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Games Software Entertainment Linux

Best Configuration for Linux Gaming? 155

Posted by Cliff from the aside-from-dual-booting dept.
werjman asks: "I'm interested in switching completely to Linux but the only thing holding me back is the gaming. What I really want to know is what distro, graphical environment, Window Manager, and so forth are low on the system resources and play games great (and by games, I mean 3D accelerated memory hogs). Does anyone out there actually use Linux as a gaming platform?"
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Best Configuration for Linux Gaming? More

Best Configuration for Linux Gaming?

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  • Yup. (Score:1)

    by pilot1 ( 610480 )
    I use Gentoo GNU/Linux and fluxbox as a WM. Works great.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • XFCE4 and Debian. I have a gig of RAM, so it doesn't really matter which WM you use. I used GNOME for a time, and everything was fine.

        (Even with my "shitty" MX440, UT1/2003/2004 were fine. I am not a gamer though, just a UT fan :)

    • Re:Yup. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Yorrike ( 322502 )
      Add me to the Gentoo gamers list. The best reason to use Gentoo is that portage has many game binaries ready to go, for example, last night I wanted to blast a few things, so I whipped out my UT2003 CDs, typed "emerge ut2003" as root, followed the installer's instructions and was killing things in less than 20 minutes.

      I run openbox on XOrg for my desktop environment, since I like a clean , fast, no nonsense desktop that relies on hotkeys rather than stumbling around with the mouse.

      The only time I use Wi

      • The best reason to use Gentoo is that portage has many game binaries ready to go
        You use Gentoo because it has binaries ready to go?

        Who is missing the point here? Me or him?

    • run games including neverwinter nights, warcraft 3, and unreal tournament2k4 on my desktop with a geforece ti 4200 and an AMD athlon 2600. this system runs fedora core 3 with gnome. i know i could get better performace with flux or xfce, but i get good enough performance with this set up
    • I run Gentoo as well, but I still use XP for gaming. Reason being, I have a fileserver with Virtual CDs of all my games disks, in Windows I can mount them and run them (no patching or NOCD etc), whereas in Linux I need the physical disk.

      In an ideal world, there would be a linux (or PointToPlay) client for virtual CD, which would allow me to mount those copy-protected disks and install/use the games. Probably still need No-cd, but at least there wouldn't be any messing with physical media. If Cedega had
    • Despite people saying otherwise, KDE is also good for gaming. I experienced no problems at all. Compared to a bare X session, UT2004 ran with the same identical performance (in terms of FPS) under KDE 3.3.1. on an AMD64 with 1024 MB.

      I'm also running gentoo linux.
      • > UT2004 ran with the same identical performance (in terms of FPS) under KDE 3.3.1. on an AMD64 with 1024 MB.

        There is no specific reason why kde would not be suitable for running games other then its memory (and to a far lesser extent) cpu use.

        Your machine has plenty of both, so of course kde doesnt interfer with a game of UT.

        Try the same on a Athlon xp 2400 with 512 MB and you will notice a huge difference.

  • Sure (Score:3, Funny)

    by crmartin ( 98227 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @07:37PM (#11133306)
    ... rogue runs on Linux.

    Damn young whippersnappers, anyway.

  • you don't necessarily need a WM (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @07:40PM (#11133327) Journal
    If it's a fullscreen 3D game that you want to devote as much of your resources as you can, you can change your runlevel so that you login on the console. Then just use xinit. I personally use fluxbox on Slack 10 though, on an older P4 2.0GHz and a Geforce3 Ti200, and I get decent play with most settings between medium and low on UT2k4.

    • Re:you don't necessarily need a WM (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I prefer
      xinit -- :1
      which sets up a seperate X11 on CTRL + ALT + F8.

      This way you can use icq / irc / firefox on your main WM. And if the game crashes / freezes it dosn't take the WM (+ everything else you have open) with it.

      I mostly do it because theres no easy way to switch out of iD's linux games without taking forever to reload the textures. (I also use slack + flux, I don't do it for the resources)

      I remember reading somewhere how to set up XQF to start a seperate X11 session like this when you start
      • That may cause problems for X drivers that cannot be ran multiple instances.

        I'm using ATI's flgrx drivers and if I start a second xsession, going back to the first one will freeze the computer. (This does not occur if I use the vesa driver instead)

        I don't know about NVIDIA drivers though.
        • Works great with Nvidia, however if I try to use Xorg 6.8 rather than XFree86 4.3, it dies. So I guess it depends on driver+xserver(+hardware?)
        • With all respect, ATI's drivers are a huge pile of shit, they are unstable and perform badly.

