Has main stream linux abandoned running games?

English Games
1

:’(Have open Suse and Suse abandoned running games too?

After some 5 or more years of my avoidance and negligence of learning new technologies such as Dual Core Processing, EIDE, IDE, SATA, SAS, UHID and USB I have finally got lid of my fear and am able to accept my first Dell Dimension. From my day one with PC back in 1986, I had always chosen to build my own system and was very hard to accept the system build by someone else. But building own system based on my goal and ideal got so expensive.

One other reason I had avoided main stream system was my SCSI only attitude. One time, I have had as many as 4 or 5 SCSI channels to support SCSI devices of different speed, I used printer, scanner, disk, tape, CD, DVD and like all on SCSI and it was necessary. I have always been afraid to give up SCSI but support of SCSI got so scarce and many manufacturers have stopped producing anything based on conventional SCSI technology (68 or 80 or 50 pin). SCSI command set survives on serialised SCSI, serialised IDE, fibre channel, fire wire1394 and on some UHID device but physical form of SCSI is practically dead out there except here at my home.

Over the holidays, I have had some time to explore what open Suse can offer in games and multimedia field.

I have not had time to explore multimedia but trying out games on open Suse were totally disaster. Once upon a time, Suse was one of greatest platform for experimenting games, different window managers and multimedia but now at least half of games I have recently tried caused segmentation fault even after having met all the library requirements.

First of all Suse 11 failed library dependency on any attempt to install sizable games (anything over 5MB in package size) such as Thunder and Lightning, Flight Gear and the like. After lengthy downloads of required libraries and drivers in RPM format, more than half of them refused to run. Problem includes the Thunder and Lightning package compiled on Suse 10.3 by Toni Graffy from the one of well accepted RPM repositories. What a disappointment! Only programmes that installed clean on open Suse 11 were celestia, stellarium and xephem after I made some modification to add simultaneous motif compatibility of libXm.so.1, Xm.so.1.2, Xm.so.2 and Xm.so.3. I tested all motif dynamic dependency using ldd with binaries in question and subsequent application test. They are correctly linked but both OpenGL and mesa support were much slower than debian and fedora. Compatibility is more important than security. I do not use any security feature in any OS. If you maintain weekly updated images of all your partitions, you can safely run everything as root. That restores everything perfectly than any virus recovery procedure. At this time, for linux and unix OS, you have to give exactly same numbers of cylinder counts per partition cloning for extreme safety unlike that of Norton Ghost32 on PCFS which can compress image by 30 - 40 percent on the fly. In unix, imaging may not be a right word, perhaps block by block and inode by inode cloning may be more appropriate for backup safer than dd. I also use TkZip for day to day differentials. If you do not like permission and owner system imposed by unix and disable them all, careful double backup is necessary.

Have open Suse and Suse abandoned running games? I want to know because it wastes my time going after something no longer exist in open Suse and Novel Suse distribution policies. There are practically no games that Suse can install and run out of box that was possible up to Suse 9.x even to 10.3 with a few shared library addition. Downloading and supplementing with a few shared libraries are quite acceptable but over a dozen of libraries for setting up every viable 3D game that exist out there is too much for me.
Is there an established Suse library repository like packages.debian.org or fedora.org where you can reference the compatibilities with games?

Also open Suse lacks simple thing as mouse double click timing control. All previous KDE did have such control (in look and feel control) to accommodate someone with arthritis like myself who badly need such feature. Such feature is much more important than app armour or cryptic directories which I would never use.

Open SUSE is visually very appearing but many things are missing what we used to have on Suse distributions. Is it the distribution and development community wide goal to shift the platform audiences to business users only?

Open Suse seem to have its srength in:

Visualy appearing and carefully layed out applets
Advanced and marked reliabiliry in udev support (USB support)
Marked hardware compatibility – video card, sound card, scsi card, printer, mouse, keyboard, SATA, CD, DVD and all
High disk to disk and CD/DVD to disk data transfer rate
No legendary KDE problem such as dcop socket ghosting
Over all efficient for business use

pinecloud,

2

Well haven’t played a game for quite a while but the prey demo ran fine.
Didn’t have problems with World of Warcraft under wine either.

There is also some games by default in the repositories, if that isn’t enough for you… take a look at openSUSE.org/Games, repositories listed there for openSUSE 10.3 till 11.1+ dedicated to games.

both OpenGL and mesa support were much slower than debian and fedora

Did you install the videocard drivers for openSUSE? This would give a huge performance increase if you have an ATI or NVIDIA videocard.
If you’re using an ATI card that would explain the difference as they’re awfully slow in getting an 11.1 repository up and the only way to get them installed is by compiling the drivers yourself.

