I'd suck at QA

So I got done installing linux on 2 computers in my home, and tested WINE for online poker. I used pokerstars to watch a buddy play a tournament, and was happy that it worked. Even the shortcut that Stars installed to my desktop worked just fine to launch the application. I was amazed. I then tried out Full Tilt (which I also have money in), and logged in easily. After installing some weird ActiveX control, even the popup browser windows in it worked for me to browse the catalog, the cashier was fine, and I closed it satisfied that it would work.

Well, I went through the install on my laptop, waving goodbye and good riddance to Windows XP Home Edition or whatever came with my Inspiron 9300. It only took about 45 minutes to complete the Radeon driver install this time (as opposed to 16 hours off and on on the first machine), and I was getting things up and running nicely.

And then I spent all night installing wine. The server was extremely slow, and kept disconnecting me. Maybe Microsoft was doing a DDos attack on them. Maybe they were preparing me for what was in store.

Pokerstars worked fine. Full Tilt did not. It wouldn't even log in. The only thing it could get through was the installation phase.

Perhaps it was a versioning issue with libraries? I downloaded the source, and built my own. And it still didn't work. I scoured online for one of its more common error messages, and found a hack. It involved changing a "return 1" to a "return FALSE," which was obviously a constant (barring some new C keyword that I don't currently know).

And now I could log in. I can play now. If I had any damn buttons! I couldn't even sit at a table. Who knows what the problem is, but it looks like I'll need to use vmware to play there. That is, unless I spend months figuring out why each of the errors are being thrown while it's running.

The mighty Casey struck out this time.

Oh, and gnome is nearly as bloated as the Windows UI. I'm back to setting up Blackbox. That one is a pain in the ass to get to a useful state, but at least it's minimalist and does a fine job doing what I need an interface to do - let me run my programs and have it look like i want it to.