Linux gaming?

[nbradley88]

aight so ive heard a lot of talk about this getting bigger and bigger... but can anyone point me to the best distro for games with wine and junk? ive already messed wit red hat, slackware, knoppix clustering, fedora core, but im just wondering if any1 wants to throw their 2 cents in :)

[sjohnson]

Debian (any flavor) plus cedega.

Actually, any current Linux distribution that does Desktop only (no apache, exim, etc stuff) supports nVidia or ATI drivers, with WINE (if you have the time) or cedega (if you have more money than time) will work well. Same as windows, you want a lean machine to game on.

[smokey]

I've always loved a stirring game of Adventure... /joke

My desktop machine is just a 2500+ running Slack 9.1. I mostly play RTCW:ET, UT2k4 and similar. Though, I do enjoy SimCity and Railroad Tycoon. ;) Pretty much any distro will work - the 'best' distro for any given situation is usually the one the user is most familiar with. Or, in a similar vein, the system from the _family_ the user is most familiar with (more SysV- or more BSD-oriented). The thing to remember with gaming on Linux (I abhore WINE and WineX, so exclude them) is, find a card you like, _make_ the drivers work (heehee, see your local *nix guru for that secret formula), find a distro you like and play! If you have trouble, post here, and I or someone with similar experience will help. It really isn't as hard as the Win32 types make it sound.... :P

Apologies for my longwindedness.

[sjohnson]

WRT "_make_ the drivers work" I've found that the latest SimplyMEPIS 3.3 Test distribution makes it simple to add nVidia or ATI drivers. One source of SM 3.3 is http://www.mrbass.org/linux/mepis/

I don't abhor WINE/cedega, just view them as a necessary evil in playing games for which no native Linux version exists. Using WINE of any flavor can be a real pain, but the loki folks try to make it easier, http://www.liflg.org/

[nbradley88]

thnx guys ill have to try it out... tell ya what i come up with... ive done some before and successfully run steam and got a server up... but i didnt know bout the gaming side of things... oh yeah... lol ive got win2k up right now ... and everything seems to be in like hyper active mode... like the bannana's on this forum are dancing a million miles an hour... i have a dual xeon system and a nvidia quadro4 xgl 980... if that makes any diff... oh yeah and what distro would best compliment my xeon system ... windoze or linux? :confused: and which type

[smokey]

If you're going to run Dually on Linux, no matter the distro (I would go Slack, but Debian and Gentoo are excellent, as well), hook yourself up with a 2.6.x kernel and the Con Kolivas patchset. Remember that with Linux, performance is all a matter of configuration - with Win32, you're stuck with what you get in the box. Enjoy. :toast:

[binkgle]

what exactly is wine? i'm a noob and keep hearing "wine this" and "wine that." is it a windows emulator? how much of a perf difference is there between it and native windows?

[sjohnson]

From http://www.winehq.com/
Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

I'd guess at a performance difference of about 10%. It's hard to say, I'm running Linux on a pretty fast system, though not bleeding edge. FPS games play at nearly the same speed using WINE as native for me. The folks that maintain the pay-for versions CrossOver Office and Cedega, http://www.codeweavers.com/ and http://www.transgaming.com/ provide optimized code that approaches native Windows performance.

[masterofpuppets]

Hmm, does anyone know where I can find some X drivers for FreeBSD that support 3D on Radeon 9800/X800?