Garry's Mod Crashing on Launch (Fix)

Garry's Mod on Linux has always been a hot mess with plenty of random crashes for me. Crashing in game, crashing attempting to join a game, crashing when downloading assets, in addition to media not loading in Cinema rooms. Those are the problems with the game alone and not mentioning the terrible servers loaded with mods and over 5 gigabytes of downloads not for any good reason, but that's a different complaint.

It's now 2023 and I seem to have fixed my Garry's Mod to the point where it hasn't crashed once for me, so far. (Although some servers have been absolutely awful to play on, getting 2fps, thought these are the servers with 5+ gigabytes of downloads. Servers that label themselves as "small download" yet still have 1 gigabyte or more, beyond frustrating, maybe it was better when I couldn't play it...)

Anyway, the fix. I did 4 different steps, without testing in between, so I'm not actually sure which ones are necessary, but if you want to figure that out you can.

Saints Row 3 Crashing in Multiplayer (Fix)

Saints Row The Third received a SteamOS / Linux release (along with Saints Row 2). My brother and I scored big on a deal from Humble Bundle Store for the Ultimate Franchise Pack (which also includes DLC plus Saints Row IV and Gat Out of Hell, both which have SteamOS / Linux versions).

I run Linux, my brother runs Windows, and it appears we're not the only ones who couldn't play Saints Row The Third in Co-op across two different systems... until...

The first few of hours I clocked up in SR3 were all in the main menu, we tried repeatedly to connect through all means, attempting to create virtual LANs amongst other things.
I noticed while connecting in online mode we could actually join each others lobby screens for a split second, he would hear a little bit of my voice through the in-game voice chat, then I would crash. The solution...

Adding New Wine Directories and Architectures

By default, Wine creates its directory in your home directory with the folder name ".wine" matching the architecture of your operating system (whether it's 32bit or 64bit).

Sometimes a program doesn't run or run correctly when your Wine architecture is set to 64bit. Rather than erasing your entire Wine directory (and every Windows program you've installed) you can create a new directory with a 32bit  architecture and run Wine out of it being its default location.

Unity Launcher and Menu Bar Missing

While it appears to be an issue that has plagued a hand-full of Ubuntu users, for at least 6 years, it still seems difficult to find a fix.
On installing Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu, after logging in, the entire Unity and menu bar are nowhere to be seen.

Rather than being presented with the usual desktop interface.

The user has displayed for them the lovely purple Ubuntu background instead (in whatever incarnation that version is using).

Luckily there's a fix...

Cinnamon Shutdown Button Missing

First step when I install Ubuntu is to replace the Unity desktop with Cinnamon from Linux Mint. The problem is for a long time I was pressing the shutdown button and being presented with a dialog that only gave me the option to shutdown and not to cancel.

If I'm guessing what was going on correctly this is because Ubuntu uses "logind" and Cinnamon uses "consolekit", which means there are two solutions.

Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

So Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" is nearly here, which will be supported until the year 2021! So nows a good time to get those Nvidia drivers working.

I wrote a post about how to do this on 15.10 and it is the exact same process. I will put a link below to it, however I'm going to post a much cleaner version right below. If you need detailed instructions; click the link. If you just need the commands; click read more.

doitonlinux.blogspot.com/2015/10/nvidia-drivers-on-ubuntu-1510.html

NVIDIA drivers: nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx
NVIDIA beta drivers: nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx

Sharing a Laptops WiFi through Ethernet

Here are 3 different ways you can share your laptops WiFi through ethernet to another computer so that that computer can access the internet.
(When your set-up is like the following diagram.)

Desktop --- Ethernet --- Laptop --- WiFi --- Router

A desktop computer connected from its ethernet port to the laptops ethernet port using a cable and that laptop connected to a wireless router via WiFi.
In order of easiest to complicated.

Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu 15.10

Nouveau seems to be both difficult to disable and difficult to spell.
I had a little bit of trouble installing official NVIDIA drivers off of the NVIDIA website in my fresh install of Ubuntu 15.10 however, after figuring it out it was actually quite a simple process.
This is a tutorial for if you want to install the latest drivers that NVIDIA offers on the website, otherwise you should just go into "Software & Updates", navigate to the "Additional Drivers" tab, and select the NVIDIA proprietary binary that you would like to use.

Here are the links to NVIDIAs drivers:
NVIDIA drivers: nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx
NVIDIA beta drivers: nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx

For the purpose of this tutorial the filename of my binary is:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-358.09.bin
And it will be saved in my Downloads folder in my home directory, which will be represented as either of the following:
~/user/Downloads/
/home/user/Downloads/