Tag: Linux

How to play Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Steam version on Linux Mint 20.1

Paul
MSFS2020 on Linux Mint 20.1

Run Microsoft Flight Simulator

I’ve been trying to get this to work the last few days on Linux because of Windows 11 set to come out in the follow months.   However, I was also wondering if this would work on Linux as it should be able to to do.   As you know steam has some great ways to run windows games on it.   The problem that most people have is just to figure out the right way to run it.   I am here to help those who might still be having difficulty in running Msfs2020(Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020) on Linux because it seems to have so many people having issues with running it.   According to ProtonDB, This game should be playable with Gold standards which means it should run perfectly after some tweaks.   I don’t know about the rest of you but It’s more than some tweaks but I digress.

Install wine

The First step you will need to do is check out my other post about installing Wine on Linux Mint.  If you followed those instructions you are half way to getting it to run on Linux.   You’ll however want to install all the Wine DB and API’s that are associated with Wine to get it to work.  That includes but not limited to Q4wine, Playonlinux, Winetricks, All Wine Compatibility layers(Windows-Desktop-files also), Wine-binfmt  and the API layers that is associated with Wine.  I found sometimes they don’t automatically install these but they are necessary for several other games.

Install Graphics Drivers

Go to your driver manager app and make sure you have the GPU driver for your system.   I currently have a NVIDIA 1660 Super and an Intel 10-850 Core.   First I’d try the recommended but we’ll discuss this at the end.   Always download the recommended driver on Linux Mint but if you have a different Linux and want to download the NVIDIA drivers, check out the NVIDIA Unix Drivers for them to work with your system.  If you have an AMD GPU, you can visit the AMD website for your Linux Driver.  Once those are installed, you will probably need to reboot your system to make sure your drivers are active when playing on Steam or other games.   Each time there is an update, it will probably be a good idea to reboot just to make sure the drivers you want are being used by the system.

Install Steam

It seems Linux Mint 20.1 or some earlier version installs the Flathub version of Steam when they install Linux Mint.   Uninstall that version first,  I’ve found that it doesn’t do as a good as a job as the one you can get from the package manager.   I also found that it won’t run some games with Proton.   So that is the reason I say, just go ahead and uninstall it and install the real one.  This is the easy part of the installation.   Once done you are more than halfway there to be able to play your games like you want.

Download and Install Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

Example of -FastLaunch

Once you have steam, You can now go ahead and download and install MSFS2020 into steam.   This will be a quick process.   Steam however will not allow you to download the game until you enable proton.  Go over to the Gear icon in steam and left click properties and go to Comparability tab.   I’d recommend trying Proton 5.13-6 first because that is what everyone else used to get it to work on their systems according to the ProtonDB. Once you do that, you’ll be able to download MSFS20 and install it.  Once installed, you’ll also want to add ‘-FastLaunch’ to the Launch options.    Once done with that, hit the little “X” button and try clicking the play button and seeing if it will run.

If it doesn’t work

Sometimes each system is a little bit different.   So I’ll talk about ways you can tweak it to get it to work on your system.    Some things to try:

  • Get a New or Older version of the GPU driver
  • Change the Proton version to a New or Older version or try the experimental version.
  • Check your Wine Settings(Although I didn’t have to do much with mine just install and try to run the q4wine once that was ran.   I didn’t do anything else but quit the program.)
  • Check the ProtoDB to see what everyone else has done to get the game to run.

I suggest making one change at a time and seeing if the game will run after the change.   If it is a GPU driver change, I suggest rebooting to make sure you are using the GPU driver you want to try to run with the program.  Also Don’t expect the game to run as smoothly as it does on Windows so be thoughtful when you are playing the game.   Sometimes there will be crashes and other things going on.  You can however try different configurations to see if you can resolve those issues also.  If you like this post please consider buying something from my affiliate list to support my blog and my time in write.

Installing Wine on Linux Mint (Cinnamon)

Paul
Wine on Linux Mint (Cinnamon)

Windows Programs

As you know not everything might be on Linux or ported to Linux. So what is a person to do when they find out that they need a particular program. Lately I have been wondering what Wine has been up to lately. I heard about Wine a few years ago, it wasn’t very stable and you had even more problems then you wanted with this little Linux program. Let’s back up and tell you what Wine is supposed to do. Wine allows Linux users to run Windows programs in a Virtual Windows Desktop like environment.   When you installed Linux you probably didn’t even think about the possibility that you might need program.  Wine is here for that one reason.