          NVIDIA is not perfect either, but their drivers do work a lot better, and actually squeeye as much performance as possible out of the available hardware.

          Its sad when a gforce 440mx outperforms a radeon 9800 but it does on most configurations when running Linux (not so when running windows on the same hardware)

  • My favorite (Score:5, Informative)

    by phoenix.bam! ( 642635 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @07:43PM (#11133342)
    www.xfce.org xfce is my favorite (of course this is an opinion). It doesn't seem as barebones are fluxbox yet is light and fast.

    • Re:My favorite (Score:3, Insightful)

      by IpalindromeI ( 515070 )
      This isn't particular to you, because you didn't come across as crazy, but what is the deal with XFCe anyway? Why does everyone love it so much? I would even compare many of its proponents to Gentoo users in terms of zealotry.

      I use its taskbar (better than gnome's, imo) but its window manager leaves something to be desired. That something is configurability, particularly in terms of key bindings. Sawfish has almost 200 WM actions that can be bound to key or mouse shortcuts. Things like toggling maximizatio

  • Why use a window manager at all? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19, 2004 @07:46PM (#11133360)
    Fire up X with nothing in your .xinitrc or .xsession except for the line to launch your game. X is stopped when your game terminates.

    Stop sshd, inetd, any web servers, any mail serers, reschedule any cron jobs for while you are at work or sleeping, and absolutely do not use gdm or other login display manager.

    If you are the sort of person who wants to get every last fps possible, then I suppose you could use Gentoo and compile everything with all optimizations for your platform (Gentoo is the easiest way to accomplish this). You just type exactly what each step tells you in the Gentoo installation manual, and it very easy (just don't try this for anything more important than your gaming machine).
    • I use icewm [icewm.org] personally, but you could use whatever you wanted. Have the links to a script which does the following:

      -Take the startup parameters for the game, write them to an .xinitrc file. Make it restart normal X after.
      -Write a custom XF86Config if needed too.
      -Kill X
      -Run startx pointing at your custom XF86Config as needed
      -.xinitrc should load the game for you

      Biggest issue is a little voodoo needed to have your script not die when X stops. Perhaps a file in one of the regular X init scripts that it
  • Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a PS2 or Gamecube, I am pretty sure you can get them second hand on Ebay for good prices.

    Stop making excuses for your Windows partition. You don't need it, remove it.
    • When HL2 comes out on PS2, OK. (lol)

    • Uh, I believe that's what this person is trying to accomplish. They probably want to be able to use a newer computer which will allow greater graphic capabilities compared to PS2 or Xbox.

      I personally like computer games better because of the controls. I'm familiar with using a keyboard and mouse at the same time. Lettered hotkeys are simpler than button combinations.

    • Yeah, and while you're at it, go out and buy a typewriter, cd player, a webtv, a dvd player, and a set of oil paint. Why bother with a PC?

      Personally, I play games on a PC not because its my only option, but because it adds an extra level of depth and complexity that you can't find in certain genres on console games. In the same way that image manipulation software lets you go above and beyond what you could do on paper/canvas (for the most part), gaming on a general purpose computer allows much more fle

    • "Stop making excuses for your Windows partition. You don't need it, remove it."

      Whoever modded this as 'insightful' was being incredibly short-sighted. The simple fact of the mnatter is that Windows is the best OS for PC gaming. If you want to play games only available on PC, and you want to play on-line, then having a Windows partition is not an 'excuse'. A PS2 or GameCube is an alternative, but not always an ideal one.

      Do yourself a favor and quit kidding yourself. If you're avoiding games because y
      • Window is not the best OS for gameing. Most games are optimized for Windows. There's a differance.

        I have a seperate PC running Windows for games because I don't have faith in the quality of the DRI drivers available for Linux. I won't even consider using a console because of the ~720x480 screen size used by the NTSC signal, a 1950's technology.
        • "Window is not the best OS for gameing. Most games are optimized for Windows. There's a differance."

          Really? Care to spell that out a bit? Windows has the largest user base, largest library of games, and supports the largest range of hardware the games will play on. What's so different that it's not the 'best'?

          " I won't even consider using a console because of the ~720x480 screen size used by the NTSC signal, a 1950's technology."

