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Linux@Play

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

When the PCQ Linux Nov-ember ’99 project started, I

was asked to do an article on gaming in Linux among other things. Being a regular

contributor to the gaming section in Computers@Home, I readily accepted the chance

to try out something that was new for me too.

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Coincidentally, at that time, I was working

on a fairly high-end system running Red Hat Linux 6. This was a PIII/450 with 128 MB RAM

and 8 GB hard disk. The only shortcoming was that it didn’t have a 3D accelerator

card. Instead, I had a simple but adequate display card with 4 MB VRAM. I was running

Gnome at a resolution of 1024x768 and Enlightenment as my window manager. Things were

running pretty smoothly.

So armed with the arrogant knowledge of an

expert action gamer, I decided to download the most famous game of them all–Quake II.

But things didn’t turn out to be that simple. I was faced with an array of

choices the moment I reached a download page. Was I to download the Quake II tarball or

the RPM? Being on Red Hat, I obviously chose the RPM. This was a pretty small

5-point-something MB file. As far as I could remember, even the Quake II demo was much

larger. Oh well, I thought, maybe Linux really is great. Maybe they can write real

optimized code or something. Then came the choice to download the glibc version or the

libc version. Not being a Linux fanatic, I wondered what these were, while searching for

some sort of hint. A note somewhere told me to look for a particular file (lib222.so) on

my system. If it existed and the version was greater than 2 then I had glibc. So off I

went, and looked for and found the file. So I downloaded the glibc RPM version, and then

ran "rpm —ivh quake2-xxxx.rpm". This gave me a couple of errors right away.

It couldn’t find certain library files. I frantically looked for the files on my

system, then realized that these were files for the GLIDE API (part of the 3DFX cards).

But since I didn’t have a 3DFX card, why was the installable looking for the library?

Couldn’t it detect it automatically? Anyway, I was getting a bit tired by this time,

so I decided to a force install. I ran "rpm —ivh quake2-xxxx. Rpm

—nodeps" which turned off all the dependencies within the package. This is not

the recommended way to set up any package and don’t do this unless you know what

you’re getting into (It’s a different matter that at that point neither did I).

Well, the RPM install went off fine. I had

a folder /usr/local/games/quake2, with proper-looking files in it. Off I went and fired up

./quake2, waiting for the game to finally start up. No such luck. It was still looking for

some files. I gave up. I needed experienced help. I searched for a HOWTO at Redhat.com and

found it. This detailed the exact steps I required to get Quake II up and running. It even

had a fairly large section on how to get your 3DFX video card recognized, set up the Mesa

OpenGL libraries, etc. I won’t go into the other horrors I faced. Like when I had to

reinstall the RPM, because I hadn’t run it as root, and so it couldn’t access

the video hardware device files directly. Or when I had to manually set up directories and

remove a lot of files from the Q2 distribution. Not in the game Quake II, but before I

even set it up. Linux is an action game by itself!

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To be fair to Linux, once I did get

everything up and running, things were pretty smooth. And most things like setting up the

video card or the OpenGL libraries were required only once. Installing another game on the

system is simpler than the steps above. Performance is comparable to the same game on a

Windows machine. I was able to install and get a couple of other action games running in

comparatively less time than it took me on the first one.

There are a lot of native Linux games like

3D Pong and others. These are good fun and run pretty well on the system. Linux renders

everything perfectly and is a good graphics platform. I’m no wallflower when it comes to

technical things, but installing a game under Linux was pretty intimidating. I read

comments from people questioning the validity of not promoting Linux as a platform for the

home segment in the October ’99 PCQ. Well, I must go along with what was written

there. Linux has a long way to go before it can match the comfort and ease of use of

Windows, especially for non-technical home users. The reason one sees the home PC segment

booming these days is because of the fact that Windows is an easier platform to learn and

get used to. At least one doesn’t have to be a rocket engineer to install a game! The

quickest way to stop the home user segment from growing is to force-install Linux on every

home PC and compel users to install and play games on it.

If you’re a technical person, very

well-versed with Linux, and wish to goof off some time without needing to boot into

Windows, go ahead and install and play games on Linux. You might even get more kicks out

of the install process than the game itself. If you’re a normal user who simply wants

to play the latest games for some fun, stick to Windows. At least till Linux reaches

there…

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