This is the second edition of my Civilization IV (Civ 4) on Linux how-to. With this guide you can run Civ 4 almost flawlessly on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution using Wine.
At the time when Civ 4 was released, DirectX 9 was not well enough supported in Wine to run it. In the [...]

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Intel VT-x is a set of processor enhancements to improve virtualization performance. In theory, VT-x should allow for near-native speed in a virtual machine. VirtualBox, a popular open source virtualization program, recently added a check box to turn on VT-x or AMD’s AMD-V equivalent. But VirtualBox’s site warns that enabling it may reduce the performance [...]

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Be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series also.
I use some common Linux tools to remotely support my Grandparents’ PC. These tools are SSH and X11vnc. X11vnc lets me take over the display, and the VNC traffic is tunneled with SSH. They can be a bit of work to set up, [...]

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If you have not already read part 1, read it here.
My Grandparents’ Linux desktop had to be super-simple for them to use. While default GNOME or Xfce are pretty straight-forward, I wanted something better. I decided to go with Xfce just because they would not be needing any of GNOME’s fancy features. Like GNOME, [...]

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It was time for a new computer for my Grandparents. Their ancient Windows 98 PC had become so slow that it was unusable. The replacement, an inexpensive Acer PC, came with Windows Vista preinstalled. It was up to me to set up the new computer and support it. So I decided to wipe out Vista [...]

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