Road rash on Linux using wine

For a lot of us, Roadrash is a game that is going to remain close to our hearts forever! Countless hours spent in front of the PC while kicking and punching others, or even on the LAN fending off your room-mate. For a lot of us, this has been THE introduction to computer video games.

Downloading the game is pretty easy, actually. I got mine at http://www.download-full-games.com/pc/sports/road_rash.html

The tricky part is to get to run it on Linux. In my case, Ubuntu Linux is the only operating system I have: I honestly don't need Windows for much. This game, however, runs only on Windows and so the quintessential wine came to the rescue. So then I unzipped the file and from the command prompt typed:

sudipta@Hogwarts:~/roadrash$ wine ROADRASH.EXE

This unfortunately leads to the "CD-Rom not found" error. The fix to this, as we all know, is to have the registry edited. There is a SETREG.EXE which you can run, but then the state is not persistent. As in, if you run

sudipta@Hogwarts:~/roadrash$ wine SETREG.EXE

sudipta@Hogwarts:~/roadrash$ wine ROADRASH.EXE

Then the registry was just altered when the last wine command was run, not this time. So I opened up the RASH.REG file and found that it contained:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Electronic Arts\RoadRash 95]
@=""
"Path"="D:\\"
"CheckDialup"=hex:00
"ChatState"=hex:02
"MiniDash"=hex:00
"OpponentList"=hex:01 

Which basically means that the above Windows registry value needed editing. This in turn led me back to the .wine folder in my home directory. Lo and behold, there was a system.reg file with lots of Registry-like entries.

sudipta@Hogwarts:~/.wine$ gedit  system.reg

So I simply added a section right on top that said:

[SOFTWARE\\Electronic Arts\\RoadRash 95]
@=""
"Path"="D:\\"
"CheckDialup"=hex:00
"ChatState"=hex:02
"MiniDash"=hex:00
"OpponentList"=hex:01 

This was because there was an entry right on top that said, ";; All keys are relative to \\Machine". And now when I run

sudipta@Hogwarts:~/roadrash$ wine ROADRASH.EXE

I get

Viola! Ah the joys of kicking the next guy off the road... :D

Firefox crashing with Adobe PDF plugin

I had struggled for quite a while with the way Mozilla Firefox would crash each time I tried to open a PDF document - I always had to save the link independently and then open the doc. The default behavior of in-browser opening of the document was the problem, it seemed. So here is how you solve it.

From the Firefox menu, go to Tools->Options. There, on the Applications tab, you will find a long list of applications/document types and what is supposed to be used to open each of those. It would look like this:

In there, like I've shown here, find the Adobe Acrobat documents and instead of "Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox)", select "Adobe Acrobat Reader", i.e. the program itself. If that does not show up by default, select "Other", and browse to find Adobe Acrobat Reader.

There you go - no more crashes! :)

Annoying right clicks on the google talk icon in your taskbar

It can be annoying when you want to right click and exit or sign out of google talk and you right click on the icon on the taskbar. Not always, but sometimes it shows this menu instead of the one you want:

 

So the way out is to just left-click somewhere empty on the bottom taskbar. This will hide the menu above. Then you right-click on the google talk icon again...

and voila - you can exit!! :)