          If you watch any TV at all then this is a ridiculous cop-out. If FPS
          • What I mean is that there is nothing inherent in the OS itself that makes Windows a better platform. The examples you site show that Windows is a more popular and lucrative platform, but not necessarily a better one. Mind you, I am a big fan of VMS and Dave Cutler, and I think that Window (as of NT) is a decent OS, but I don't see anything about the OS that makes it a better gaming platform. If anything, DirectX is an inferior way of encapsulating 3D instructions than OpenGL on Intel platforms. I don't
            • "What I mean is that there is nothing inherent in the OS itself that makes Windows a better platform. The examples you site show that Windows is a more popular and lucrative platform, but not necessarily a better one."

              Okay, I understand what you're saying. Please understand, we're measuring 'better' in two different senses here. I'm talking about better in the sense of "My goal is gaming, which OS gets me closer to that goal?" I never intended my comment to imply that Windows was technically superior f
              • I use windows to play games, for the very reasons you stated before. I'm not talking about development systems, but runtime accomodation. But yeah, basically we are saying the same thing.

                I may be an odd case when it comes to the number of pixels. I've studied OpenGL and general 3D rendering. I have an appreciation for lighting and shadowing effects. And a think my experience of the game is unduely affected by the sum total of information that is delivered per second. But I also agree that there are
            • There is nothing inherent in TCP/IP itself that makes it a better networking protocol. But its widely available, cheap and supported by all.

              In the 80's the Coleco Adam was a better machine than the Commodore 64 in every respect. But it cost $100 more and was released before its floppy drive and everyone bought the commodore.
      • I have standards and moral judgments to make in regards who I do make business with.

        Although Sony and Nintendo are by no means saints, MS has no goodwill left with me. None. Zilch.

        Convinience will not impair my judgment. It is a pity so many people don't even question themselves about these matters and as long as something is convinient they close their eyes to the consequences of their actions.
        • "It is a pity so many people don't even question themselves about these matters and as long as something is convinient they close their eyes to the consequences of their actions."

          It is a pity so many people hate a company so bad it impairs their judgement on anything related to what they do.
    • You know what, he was asking a specific question for a specific use. I'm sure he knows about PS2 and gamecubes. I sure he knows that windows runs windows games better.

      However, he wants to get decent performance game-wise out of linux. So responses such as "screw what you're doing and do entirely-different-thing-X" are not only useless, they're ignorant and trollish.
  • As far as graphics cards go it seems as if nvidia, although not open source, still has the lead as is noted in this [anandtech.com] review

  • use the game itself as your window manager (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rjforster ( 2130 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @07:53PM (#11133403) Journal
    First set your system up without graphical login, which most distributions configure by default.
    To do this edit /etc/inittab and change the default runlevel to 3, this means find the line
    id:3:initdefault:
    which will normally read 5 and change it to 3 (like mine is), Fedora inittab files are well commented and explain what to do, others are probably similar.
    To go into X (the windowing system) you type startx after logging in, this gives you your regular desktop, gnome, kde, xfce, whatever.
    When you are bored with email quit out of X and run your game with (I think)
    xinit /usr/local/games/doom3/doom3

    I read that here [nvnews.net]

    • Re:use the game itself as your window manager (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @07:59PM (#11133436) Journal
      What you're doing there is actually loading up X again, but instead of immediately loading and running your normal window manager, you're initing straight in to the game. Considering desktops like Gnome and KDE do take up quite a lot of RAM and spawn various background processes, this is sound advice since it'll cut system resource usage right down and make your game slightly faster. Most 3D games still run in X, of course - since this is the best and easiest place to find full hardware accelerated 3D (OpenGL) on the average Linux desktop box, thanks to the open and closed source drivers for various nVidia and ATI cards.
    • 1. edit /etc/inittab and change the default runlevel to 3,
      2. this means find the line id:3:initdefault: which will normally read 5 and change it to 3 (like mine is), Fedora inittab files are well commented and explain what to do, others are probably similar.
      3. To go into X (the windowing system) you type startx after logging in, this gives you your regular desktop, gnome, kde, xfce, whatever.
      4. When you are bored with email quit out of X and run your game with (I think) xinit /usr/local/games/doom3/doom3

      Y

      • > You expect Joe Sixpack to do all that to play a game? Not a chance. You might as well be speaking Mandarin.

        1. the person asking is obviously a bit more knowledgable then 'Joe Sixpack'

        2. you can run games without doing all those things, you will just get the same problems as Windows can have (ie, background processes taking away resources from your game, stupid popups from whatever program interupting your game etc etc)

      • yeah, and generally speaking "Joe Sixpack" Asks Slashdot on how to configure his Linux Box...where did that Troll mod go now?

