Many of you, Linux users, have Windows installed on your PCs for only one reason: it’s a game or a program, written only for the Redmond’s system. In the last few years true alternatives have appeared: Cedega and CrossOverOffice. Cedega is the WinAPI’s overlay, based on the open source Wine. It lets you play games designed for Microsoft systems.

Author: Katarzyna Myrek

In version 6 support for the following technologies has been added: DirectX 9a, Pixel Shaders 1.4, Vertex Shaders 1.1.

Minimum requirements: Linux Kernel 2.4, XFree86 4.0 or X.org, glibc 2.2, at least 60MB of free space, and an nVidia GeForce graphics board (recommended).

Installation

Cedega is available in a viariety of package formats: .rpm, .deb, .tgz, .cpkg. I have used it on a newly-installed Ubuntu 7.04, which fulfills all the requirements.

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During the first run you will be prompted to accept the licence.

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After that, the configuration process will begin. You will have to enter data about your transgaming.com account. Thanks to that, all updates will be checked and downloaded for you.

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The next step is hardware detection. If everything went well, a few benchmarks will be held.

And this is the end of the installation. Cedega is ready to run.

Recently Cedega creators have published an “encyclopaedia” of games on their website. Users add there titles of games they have tested, instuctions and comments. It is very helpful because you can instantly know if the game will install smoothly or not. The latest version of Cedega is available only on the cedega.com.

Curiosities

The first name of Cedega was “WineX”. The change took place on 22 June 2004 with the release of version 4.0. Cedega is also a brand of Porto wine. So it came out a word puzzle: port/Porto+Wine/portwine Cedega (src. Wiki).

Cedega — installing a game

On forums of many Linux distributions people can be found who had a lot of problems installing games in Cedega. The most important thing you should always take care of are dependences. I suggest you to run Cedega in a terminal to see all the errors or information about lack of a certain package. When you have some problems with Cedega it is highly recommended to check the version of Python you are running, and it is the best to have the same version numbers as those in the manuals.

To list all installed packages containing “python” in their names use the following command: rpm -qa|grep python (in RPM distros) or dpkg -l | grep python (in Debian derivatives).

When you succeed in installing all necessary packages, move on to the next step: installing the game. I used Test Drive 6 which is a quite old one so the hardware requirements aren’t high and every PC should fulfill them: CPU 233MHz, 32MB RAM, 250MB HDD, Graphics Controller with 4 MB memory and Direct3D support. It is the best choice to check the abilities of the TransGaming product.

You can run Cedega (the best way is to run it from terminal to see errors) with user or root privileges. There is no difference where you put your game on the HDD — place it whereever you have enough space. I used Ubuntu 7.04 and run Cedega with common user privileges.

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At first insert the game CD into your CDROM or mount the image of an installation CD. In case the CD/DVD ROM isn’t mounted, mount it in a way you usually do it. Then press the “Install” button. A new window should appear (like the one below):

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• Game Folder: type the directory name where you want to install the game. You don’t need to add slashes.
• GDDB Entry: choose the title of the game from the list. In case the game you want is not available, leave “<none>” selected.
• Installer: enter the full path to installation file *.exe.
• General|Play|Install|All fields are empty or are filled with default data associated with the game chosen from the GDDB Entry list.

Then press the “Continue” button and wait for a while (sometimes it takes over a minute). After that the Windows installation wizard should appear. If nothing happens after you press the “Continue” button, you have to check the version of dbus-python installed in your system.

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Unfortunately sometimes it happens that Cedega can’t proceed with the installation of a game. There are two titles which I couldn’t install using Cedega, despite all the effort I did to install them:
SimCity 3000 -> EA Classics and Stronghold -> but only the version from Play-it.pl, others work well.

This text is based on the article published in Dragonia Magazine, a Polish online magazine about Free and Open-Source Software. You can download the latest Dragonia issue (first one in English from our mirror). The article has been slightly modified compared with the original version by the PolishLinux team.

Proof-read by trashcat