On Fri, 2004-01-02 at 13:14, tar.bz2 wrote: > hello > > I would like to know the best linux distribution to use games, since using > wine on debian and redhat9 was not very much convincing > > is there sthing new on yarrow ? > because really games are the only tiny thing that obliges one to keep a > "windows working on machine" That is a pretty broad brush. Here is my experience... Distribution is not as important as video driver and video card. The faster, the better. You also will probably want the "proprietary" drivers. (Useful hardware OpenGL support is only available through those drivers, in my experience.) So far, the only brands that seem to be fast for 3D are nVIDIA, ATI and maybe Matrox. (Matrox has very fast 2D support, even with the included XFree86 drivers.) A fast system and a fast processor are also a help. This is where distribution matters. My dual Athlon runs MUCH better under Yarrow than it did under Redhat 9. (Not certain why, other than a massive IRQ problem.) Current kernels are a help and a hindrance. (Some programs have problems with the new thread library. The release notes have info on how to work around it.) Yarrow also has XFree86 4.3, which has some improvements. (I would have said the "newest" version, but I know of newer code via Keith Packard and the freedesktop.org cvs tree.) The next thing is what kind of games you want to run. There are games for Linux natively and there are games under Wine. There is also the type of game. First person shooter? Adventure game? Real time sim? There are a number of games that have Linux ports. Unreal Tournament 2003, Neverwinter Nights, Descent 3, Quake III, and Postal 2 are a few with native Linux ports. There are more. http://www.linuxgames.com/ and http://www.tuxgames.com/ are two good sources for info and/or games. For Wine support, www.transgaming.com has a version of Wine tweaked for various games. I have used an older version and it worked fairly well. I have not tried the latest version and I don't know what games you want to play, so your results may vary. The problem with getting Windows games to run under Linux is that you have to create an emulator that supports various versions, libraries, and other cruft and is totally bug compliant with Windows. Not an easy task due to the lack of accurate documentation and the various hacks programmers have used to make Windows work. (Not to mention the problems of copy protection support.) Transgaming has a list of what works and how well at http://www.transgaming.com/dogamesearch.php?order=working&showall=1 There are also a number of other emulators for older hardware. Here you get into a gray area of copyright. (How can you buy something that is no longer sold?) I won't get into that here. Some of these have been supported by the original vendors and/or programmers. ScummVM is such a system. It emulates certain Lucas Arts games such as "Sam and Max Hit the Road" or the "Monkey Island" series. (My daughter loves the Sam and Max game and runs it under Linux.) You have to have the original game in most cases though. ("Beneath a Steel Sky" is legally available for download.) http://www.scummvm.org/ for more info. XMAME is the most well known of the emulators. http://x.mame.net/ has more info on that. It supports thousands of old arcade games. It is also that gray part of copyright I was talking about.) Then there are the varios games that people have written specifically for Linux. http://www.linuxgames.com and http://www.freshmeat.net/ will give you many pointers to some cool (and not so cool) games. Any specifics you want to know? -- Alan <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