  • Damn good question.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @07:55PM (#11133412) Journal
    I've been wondering this myself. I've gotten CS to work on most distro's, but after getting burnt out for years of trying to get other games working on linux, I've just used my linux boxes for either servers or desktops that needed X.

    Gentoo has some nice patched kernels for gamers, and the gentoo forums are the best forums out there. And then use transgaming to complete it.

    As for a desktop wm, depends on how much functionality you want. The barest wm is twm. But then whats a 150K or so, might as well run IceWM which has a nice taskbar.

    The easiest out of the box setup is Mandrake for gamers, less configuration and config time.

    Just my 2 cents.

  • twm-gl (Score:3)

    by jvmatthe ( 116058 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @07:56PM (#11133423) Homepage
    I heartily recommend twm-gl for your desktop. It has all the lightness of the original twm window manager but some of the best use of OpenGL acceleration on the desktop you've ever seen.

    What's really amazing is that you can eke out a boost in 3D game performance by using it. Really, one of the best, but lesser known, free software projects. (And since it's free software, I hear that a Windows and MacOS X version is in the works. Awesome!)

    Give it a try.
    • Of course, you can (in the Mac OS) just kill off the Finder and get back most of the processing time that it eats up in window management.

    • I heartily recommend twm-gl for your desktop.

      1. You forgot a link [icculus.org] to the project.
      2. twm-gl is binary-only, no source (that I could find, anyway.).
        I am reluctant to trust binary-only code from someone that I don't know.
      3. The lack of any reasonable documentation on the website (three bullet points, one of which claims that the writer was on LSD when he/she wrote it), plus the broken screenshot pics, do not give me great confidence in the project.
    • Tried to check out a screenshot [icculus.org]
      .

      > look
      It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

      > find link
      You stumble around trying to find http://icculus.org/projects/twmgl/screenshot1.jpg, but your hands grasp nothing except dirt and rock. You eventually touch something solid, and lift it up. As you bring it to your eyes, you squint to find that it is an electronic root kit of high-jump.

      > quit
      Your score is 25 out of a possible 375. This gives you the rank of hoser.
      Are you sure you want to

  • Hate to say it (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jaredmauch ( 633928 ) <jared@puck.nether.net> on Sunday December 19, 2004 @08:01PM (#11133452) Homepage
    This is the only reason why i have a dual-boot system. I don't play a lot of games to be honest, but the ones that I do play require me to be stuck in windoze. When I upgraded my (desktop) system to a p4-2.8 htt/1g/radeon9800pro earlier this year (soon i'll have to say 'last year'), i was forced to update to XP from 98. I just couldn't get things to work correctly. I wasn't expecting the HT to work correctly, just act like a single cpu, but the usb, etc..on the mb just did not have 98/me drivers that would work in my setup.

    I took this chance to actually put some cash in m$ pocket when they've been getting "better" on the security, etc... front. Sure, mod me down or whatever for saying these anti-opensource things here. Not like i actually did anything for linux or open source [google.com]. ;-)

    I've found that this works the best (aside from my PS/2) for my needs. YMMV depending on what you need.

    • Yeah, I'll sheepishly admit that I'm in the same boat.

      There are, however, inherent advantages to dual-booting in the first place. If some random program I download screws up my Windows desktop...eh, just reset in Linux, get back to work, and worry about it later. Useful, especially since I seem capable of crashing just about any OS (I've crashed Red Hat Linux, stalled an automatic, and crashed a GameCube. ...Windows XP lasted approximately 16 hours the last time I booted up...).

    • With a radeon, your pretty screwed with linux gaming anyway. Atleast you didn't do like many people, claiming that windows is the only way, and not just your personal experience, and denying the very existance of people who use linux for gaming. I'm quite happy with my linux-only pc gaming experience and so are many others.
    • On a side-note (and not to contradict that linux gaming has a ways to go), older games sometimes work in linux better than in windows. Especially when you consider older games for DOS... in which many work great with either "DOSbox or DOSemu [freshmeat.net] as well as other projects specific to running old SCUMM [freshmeat.net] or Sierra [freshmeat.net] games [freshmeat.net]

  • Gentoo kernels... (Score:5, Informative)

    by St. Arbirix ( 218306 ) <matthew...townsend@@@gmail...com> on Sunday December 19, 2004 @08:06PM (#11133472) Homepage Journal
    Gentoo has a few dozen different kernels at your disposal. There used to be a gaming-sources kernel that was based on ck-sources [optusnet.com.au]. The other popular kernel in portage for gaming is mm-sources by Andrew Morton (the guy Linus lets go hog-wild with the kernel).

