Gaming on Linux [howtos / hints and tips]

[volsung]

GOG has the first Trine, just in case you are still interested. It is fun and, as I said, visually attractive. Imagine Castlevania in a shiny fairytale world (instead of vampires and monsters), with physics based puzzles and A LOT easier.

Torchlight is a dungeon-crawler action "RPG", i.e. no role playing at all. It is fun though, I played it as an isometric shooter and it was very entertaining. The story is terribly lame though. Torchlight 2 is pretty much what Diablo 3 should have been. I am not a fan of these games, they are NOT role-playing games, but honestly, Torchlight *is* a fun isometric action game with customizable talents/equipment

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

No big deal though. Just wanted to have a quick look at the game, but then had to rant since they were very much like Shite in how they approached it with container application and crap like that.

Feel free to direct your criticism directly to Desura. They are known to be critical of DRM and this can be an oversight, since as you said demos aren't a common thing: http://www.desura.com/contact

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

I just checked. You can download demo without registering, it's just not the most apparent option. Here is the flow:

1. http://www.desura.com/games/trine
2. From there open Install Game (http://www.desura.com/games/trine/play)
3. Choose Trine Demo "Install Now" there.
4. Then choose "view standalone downloads" (that's where it branches off to a separate workflow).
5. Choose Trine Demo "Download". (Demo is Windows only though).

That's it.

 

[Pangaea666]

Thanks, that did the trick. Tried it out and it was quite fun. Shame I sucked at it Once that fighter-dude died, we were done for with skeletons coming at us from every angle.

 

[volsung]

Glad you like it, Pangaea.

I actually prefer to play with Zoya the thief all the time except when I really need some brute strength or the occasional magic. Trine 2 does a better job at integrating everyone's talents.

Oh and by the way I got an invite for the Steam Linux Beta. Will try installing it in my Debian Testing amd64 and report.

 

[freakie1one]

Glad you like it, Pangaea.

I actually prefer to play with Zoya the thief all the time except when I really need some brute strength or the occasional magic. Trine 2 does a better job at integrating everyone's talents.

Oh and by the way I got an invite for the Steam Linux Beta. Will try installing it in my Debian Testing amd64 and report.

That's great news, Volsung! I'm curious to know how much progress they've made and how many titles they will have available.

 

[tommy5761]

So which in your opinion is the best Linux for gaming or are all of them about the same . The last Linux I used was Ubuntu 10.4 and was a real chore to get games to run on it and do any or all still use the grub bootloader .

 

[freakie1one]

So which in your opinion is the best Linux for gaming or are all of them about the same . The last Linux I used was Ubuntu 10.4 and was a real chore to get games to run on it and do any or all still use the grub bootloader .

Not sure which one would be considered best for gaming but yes, most versions of Linux still use a version of grub for the boot loader. However, if you plan on dual booting you can simply add an entry for Linux in the Windows boot loader and skip the grub boot loader installation.

EDIT: also I'm not sure how familiar you are with Linux but if a game is originally designed around the DirectX API (designed for Windows) and then later ported to use the OpenGL API (can be used natively on Windows, OS X or Linux), sometimes the devs run into performance issues in the transition. This is currently what some people are reporting with The Witcher 2 port for OS X. If a developer plans on creating native builds of a game for all three operating systems it makes sense to start out using OpenGL to avoid these porting issues. Also, were you referring to problems with getting OpenGL games to run or getting DirectX games to run using an emulator like WINE?

 

[tommy5761]

Not sure which one would be considered best for gaming but yes, most versions of Linux still use a version of grub for the boot loader. However, if you plan on dual booting you can simply add an entry for Linux in the Windows boot loader and skip the grub boot loader installation.

EDIT: also I'm not sure how familiar you are with Linux but if a game is originally designed around the DirectX API (designed for Windows) and then later ported to use the OpenGL API (can be used natively on Windows, OS X or Linux), sometimes the devs run into performance issues in the transition. This is currently what some people are reporting with The Witcher 2 port for OS X. If a developer plans on creating native builds of a game for all three operating systems it makes sense to start out using OpenGL to avoid these porting issues. Also, were you referring to problems with getting OpenGL games to run or getting games to run using an emulator like WINE?

With Ubuntu 10.4 I used Wine at the time . I`ve been looking at Linux Mint for a little while now and right now still undecided .

 

[freakie1one]

I've been using Linux Mint 14 for about a month now and I like it Stable, fast, comes with all the basic codecs/programs you need to have an efficient OS. I'm using the Cinnamon desktop environment and it looks nice and is very functional. Though I haven't tried much gaming on it yet so I'm not much help in that regard.

