Baby Steps In Linux Gaming

Today I made great leaps to gaming on Linux. I inintally installed the 32bit Debain (2.4.x kernel) since there are NO 64bit ATI drivers, and I’m not about to replace my ATI Radeon 9800 so soon, pitty really. I did a quick Desktop Enviornment install from tasksel to get gnome, kde, etc. I was able to use X with the VESA graphics driver temporarily. I was experiencing issues with hanging usb devices on bootup, but upgrading to a 2.6.x series kernel fixed the problem (and is much nicer). I then installed the ATI Radeon drivers from this site. Took some fiddling, but the instructions are easy to follow. At that point I had Direct Rendering (just what I wanted). My sound, however, was not working. The card was being detected, but nothing was coming out. It was not muted. Then I found out, at least in some distros (I did not have this problem in Fedora 2), you have to plug the speakers into the “mic” connector on the soundcard… VERY strange. I also muted the mic, so I didn’t get noise. I’m thinking there’s gotta be a way to fix this, but not sure how. If your wondering my sound card is the built-in on an Asus k8v motherboard - which I still recommended for all you Athlon 64-ers out there, Socket 754 anyway.

As of now, Quake 3 runs great. The UT2K4 Demo works, but sound is laggy (so far 2 negatives for the sound card). I intend on getting Quake 2 installed, as well as STEAM / Counter-Strike through WineX. I had such a setup on my 1.5 Ghz Athlon / ATI Radeon 7000 a while back and i was almost as good as windows. Should run great now ( I would hope.) We shall see. I also, for the heck of it, will try to get AVP2 running under linux/winex.

Update: I got the Quake 3 demo working as well, needed to install xlibmesa-dev to get libGL.so. This also allowed me to get Quake 2 running in Open GL.

Update: After a few hours of tinkering I’ve gotten WineX/Cedega to run STEAM again. For some reason it wasn’t installing yesterday, so I went back to my old installer I luckily had archived. I also had to include a native dll (SHDOCVW.DLL) to get it working and compile in freetype/fontconfig support (which I also needed Debian packages for). That had to be enabled in the config. I switched from Alsa sound to OSS to get sound working. All my fonts are systemwide (which I’ve installed from msttcorefonts and manually Marlett & Tahoma). All in all it took longer than expected, but its working again. Linux-Gamers.net is where I got a lot of information this time (and the last time I did this), as well as from trusty Googling.

Update: Aliens Vs. Predator 2 is installed, but not yet playable. Will keep trying.