    Kernels not in Gentoo portage but compatible [gentoo-wiki.com] and designed for speed are:
    nitro-sources [www.sepi.be] (ck-sources + reiser4 + framebuffer + other stuff)
    love-sources [love-sources.org] (community maintained kernel to optimize desktop performance and test "unstable" patches)
    speedy-sources [limitlessfx.com] (love-sources w/ reiser4)

    Oh, and looking at the forums nearly everyone uses an nVidia card. So far, nVidia plays nicer with x.org than ATI.

  • Really not a troll.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Keebler71 ( 520908 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @08:10PM (#11133506) Journal
    Best Configuration for Linux Gaming?

    How about a windows machine configured right next to your linux box. Seriously, it has the pro over a dual-boot at least in that you don't have to reboot to switch operating systems. I recommend a monitor switch to let you use the same monitor for both computers (and of course, allows you to instantly switch). Make sure you get a good one though or your will have some funky artifacts on your screen...

    • Re:Really not a troll.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Trelane ( 16124 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @08:54PM (#11133792) Journal
      I'd say the biggest reason not to do that is that not everybody can afford to maintain a Wintendo.

      I personally game on Linux exclusively despite having several copies of Windows around. This is simply because I use Linux all the time, and hated dual-booting (guess I'm just impatient like that. I also hate having to drop everything I'm doing; I usually have lots of stuff going on on-screen). I can't afford to maintain a whole nother box (especially one that has the same specs as my laptop, which is necessarily fast due to the work I do) to run the latest games.

      Better, IMHO, just to pay for Linux games and maybe pick up a few on the discount rack that work via Cedega/Wine. I don't have to be annoyed or maintain two expensive machines, and I get my work done under Linux (I'm honestly much more productive under Linux than Windows), and I help support Linux games with my wallet. A win-win situation for me. Others' views may be different, but those are my reasons.

    • >> Best Configuration for Linux Gaming?

      > How about a windows machine configured right next to your linux box

      Lets see, the person asks very explicitly for a Linux setup. Your answer: Use windows.

      Sure, Windows does better for gaming then Linux due to availability of games and supported hardware, but THAT WAS NOT THE QUESTION. Neither was it a question about dual booting, it was about running games on Linux.

  • One thing that bugs me is the limited audio enhancements in gaming. No EAX support since CL doesn't make Linux drivers nor share it for driver creators. Even with Transgaming [transgaming.com] for old Diablo 2 [diablo2.com], I could not enable EAX/3D sound for my old SB Live! card.

    Has this been improved yet? I don't play games in Linux these days.

    • Re:Audio... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Newtonian_p ( 412461 )
      Well, ALSA has 3D audio support for Sound Blaster Live! cards (I get 4 channel sound from my DVDs when played with Mplayer using the alsa audio output on my SB Live! 5.1).

      And since version 2 [transgaming.com], WineX has been able to translate DirectSound 3D into ALSA's 3D API.

      Does Diablo 2 use DirectSound 3D or just EAX?

  • Cedega (Score:5, Informative)

    by _aa_ ( 63092 ) <j&uaau,ws> on Sunday December 19, 2004 @08:39PM (#11133695) Homepage Journal
    Cedega [transgaming.com] is a non-free version of wine with directx capabilities. You can browse their supported games here [transgaming.org].

    Of course not all games now-a-days require wine or cedega in order to run on linux. Games like unreal tournament and doom III include fully functional linux versions [icculus.org].

    There are several open source games developed for but not limited to linux. torcs [sourceforge.net], flightgear [flightgear.org], tuxracer [sourceforge.net] are some examples.

    Projects like libsdl [libsdl.org] are making cross-platform game development easier.

    Probably the biggest problem you'll encounter is building drivers for your video card. I've heard it argued both ways but as I understand it, both nvidia and ati drivers are ass-pains in linux. Nvidia's drivers [nvidia.com] are free as in beer, not speech. If you don't really care about free-software principles and philosophy then this is not a problem for you. ATI's drivers [rage3d.com] I understand to perform less than ideally. If you haven't already purchased your video card, I would encourage you to do extensive research beforehand.

    In reality, linux distributions have few differences. Any recent, major distribution should be able to accomodate gameplay. I myself use debian [debian.org] unstable for amd64.

