. Brilliant for your lawn, great for your conscience, better for the planet. The product uses considerably less energy than any conventional mower. That’s because, in addition to a charging station, it comes with a large integrated solar panel. When there is daylight available, the solar cells enable the mower to extend its cutting periods before it needs recharging. That means a cut lawn in a shorter time, even lower power consumption and an extended battery life. So now it takes even less energy to mow the lawn. Suitable for lawns up to 2100 m2, depending on light conditions.

Now this is truely a must have for any geek out there that does NOT like doing the manual hardships of life.

Like WOW, this would be a great initiative from Nedbank inviting their loyal customer to such an event.

Well – NOTTT!!!

If something is to good to be true, IT IS.

Received this impersonal and very short email a few minutes ago :

To whom it may concern

You have recently received an invitation from Nedbank to attend a Dinner Function. The email was send to you in error. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Please contact me personally should you have any queries at error@eventrsvp.co.za

Kind Regards,

Stephan Potgieter
Managing Director

They could have at least used my name from the mailing list on the apology instead of “To whom it may concern”

Wonder how many people recieved this ?

There is my#fail for the day.

I found this very nifty Sports Camera at Mantality.co.za today.

A small, good quality camera with various adapters to fit on bicycle helmets, jogging gear or even on your skis when going for your yearly oversees trip.

The Camera is called the Veho™ Muvi Micro Digital Video Camcorder which boasts with 2 megapixel camer with very cool voice activated start/stop funcationality.

This camera is very small, so it won’t keep you behind, with almost the size of your thumb, it is real compact.

I would recommend this camera for the extreme sports and lifestyle enthusiasts and of course those geeks and gadget freaks out there.

With a price tag at around R1500 this is real good value for money.