 

[freakie1one]

Here's a screenshot of my desktop so you get an idea what it's like. Note that I use two monitors so this screenshot should be split down the middle:

[media]http://www.abload.de/img/screenshotfrom2012-12too3h.png[/media]

 

[Pangaea666]

"Do not push" What the..?

Linix Mint is the version I used way back too, think it was version 6 or 7. Is it much improved now? I recall there were all kinds of problems, with just basic stuff that I spent WAY too much time looking for fixes for.

Would like to give Linux yet another go, but don't really have the chance now given that I don't have a harddisk where it can be put. The OS disk is only 20 GB, and Windows is taking up all of it. Think I only had 5GB or something like that for Linux. That should still be there, I think, but it really isn't much, and I could REALLY use it for Windows these days.

The one thing I really liked was the degree to which we could make the desktop our own. That's one hell of a system you got there btw. Do you really need that much monitor space? Looks gigantic to me

 

[freakie1one]

Haha, yeah, I have a weird sense of humor. I think they've made literally thousands of improvements/bug fixes from the earlier versions of Linux Mint. However, if you're short on hard drive space I wouldn't recommend it. Hard drives usually run better when you have a percentage of the HD free. Especially if you're talking about Windows which needs free space for the swap file.

I do a lot of multitasking so I use the second monitor quite a bit (on a daily basis). It would be weird for me to switch back to just a single monitor since I've become accustomed to it.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

I'm using current Debian testing x86_64 for gaming (with Nvidia card and drivers). It works fine.
I'm also using Wine from here: http://dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

For some reason this thread doesn't appear in the forum list anymore, so I started a separate one for DosBox related GOG games:
http://en.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?/topic/34653-how-to-run-gog-dosbox-games-on-linux/
May be moderators can figure out what's wrong and merge the two.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

If this is useful to anyone, I just tested the Stacking game from the most recent Humble Bundle. It had some sound stuttering issues (using SDL with my PulseAudio apparently). It's fixable by explicitly forcing SDL to use pure ALSA:

SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa ./Stack.bin.x86

 

[volsung]

So everybody (i.e. Gilrond), I want to update my home Linux and I'm am a little tired of library version issues in Debian Testing. I am considering whether I should simply use Debian Sid (which behaves like a rolling distribution) or Arch Linux, of which I have heard a lot.

Today I tried Arch on a VM, and the installation process was fairly straightforward and without problems. I don't mind the lack of "installer", I used to be a FreeBSD enthusiast In fact, Arch reminded me of my FreeBSD days, with manually configuring XOrg and whatnot.

Now, I am getting used to pacman and systemd scripts (as opposed to Debian's SysV). Is it just me or the pacman repo list is simply huge and ridiculous? From what server is it downloading from? And why do I get such inconsistent bandwidth for each different package?

Anyway, I liked Arch. But I am already familiar with Debian to the point where I can build my own Kernel packages. Is it worth trying Arch? Or just staying with good old Debian?

I do want to have more modern versions of packages and try fun things. So I would be installing the usual Testing but moving the repos to Sid.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

I've heard good things about Arch, but didn't really play around with it.

I personally avoid Sid, since it gets tedious to maintain various messes. Even testing can have those, but possibility of Sid being broken is always higher.

Debian testing was stalled for a long time because of the release freeze (this time it lasted really long - more than 6 months), and surely many users were annoyed. Right now since Wheezy is out, testing is updating massively to catch up. Debian developers made some proposals how to fix this situation: https://lwn.net/Articles/550032/ This can make Debian testing a fully rolling distro. But who knows if they'll actually push this through. Also note, that Sid gets frozen as well during the release, so it isn't much better than testing during those periods.

About systemd - I'm using it on Debian, and while it has some rough edges in rare cases (like not working with my USB hub setup in one case, when keyboard isn't detected after startup), in many configurations it works just fine. To install systemd on Debian see: http://wiki.debian.org/systemd

So in the end, I don't see a reason for me to switch. Debian is great as ever and only getting better. But you can try other distros if you have time for it. Arch is known to be updating fast.

 

[volsung]

I've had lots of issues with testing lately, but it may be attributed to this unusually long freeze you mentioned. Also lots of broken dependecies after I activated multi arch on a non fresh installation.

Some issues I ran into included an especially old libc6, which seems fully up to date on the Testing packages now. A few months ago I had to manually extract and edit the Steam deb package to make it ignore certain library versions, and still had other problems.

My main reason for considering Arch was package versions. But now that Debian Testing is catching up I might stay a while longer.

Any thoughts on multi arch dpkg? I activated it on a fresh install at the lab a few months ago and have not had any issues.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Multi arch works pretty well for me. It's required to use Wine in the current testing (which soon will provide wine-unstable by the way), since Wine is still practically 32 bit. Multiarch is much neater than previous ia32-libs approach.