    As far as performance, it really boils down to hardware. My advice is to install the linux distribution of your choice. Once you get glxgears [xfree86.org] to run, give ut2004demo [unrealtournament.com] a try, and if you like the way it works, then stick with linux.
    • ### I've heard it argued both ways but as I understand it, both nvidia and ati drivers are ass-pains in linux.

      ATI drivers are still a pain, NVidia drivers however are now among the easiest to install drivers outside the standard kernel. They come in the form of a simple self-extracting script which you just run, it will automatically detect the correct kernel headers and such and will in most cases compile out-of-the-box without ever manually configuring anything, even on a Debian box. Beside from the easy

  • Suse/Nvidia (Score:3, Informative)

    by miyako ( 632510 ) <miyako AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday December 19, 2004 @09:13PM (#11133875) Homepage Journal
    I don't consider myself a "PC Gamer", I generally prefer console games, though I do have a few PC games that I play occasionally (Neverwinter Nights, UT2k4), I ran Linux exclusively for quite a while (I have a mac now as well, though I've never used it for games). I have to say that, in my experience with a few different distro's (pre-fedora versions of redhat, Mandrake, Debian, and Suse), I've found that Suse is really a nice distribution for 3D support- if you use an nVidia card. You can choose at install time if you want open source 3D drivers, or the official nVidia drivers, and if you update your system, getting the drivers working again is as easy as refreshing the install from YaST.
    As for a window manager, Window Maker seems to be pretty light weight, or if you really want to get fancy, you can write a script to drop you out of a window manager completely and just run the game on top of plain ol' X. To be completely honest though, I run KDE most of the time, and have never found it's memory footprint to be a problem even when I'm running rather resource intensive games or applications. I have a buttload of ram though, so YYMV.
    Others have mentioned Cedega, which is not free, though you can get the source free from CVS if you feel like messing about with configuring it and compiling it yourself. AFAIK their licensing doesn't prohibit this, it only prohibits you distributing it to anyone else.

  • Don't do LFS (Score:3, Informative)

    by CestusGW ( 814880 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @09:24PM (#11133916)
    For the love of WINE, don't do an LFS system if you want Cedega to work at all. Between my dillying and dallying with RC kernels, nVidia drivers, supporting libraries and GCC versions, I can tell you that every time I do something, I've gotta fix something in Cedega :S So make sure your distro is 'non-volatile' before you take the plunge with Cedega.
  • I've been using/gaming in linux for years now and the only distrobution that's given me (too much) grief has been Fedora Core 3. I had this little ditty installed a few weeks ago and I couldn't even play my collection of Loki ports (SmacPack or SimCity 3000) they just segfaulted. WineX didn't work either so I didn't do much gaming done at all. Aside from that single bad experience I've actually had more luck with games like steam under linux rather than Windows!! StarCraft, Steam, Diablo II, most everyt
  • I'm not a hardcore gamer, but I've had good luck with a GeForce4 Ti that I bought last year running under Gentoo. A lot of new games are coming available for Linux (Doom 3 comes to mind -- I don't have it, but I play Quake 3 Arena and find the Linux Q3A experience to be more pleasant than the Windows experience), and for those that don't, WINE and Cedega can sometimes pick up the slack.

    I have both WINE and Cedega installed on my Gentoo system (and, FWIW, you can obtain Cedega from CVS without paying for

  • been a Linux-only gamer for 3 years (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ender Ryan ( 79406 ) <MONET minus painter> on Sunday December 19, 2004 @09:46PM (#11134006) Journal
    Not counting my PS2 and Xbox(which I'm ashamed of owning...) I exclusively run PC games on Linux. To have a good experience with Linux gaming, you need the right hardware, a sane configuration, and a little bit of knowhow and willingness to experiment.

    If you are very familiar with Linux, you will likely be very satisfied with your experience, and even likely to have fewer problems than your Windows using friends(for games that run on Linux, that is).

    So first off, you need the proper hardware. You _need_ an NVIDIA card. Don't bother with ATI, their drivers are unstable and perform terribly. With NVIDIA, you will be up and running in no time.

    Second, you need a decent sound chip. If you have a laptop, chances are you're screwed, unless you're seriously willing to tinker. You will want a card that supports hardware mixing, all common audio frequencies(many newer cheap cards only support 48000). A SB Live is probably your best bet, unless you know of another card on the market today with those features that is supported well in Linux. If you use the alsa drivers, be sure to load the oss compatibility modules, and you may have to $ echo "binary 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss, to get some games to work. Google is your friend. Substitute "binary" with the actual name of the program, eg. "quake3.x86" or whatever.

