[SOLVED] Words With Friends for Linux?

[RupertPupkin]

Is there a free Linux clone of Words With Friends? My girlfriend has got me hooked on that game, but I can only play it on her Android, and I don't want to use Facebook. That game is very addictive!

[sesso]

did you check in google chrome apps yet?

[RupertPupkin]

Originally Posted by sesso

did you check in google chrome apps yet?

Yeah, and it doesn't have anything like Words With Friends. But it looks like you can run Android apps under a VM in VirtualBox (using the eeepc iso image), so I'm going to try that instead.

[RupertPupkin]

Woohoo! I can now play Words With Friends in Linux. I got it working by running Android-x86 in VirtualBox under Fedora 16. This is awesome!

[DBelton]

looks like Scrabble!

[RupertPupkin]

Yeah, it's basically a networked version of scrabble, with just slightly different rules.

To me the best part is getting a full-blown Android environment running in VirtualBox. It took some effort to get everything working right; Words With Friends is the icing on the cake. You can play it from within Facebook, but I neither have nor want a Facebook account. So now I can play from my Linux PC against my girlfriend on her Android phone. It's fun!

[DBelton]

I have been kinda toying with the idea of getting an android environment running here just to mess around with.

Did you kinda follow the how-to on the android-x86 site to run it in virtualbox?

http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto

[RupertPupkin]

Yes, I followed the general steps in that guide to install Android to disk in VirtualBox, until I ran into a roadblock: the iso images on that site only work with wireless connections. If - like mine - your PC has a wired ethernet connection then you'll need one of the patched isos with ethernet support; I got mine here (get the android-x86-vm-20120130.iso.gz file listed under UPDATE). In either case you'll need a DHCP server somewhere in your LAN. I didn't have one, so I enabled the built-in DHCP server in my router.

Besides the networking issue, there's also the issue with many Android apps (e.g. Words With Friends) wanting to be run in portrait mode (like on a phone) instead of landscape mode. So unless you like tilting your head 90 degrees all the time, you'll have to deal with that as well. I found a solution here. It seems the default display is a (landscape) 4:3 aspect ratio at 240dpi, you'll want to make that a (portrait) 3:4 aspect ratio at about 120dpi. I called my VM "Android" and ran this command (before running VirtualBox):

vboxmanage setextradata "Android" "CustomVideoMode1" "750x1000x16"

Then in the Android boot menu I added "DPI=120 vga=ask" to the kernel parameters, and selected the 750x1000x16 mode when prompted. Later you can permanently add those parameters in GRUB as described in the above link. You can play around with adding more custom video modes to find one that suits your setup. You may want to go to the Settings app and select eth0 as the ethernet device before changing the video mode; for some reason the Settings app sometimes won't open when using the custom video mode.

It took me a while to figure all this out but now it's working great and I'm enjoying playing with Android.

[DBelton]

Thanks for sharing your experiences

I would have run into several of the same things, since I don't and will not ever use wireless, and also don't have a DHCP server either (and as you did, enabling the DHCP server in the router is probably the easiest route)

Now to grab the iso and start playing around with it

[chrisco23]

Why not just play with Facebook?

That's what I've always done. But I found this thread by googling because I've hit a problem recently.

I run Fedora 16 on desktop and laptop. About 2-ish weeks ago, my WWF app in Facebook stopped working on the desktop. Still fine on the laptop. Both desktop and laptop are full yum updated. The page loads but it doesn't show my FB friends, and it doesn't show games in progress.

I've been looking at the Network tab in Developer Tools, and I don't see anything jumping out at me. There is a pull to 1-299.channel.facebook.com that sometimes shows no response, but most of them do show responses.

Also, the buddy_list.php shows the response and it has my friends' IDs in there.

I've tried running Chrome in incognito mode. I've also tried Firefox, and Firefox in Safe Mode.

Any ideas?

[RupertPupkin]

Originally Posted by chrisco23

Why not just play with Facebook?

Because I despise Facebook and want nothing to do with it.
So unfortunately I can't help you with your problem.

By the way, Words With Friends still works great for me in the Android VM under VirtualBox.