| Monday 6th February 2012 | |||
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Are you a Linux or Mac user? Windows has always dominated the Operating System market because of Microsofts' hard selling techniques and a lot of people think it is the ONLY system available. With modern devices such as Smart Phones, Netbooks and the never ending list of Apple gadgets appearing, people are now starting to realise that there are alternatives to Windows. It is surprising how few people know that most internet web servers are running on a Linux operating system. If you have a smart phone running Android, then you are already using Linux but may not realise it! My main Operating System is Ubuntu Linux and I like to play poker online. If you also like playing poker, then you'll know what a pain in the arse it is to find a reliable poker site that works on Linux or Mac. Clients intended for Windows can be run under Windows emulators such as Wine, but sometimes it is better to install a Virtual Machine (VM) such as VirtualBox, then install Windows inside it. You then have a full working copy of Windows running within the security of your Linux or Mac operating system. Doing it this way, you can use ANY Windows software without the hassles associated with setting up Wine. Poker clients Not many poker sites cater for Linux or Mac, although this appears to be improving. A lot more people are starting to realise that Windows is not the ONLY operating system available, so the poker sites are having to develop multi-platform solutions. A number of sites offer Browser clients, however their main disadvantage is that due to security restrictions, they cannot write to your hard disk. That means no Hand History files and no Player Notes which is quite a problem if you are a serious player. I have developed a solution... If you're looking for a big European site with over 10,000 players at any random time, then take a look at one of the many Entraction/B2B skins. Their poker client comes in two formats:
Java is designed to be multi-platform and by using a Windows only exe, they've made it a Windows only client. That is unbelievably short sighted from a business point of view and I really cannot understand why B2B have developed their software like this. Anyway, fear not, because I have written a Bash script that does the same thing as the Windows exe. Another cool feature of using a script to launch the client is that you can put the script and a JRE on a USB flash drive and run the whole thing from the flash drive...a perfect solution for a portable poker client! Although the following script is Linux orientated, I'm sure that this method would work on ANY operating system that supports scripting and Java. Installation notes. I have received a number of emails telling me that this script doesn't work, however the users have failed to read the source code notes. The usual problem is that the poker client starts to load, displays the splash screen and then shows a message box saying "Update check failed". When developing this script, I spent several weeks trying to work out what the problem could be. It turns out that the B2B Java clients were developed for Java 5 and will attempt to install it if not found. Seeing as most modern computers are running Java 6 or newer, the client will attempt to download the older JRE by launching a Windows exe - which of course does not exist (or work natively!) on our Linux/Mac systems. So the solution is simple - we have to install Java 5. It can be installed alongside your existing Java version without any conflictions. My personal preference is to install Java 5, copy the jre folder to my script path and then uninstall Java 5. Note that the original folder name is something like "jre_1_5_x", but I shorten it to "jre" for simplicity. If you decide to keep both versions of Java, then you will have to edit the script so that the correct Java version is used to launch the client. My install folder looks like this: 
The "SKINS" folder will be created by the script if it does not exist, so basically all you need to do is create a "poker" folder, then place the JRE folder and script inside it. Run the script and it should automatically download all the necessary files from the B2B servers, then launch the client. Note that the files are only downloaded if the server ones are different to what we have. This is our way of doing automatic updates. Information for MAC OS X users. Although I have never used a Mac, a colleague has been playing around with this script has had some success on OS X Snow Leopard. The biggest problem was installing the essential Java 5 version, however a solution is available here: installing-java-1-5-on-snow-leopard If you follow the instructions, this will install Java 5 alongside your existing java version. You will then need to modify the last line of the script so that it looks something like this: "/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Home/bin/java -cp pokerclient.jar:resources.jar:ext-resources. jar ui.PokerClientApp" The Download. Well here it is. That Bash script you've been waiting for... poker_launcher.zip [Entraction Poker Launcher] If you find this script useful, please consider saying thank you by setting up a rakeback deal via the link on the right of this page. |
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