    Build yourself a custom kernel, do not include DRI or agpgart. The NVIDIA drivers have their own agp support, with better support for different/broken hardware.

    Get yourself a gig of memory already, and you won't need to worry about your WM. Just don't have any silly CPU consuming applets running.

    If you have to ask what distro to use... well, I don't know quite what to tell you. Any distro can be made to work if you know what you're doing. But since you're asking for a recommendation, I heartily recommend Gentoo. It will, hopefully, teach you a bit more about how your system works, and it is the most flexible of the mainstream distros, IMO.

    Cheers, and good luck.

    • I'm not currently much of a gamer, but your comment has made me curious - what game versions do you play?

      My friends have a LAN party every other week and I had assumed that I would need to build a winbox to join in. Is Wine sufficient these days to use the Windows versions, or are games generally available for Linux? Or something else I hadn't thought of?

      Cheers,
      Justin.
      • Playing games on Linux, your selection will be somewhat limited. However, a number of LAN party staples are available for Linux or run acceptably in Transgaming's Cedega.

        UT2004 is available for Linux and runs very well. Doom 3 is available and runs well, but not many people are playing that at LAN parties :) There's some classics, Quake 1 - 3, UT, UT2k3. RTCW, Enemy Territory.

        Some Windows games that reportedly run very well are Far Cry, Painkiller, Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy, GTA3, GTA:VC, Half-Life

  • loki installers for linux gamers (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These guys can help install games from their original cd onto linux.

    loki installers for linux gamers [liflg.org]

  • Lightweight window managers? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lsd ( 36021 ) on Sunday December 19, 2004 @10:33PM (#11134234) Homepage
    To those of you suggesting that a lightweight window manager is the way to go, I have to ask, what exactly is the point? The last time I did this was back in the early G400 days, when things like CPU meters updating add significant X server context-switch overhead (far more than the under 1% of CPU time such apps might take). It saves some RAM, sure, but think about it:

    1) RAM costs next to nothing these days - 512MB goes for under AU$100 locally.

    2) Even without enough real RAM, this is a classic example of what virtual memory is for. After a quick game, is logging back in to your desktop, reloading all your apps and then getting back to your work really quicker than just leaving the OS to swap your apps back in?

    For me, one of the joys of Linux is the ability to have my desktop and applications open 24/7 for weeks on end. If you're going to log out every time you play a game, you might as well just hit the reboot button in your login manager and go play in XP.

    To answer the topic, I'd suggest an NVIDIA video card (the 6600GT is, by all indications, awesome, and NVIDIA's Linux drivers are better than ATI's [anandtech.com]), a Creative SB Live! or Audigy card (no need to knock yourself out - an older OEM Live! card will do fine), and an Athlon 64 CPU. There's no Linux-specific reason to go for the Athlon 64 over the P4 (though playing with 64-bit Linux can be fun), but they just seem to be a better chip for the money overall, and a better gaming chip in particular.

  • The most enjoyable gaming... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Any distro, LILO, Windows XP and a spare drive.
  • I created an Xsession specifically to launch the urban terror mod for quake 3. from gdm I login and select Urban terror and am straight in the game with no wm, de, any other X clients running except the game.
  • From my experience, if you meet the requirements of the game you're playing, having the proper window manager or distro doesn't really matter. I use KDE which is not considered light-weight and have had no trouble. Just close every running application before playing your game if you have a resource crunch, or add more swap.

    I use Gentoo, but again any distribution will work.

    As other people have mentioned, this might not work as well as you hope. I've also been forced to maintain a "Wintendo" because my gam
  • Why not just boot up a windows sesh in VMWare and then run the game from the emulated instance of windows :-P

    • Re:Simple Solution.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by bryhhh ( 317224 )
      Unfortunately VMWare 4.x (on a linux host) doesn't support the level of Direct X required for most games. So unfortunately that won't work. - I tried this not to long ago. But if you have a windows license anyway, why not just throw a second disk in the box and install a native copy of windows on it?

      I'm a believer in using the right tool for the job. This is why I have a Linux web, mail & file server, and my games machine is a windows box. - That's not to say Linux isn't any good for games, but for me
  • Games are such a hog I'm prepared to dual-boot. When a game is running I consider that conputer unavailable for anything else; between rounds I use a 2nd computer.