Don’t Wine about it

What’s Wine Good for?  It general it is used to play a lot of Windows Game on Linux.   From Spore, to Call of Duty, to probably even EVE.   I know most of these games will need a Good Graphics Processing Unit to play on Any system.   I’ve seen people play Sims 3 on Linux and run very Smoothly.  I personally use Wine for programs that I might need to fix Clients computers with.   Each users needs are a little bit different and most of the time may or may not work with Wine.  So you will need to know what you might need to try with Wine before going all in with Linux.   Wine has a great list of apps and programs that will work with it.   People have been trying programs and submitting them to Wine For review of how to make them work better.

More Stability

I’ve used Wine in the past few years I think the last time I played around with it was in 2015 but I had some difficulty installing it and using.   The Wine developers definitely got it more user friendly and now most things are working much better than before.   I even tried my Yumi Multiboot USB tool with Wine and seems to run just fine as long as you don’t use persistence option when you create an ISO on the USB.   Hopefully they will fix some of these issue but it might not be fixable due to Wine capabilities.

Do you use Wine?  Why Do you use it?  Have you left Windows behind?  Did you find it hard or easier to do so?  Why did you do that? Why not leave a comment and answer all these questions and tell me your experiences with Linux.

Installing a Windows 10 in VirtualBox on Linux!

Paul
Windows 10 in Virtualbox (LinuxMint)

Windows 10

Sometimes I hate to admit this but I need Windows 10 to do stuff with. Like making a multiple bootable USB key or Something like that! If you are like me and need it for a certain app that isn’t available on Linux. This solution seems to work well. It also doesn’t hurt that Microsoft is giving away Free Windows 10 to people. I didn’t have to do anything but put my email address in the system and it activated without a problem. It could just be that I have been in the beta for Windows 10 and it is associated with my account. Either way its a win for me. I decided to install Windows 10 because Windows 7 end of life was January.   I’ve never really liked Windows operating system so I tend to use it from time to time.  You could possible make it a dual boot also where Windows 10 and Linux Mint boot separately.   If that’s an option for you than it will be a whole lot faster.

Install VirtualBox on Linux

The first part of this post is how do you install Virtual Box on your Linux Mint Machine.  This might seem hard to understand but once you do it a few times you will understand it.

sudo add-apt-repository “deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian <mydist> contrib”

Now to install the right version of Virtual box you will need to know your distro of your Linux Mint. You can easily find that out by doing the “lsb_release -cs” command and it should say Tricia, Tina, Tessa, Tara, Sylvia, Sonya, or Serena”.   You’ll put that instead of the <mydist>  So like mine it would be:

sudo add-apt-repository “deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian tricia contrib”

It would also be a good idea to know if you have a 32 bit or 64 bit system Linux System.   You can find that out either through command line or desktop.   The command line is “arch“.  You might have to change the arch line to 32 but more than likely you are running a 64 bit system.

Now you need to Add the Keys to the repository and that command is easy.

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add –
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add –

The last step is to install Virtual Box on your Linux Mint system.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-6.1

A Good tip for those who might want to install an older version is to hit the tab button after you type the app you are wanting to install it will show you all available versions that you can install.

Installing Windows 10

You’ll need an ISO of windows 10.   I got mine from Microsoft directly.   You can download the ISO from them directly and get the latest version.  Once you have the ISO, you’ll want to run Virtualbox and set it up.   There are many Tutorials that will show you how to do that.   This one was just install Virtualbox on Linux MInt.

How to Install your Favorite Apps on Linux OS.

Paul
Photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com from Pexels

Command Line Rocks

I simply love using command in Linux.   I currently using Linux Mint because I didn’t want to upgrade my laptop to Windows 10.   If you know anything about Linux, they seldom install the necessary apps for Laptops or Desktops.   You’d have to install them separately and some of the apps do some really useful things on Linux.   Such as the touch pad inidcator which will disable the touch pad when you are typing or when you are using a mouse.   I hate to use the Graphical User Interface to find and install these apps.  So I decided to create a shell script to install the needed laptop apps for any installation of Linux on a Laptop.  I do like to install programs from the GUI but that is when I am looking to install one program or just curious what they’ve added to the Synaptic Package Manager.   Since most of these apps are open sourced, I thought it would be nice to show you how to create a shell script that you might want to use from time to time.  The nice thing this helps if you are re-installing Linux or installing Linux on a new laptop Linux.

