deekoo.net

How I fixed the dread 'AWC.dll load failed.' error.

So, today I installed Dragon Age II. It went reasonably straightforwardly; I took the obligatory cheap shot at the file extensions; I looked confusedly at eulas in tiny boxes, then blinked in slight surprise at seeing the LGPL in there. Good, I can cite that as precedent if anyone's ever complaining that they don't want to distribute LGPL-containing games.

Then came the moment of truth, to see if the box I cobbled together is actually good enough or if I need to run out and buy video cards (or build a whole new box). With trepidation, I entered the regcode and clicked The Button...

A window popped up: Exe Loader: AWC.dll load failed.

(Note: There is an answer at the end of the maundering!)

So, I searched the Internet. And the Internet gave me many solutions. Unfortunately, most of these were for Mass Effect 2, and (unsurprisingly), none of them worked on Dragon Age 2. One commenter observed that eir friend's pirate copy (I think e was talking about DA2) worked fine, but eir legal copy was useless. While I wouldn't feel guilty about warezing a usable copy to replace a useless legal copy, the notion of downloading a DVD and then having to spend a few days reverse-engineering the hacks to make sure that the only security they broke was EA's does not really appeal to me.

So, internet unhelpful. Hm. Well, this is a virgin XP install... so I installed a pile of updates. No luck; however, the service packs did make the configuration utility crash (just like Origins' configuration utility crashed.).

Much arghing later, I remembered something. The event viewer. It's Windows' version of syslog, and IT IS YOUR FRIEND. Control Panel (assuming classic view): Administrative Tools: Event Viewer.

Event Viewer told me that there were errors loading an assembly. Microsoft.VC80.CRT, to be specific. So I searched the Internet again, but installing the relevant runtimes also didn't help.

But searching my computer for the files DID help.

DONE MAUNDERING, NOW TO FIX IT:

So, trying to log in as adm (per some of the examples) dumps me at a rather messed-up hugetext GUI screen (sans most of the 'UI'), and adm's homedir is missing. Hm.

... Trying to log in as 'fnord' does the same thing.

Logging in as glenda gets me to a weird GUI that actually has a UI. Shokku! Scroll lock gives me a Weird Glyph That I Don't Recognize, which is sort of irritating because I use scroll lock to trigger my KVM.

I miss tab completion already. The terminal cursor is nice, though.

Today, I tried to install two OSes I'd never seen before.

Why? Because I want to set up a pair of backup servers to rsync my code to every day (alternating on a weekly or monthly basis, so whichever one I'm not using can be off and unplugged for lightning-strike protection).

The attempt to install ChaOS did not go well - it booted, got far enough to tell me to press anything but shift to reload the bootstrap, then refused to respond to input. Oh well - I'm not sure if ChaOS was the best choice for a backup server anyhow, but I wanted to try something WEIRD to see if perchance one of the many people whose idea of a good time is writing their own OS has come up with something that meets my definition of 'AWESOME!'.

So, time to try something likelier.

Plan 9. A vaguely unixlike thing (it's more unixlike than, say, Windows XP is Maclike, but less unixlike than, say, Linux/HURD/GNU/OS X.). It's apparently the origin of procfs (which I've always found unaccountably interesting to peer at). It's got filesystems I've never heard of, UIs I've never used, a weird shell that allows treelike redirection constructs, and treats EVERYTHING as files.

The first frustrating thing was that it hated my DVD drive - it worked enough to get a large chunk of the way through the installer, but not enough to actually detect the installer data. I'm not sure if that's Plan 9's fault or my DVD drive being crappy, though. I put in an old CD drive and it installed happily enough.

The documentation was frustrating, though I think part of that was that I was stumbling around in entirely the wrong set - a collection of occasional step-by-step instructions buried among a large number of academic papers discussing the behaviour of a jukebox full of worms that they were using for a fileserver (with 320 gigs of storage and, IIRC, 128 megs ram - BIG IRON indeed!)

So, I blundered around the filesystem trying to figure out what to do next for a bit. The /n/dump filesystem is YAY and pretty much settles that Plan 9 will be one of my backup servers if at all possible (unless it winds up requiring so much storage that I can't back up ~/code/ to it.). I'm somewhat worried by the fact that I don't know what happens when the storage fills up *and* the docs were happily announcing 'Don't worry, by the time you fill it up storage costs will have come down!', though.

Blundering was frustrating, because I hate having to touch-type qwerty on a dvorak. So, I went looking for instructions for how to change the keymap, and found them. kbmap.

Which is a GUI app, that lets me use a mouse to select keyboard type by clicking on it- no, wait, clicking does nothing. Escape does nothing. Hm. The apps in the installer would let me do things to the windows by right-clicking... *right-clicks in a blank piece of the window.*. Nothing. Maybe if I right-click on one of the keyboard type buttons? Yes! It selects! And stays selected.

Websearching eventually disclosed that kbmap is dismissed using the Q key.

... of course, I haven't bothered to find out if rsync runs on this beast yet...