    In terms of hardware though I think same principles as other apps apply but with the best linux graphics card there is... probably Nvidia Geforce 6800? I think SCSI or fast storage is suprisingly useful too!
    • > Games are such a hog I'm prepared to dual-boot. When a game is running I consider that conputer unavailable for anything else; between rounds I use a 2nd computer.

      While I agree that games are usually a big resource hog, it is by far not as bad as you are suggesting.

      For example, I have been running a webserver on the same machine that I use for playing Enemy territory. This setup was very usable, and the game and webserver did not cause any noticable interference with eachother (webserver was also usi

  • Fall 2004 State of Linux Gaming (Score:3, Informative)

    by The_Dougster ( 308194 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @10:22AM (#11136520) Homepage
    My system is a dual-boot machine with Gentoo and Win2k. I leave my Win2k partition obviously for games that I will probably only play once and then uninstall them, and for other stuff that just isn't going to run under Wine, like Freelancer for instance. I spend most of my time in Linux, but sometimes I just want to play one of the Windows games so I'm not ashamed to say that I'll reboot into Win2k once in a while.

    On the Linux side of things, I run Gentoo and just use the regular old Gnome desktop with Nautilus even. My system is fast enough to keep up with it, and Athlon-XP 2400, GeForce FX-5900, 1G of RAM, a fast 120G HD, 20" Monitor, SBLive! sound card, and some USB joysticks and game pads. I use the JFS filesystem in Gentoo because it has the lowest CPU usage and its speed is comparable with the other guys.

    One of the greatest things for the Linux gamer is DOSBox [sourceforge.net]. Using that program, I can play Wing Commander: Privateer, and X-COM UFO Defense in Linux. You can adjust the speed of DOSBox so the game feels about right. You know its getting pretty good if it can run Privateer (which is now abandonware and a free download from The Underdogs). In fact, you can probably run most of the great old DOS abandonware games in DOSBox with zero problems now. This one program increases your Linux gaming library to thousands of freely available commercial quality games.

    Next are the nice commercial games which have a linux port. Neverwinter Nights and Doom3 stand at the forefront of the pack and run great on my system. Also there are great ports of Quake1/2/3, RtCW, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 1/2, and Doom.

    After that, you enter the realm of Open Source games, with great titles like the Ur-Quan Masters, Vega Strike, Battle for Wesnoth, and any of the thousands of other games listed at The Linux Game Tome [happypenguin.org]. Having Gentoo is an advantage here because the compiler toolchain is particularly strong, so its easy to compile and try out the latest cutting edge CVS versions of these in-development games.

    Then you have the Wine and Cedega games. I use this for Jagged Alliance 2, Fallout1/2, and Diablo II. These (and other) well programmed games are totally playable in Wine, so there's no reason to have to special boot to windows just to play them, might as well just use Wine to play them. The windows versions of most of the old Loki games that are now broken typically work under Wine.

    I won't even go into the other emulators, but suffice it to say that there are emulators for most consoles, such as ZSNES, and arcade games, like MAME. There are thousands of games which will work great using these things. I sometimes boot up ZSNES and play some ShadowRun.

    Which leads me finally to the unfortunate state of the Loki titles. A lot of these are linked against older libs and may or not work on a new system without some serious fiddling around and building of compatibility libs. Some still work, some don't, but chances are that they will all eventually die of bit-rot. Poor Loki Games, you are missed.

    I've been doing serious Linux gaming since 1998. There are tons of great games available, thousands that can be emulated, and the best part is if you want to take a hand at making your own games, you have every tool and library under the sun right there at your fingertips.

  • Almost anything will work. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mornelithe ( 83633 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @01:04PM (#11137887)
    If you've got a computer capable of running a 3D accelerated memory hog, then you've got one capable of running a 3D accelerated memory hog and KDE. It's not a very noticable performance hit.

    Now, if you're trying to run Doom 3 on three-year-old hardware, the case might be different, but if you've got something up to snuff, you shouldn't have much of a problem running almost anything. When I'm in KDE on my machine, I typically have a memory usage of around 200 MB, even after days, with several programs loaded up. Can Doom 3 really not handle itself with 800 MB of ram (assuming about a gig of ram is standard on a gaming machine these days)?

    If you want a lightweight window manager, use XFCE or Fluxbox or something. However, don't listen to people who tell you that on a 3.5 GHz machine with a gigabyte of memory you need to use Ratpoison because anything else uses too much memory. Use whatever you like to look at. You bought a giant machine; you don't need to treat it like a pentium 90.

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