Creating a Shell Script

Before you begin this process, you’ll want to wrap your head around how to create the Linux script.  Once you learn about the process of creating the script.  You will understand more about the next process but you should at least get the basics so you can know what you can and can’t do in a script.   A shell script is almost like a batch file in Windows and you can do a lot of things in it.  Some things you can do are If/then or Echo, or Sudo commands.   If you want to make a complicated menu then that is fine also. I believe simplistic is best.   So I created my own little simple script to install the laptop apps that will help me on my laptop.

Laptop-linuxinstall.sh

echo Installing Touchpad Inidcator
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt update
sudo apt install touchpad-indicator

echo installing cpu frequency Inidcator
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:artfwo/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get indicator-cpufreq

echo Installing Battery Optimization
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw
sudo tlp start

echo Installing Laptop Mode Tools
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools

You could easily copy this and paste it into a text editor and start using it right away but I hope you at least learn about scripting.   This script will work with Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but I am unclear if it will work with other Linux OS.  This is why you will want to learn the create your own script because you might have to modify or add new lines into the script.  If you decide to use Laptop Mode tools, I suggest you read about how to configure the tools once you installed it.

Changing Permission in Linux

Changing Permissions

Once you have created the script and saved it to a file you will need to change the permissions of the file so Linux can run it from command line or if you decide to run it from the GUI.   You can either right click the file > Properties then go into permissions (See above for example) and check mark “Allow executing file as a program” or go into terminal mode.

Go to where the file is located and type “sudo chmod +x filename.sh”  and enter your Password.  Once this is done you can now either use the GUI or type “./locationoffile/file.sh” in the terminal.

All is Good!

After you have done all that, You now should keep the shell script on several locations so you can always use it if you need it.   I occasionally like to reinstall Linux to keep the system running smoothly so that is why I created shell scripts to install my favorite programs or stuff I might want to use on my laptop.   Do you have a favorite application or a suggestion please feel free to leave a comment below.   I’d love to hear what you install on your Linux OS and why.

Three ways to speed up your Laptop

Paul
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

Laptops all around

You probably got a old laptop, which is probably slow and very sluggish. It is a single, double, or quad core low megahertz system and you really can’t do much with it because it is so unbearable slow. I grew up with 9600 baud rates, for the younger generation that is very slow internet. It can be very disheartening to have to just wait for the system to boot or a program to run. You could of even bought this laptop from a yard sale. So what can you do with this laptop besides make it a door stop? This article will tell you how I refurbish my laptops to make them faster and more responsive when I don’t want to buy a better laptop.

2x or 3x more RAM!

If your laptop can support another laptop memory module then you should install another RAM module. It however is dependent on what speed of ram you currently have installed. If your laptop only has one module slot you will need to go buy a bigger ram and install it instead the one you have. So you need to know how big you can install into the laptop. You can easily Google it and find out how much you can add to your laptop. I wouldn’t install anything to big, something like 8 GB to 16 GB will do to make it even faster. The faster the ram speed the faster the system will respond but it must be capable with the current module so I suggest installing the same speed if you aren’t going to replace the module.

Replace the HDD with SDD

If you’re considering doing this, I strongly recommend you backup your current system. Remember the rule of 3. You should always have at least 3 different ways to restore your current system. What’s is an SSD? It is short for Solid State Drives and don’t use mechanical plates to write data. Think of a HDD has having several layers of DVD plates that are much smaller and use magnetism to read and write data. SSD are almost like RAM and have no moving parts and thus are more responsive to reading and writing which makes booting the system way faster than you probably ever realize. You can find some SSD at Amazon if you need one. You can find some really cheap SSD because you probably don’t need a lot of space for your old laptop,\.

Install Linux

I’ve talked about this before but I will say this again. If you are using a really old laptop you probably can’t use Windows 10 and since Windows 7 is at it’s End of life. You really can’t go wrong, by going to opensource operating system. I personally love Linux Mint but I am sure there are other Linux system that might be better for your laptop because it might require a very simple Linux desktop. You want your system to boot up and be able to use your laptop with ease this is definitely the best recommendation I can give you. If you are planning to install windows 10, you should make sure your laptop can support it.

Got a favorite Linux system? Or maybe something else to make your Laptop speed up and more responsive why not leave a comment and let me know and others.