Running Sims 3 under PlayOnLinux in Ubuntu Linux
Back when I was using Windows Vista years ago, I played The Sims 3 and other games for several hours. Once I switched to GNU/Linux, I got rid of these games when I failed to run them under Wine. However, for some reasons, I found a folder which stores The Sims 3 ISO file while cleaning and organize the hard drives today that I downloaded from a website that I don’t remember anymore. I searched over on the Wine database and found that the game and its expansion packs are in the gold state which I assume that it works very well on the GNU/Linux platform.
After searching around in the Ubuntu repositories, I discovered PlayOnLinux which is the front-end of Wine. I installed it and found out that there are almost all the Windows software and games that are pre-configured by PlayOnLinux. One thing that I discovered when I was running The Sims 3 under PlayOnLinux is that the sound would go out about one minute after running the game. The following is the solution that I came up with the help of this PlayOnLinux forum thread:
- Open the terminal and type playonlinux to run the GUI which you can add to the GNOME Menu manually with this command. Read this article on detailed instructions on how to do this.
- Install the game by clicking the Install button on the toolbar and follow the instruction.
- Run the game you installed. If it doesn’t have any sound problem, enjoy the program. Otherwise, go on to the next step.
- Follow the instruction on the first post of this thread under the FIX section.
- Instead of using last step on that thread, create a launcher on the desktop with the following information:
Type: Application
Name: The program name that you installed in step 2. In my case is Sims 3.
Command: padsp playonlinux –run “The Sims 3″
(Replace The Sims 3 with the program name that you want to run, note that this name must exactly the same with the name listed in the PlayOnLinux main window, otherwise it will fail to run)
Comment: Optional. You can add your own description. - You can add an unique icon by clicking the button on the left and select a JPG image.
- Click the launcher that you created and enjoy the game.
- You can also add this launcher to the GNOME menu by following the instruction from the link I provided in step 1.
If you have any problem for the above steps, leave a comment below and I will try to help as quick as possible. Note that I will not answer comments other than sound problem, especially the CD-related issue for the legal concern of my hosting provider.
Text-to-speech web service Odiogo (Updated)
Update(06/01/2010 10:30 AM): The audio version of this post is now available. You can click the above “listen now” button to listen to this post.
Update (05/31/2010 11:25 AM):Â Apparently, Odiogo hasn’t converted this newest post to audio yet. According to their FAQ, they check the update several times throughout the day. However, it has been almost twelve hours since this post was written, the audio version of this post hasn’t been available yet. I will update this post as soon as the audio version of the post is available. In the meanwhile, you can checkout the TTS version for my other posts on this blog.
While I was reading the news today, I came across an article on freesoftwaremagazin.com. A feature on the site that interests me is the “listen now” button. When I clicked on it, a familiar male TTS (Text-To-Speech) voice began to read the current article aloud for me. This voice is very familiar to me because I always used TextAloud with this Neospeech Paul voice to read the articles online when I was a Windows user. This voice is very human-like compare to Neospeech’s own female voice. After I switched to GNU/Linux for the first time, I tried to install TextAloud and the Paul voice through Wine, but I failed. Because I was too relied on the TTS reading the articles for me, my reading speed have become slow. I then decided to challenge myself to read myself since that day when I gave up installing TTS engine and TextAloud onto GNU/Linux. However, I still think that my reading haven’t improve at all. When I heard this voice on the website, the above memory came up in my mind. I can’t help but to look for where to produce this voice. Fortunately, it contains an introductory voice in the audio that talks about the source of this feature. It’s odiogo.com. At first, I thought that this web site provides web services that can use TTS on other websites to help me read the articles just like TextAloud. However, it seems that it used to convert my own blog to podcasts. It disappoints me to know that it can’t work on websites other than my own site, but I think that it is a good idea to provide more accessibility to my blog through this web service. Therefore, I added a “listen now” button onto this blog to provide text-to-speech feature. Check it out now below the title of this post and tell me what do you think in the comment.