Compatibility is more important than security. I do not use any security feature in any OS. If you maintain weekly updated images of all your partitions, you can safely run everything as root. That restores everything perfectly than any virus recovery procedure
Not running as root is not adviced just for your own personal safety but also to make sure your computer doesn’t abuse your net connection for all kinds of malicious activities, for example you might not notice yourself but your computer could be used to send spam or perhabs it’s taking part in DOS attacks?

Also open Suse lacks simple thing as mouse double click timing control. All previous KDE did have such control (in look and feel control) to accommodate someone with arthritis like myself who badly need such feature
Assume you are running KDE 4.x now then?
If so simply click in sequence.

  1. Launcher icon (bottom left ‘start’ button)]Configure Desktop (under favorites by default).]General tab ]Keyboard & Mouse (last row in the window)]Mouse (left side)*]Advanced (tab)
    Now you find a form field labeled ‘Doubleclick interval’ which by default is set at 400ms, if you have problems with it I suggest trying a higher value.

PS:
Next time you might want to make a post the moment you run into a problem as it seems you got frustrated over a lot of things dumping them into one big ‘combination’ post.
Peoples attention spans nowadays are short and a lot of people will click back the back button in their browser once they see so much text.
Making a thread for each problem is more likely to get your questions answered.

3

If your PC is connected to the internet, then not so (as Axeia pointed out). Also, even if not connected to the internet, recovering from a backup takes time, … far more time than it does to occassionally type the root password.

A complete hard drive cloning operation is OS independent, and will back up a dual boot setup. Pick the cloning application that is best for you. I used dd the other day on a PC with a triboot (winXP, winME, openSUSE), and it worked fine and it was fast (with the correct parameters included in the command).

This IMHO is bad advice. I recommend all new users to ignore this.

I don’t play games on openSUSE (other than chess, and setting up solitaire for my mother) so I can’t provide recommendations for getting games to run under Linux. Many users retain a dual boot (Linux/Windows) so as to play the games they want on their PC.

openSUSE-11.1 still comes with KDE-3.5.10, which is possibly the best KDE release to date.

I don’t think so. From my perspective, KDE-3.5.10 on openSUSE-11.1 is the best to date.

Again, reference your desire for games, give some thought to running a dual boot operation with openSUSE, and with the OS of your choice that runs games to the extent that you wish.

4

pinecloud wrote:
> [snip] Compatibility is more
> important than security. I do not use any security feature in any
> OS. If you maintain weekly updated images of all your partitions, you
> can safely run everything as root. That restores everything perfectly
> than any virus recovery procedure. At this time, for linux and unix OS,
> you have to give exactly same numbers of cylinder counts per partition
> cloning for extreme safety unlike that of Norton Ghost32 on PCFS which
> can compress image by 30 - 40 percent on the fly. In unix, imaging may
> not be a right word, perhaps block by block and inode by inode cloning
> may be more appropriate for backup safer than dd. I also use TkZip for
> day to day differentials. If you do not like permission and owner
> system imposed by unix and disable them all, careful double backup is
> necessary.
>
If you are running as root then I would not trust any back up you have
ever made during any week that your system has been up except for your
very first backup that you made immediately after install of the system.
If you didn’t do that then not 1 backup can be trusted.

> Have open Suse and Suse abandoned running games? I want to know
> because it wastes my time going after something no longer exist in open
> Suse and Novel Suse distribution policies. There are practically no
> games that Suse can install and run out of box that was possible up to
> Suse 9.x even to 10.3 with a few shared library addition.
> Downloading and supplementing with a few shared libraries are quite
> acceptable but over a dozen of libraries for setting up every viable 3D
> game that exist out there is too much for me.
> IS THERE AN ESTABLISHED SUSE LIBRARY REPOSITORY LIKE
> PACKAGES.DEBIAN.ORG OR FEDORA.ORG WHERE YOU CAN REFERENCE THE
> COMPATIBILITIES WITH GAMES?
>
Name some that you could in 9.x - 10.x that you can’t know so we can
verify if it is something that can be replicated or something that might
be specific to your system.

5

[QUOTE=Axeia;1927796]Well haven’t played a game for quite a while but the prey demo ran fine.
Didn’t have problems with World of Warcraft under wine either.

There is also some games by default in the repositories, if that isn’t enough for you… take a look at openSUSE.org/Games, repositories listed there for openSUSE 10.3 till 11.1+ dedicated to games.

Did you install the videocard drivers for openSUSE? This would give a huge performance increase if you have an ATI or NVIDIA videocard.

6

>There is also some games by default in the repositories, if that isn’t enough for you… take a look at >http://en.opensuse.org/Games]openSUSE.org/Games, repositories listed there for openSUSE 10.3 till 11.1+ dedicated to games.

>Did you install the videocard drivers for openSUSE? This would give a huge performance increase if you have an ATI or NVIDIA >videocard.

Hello,

:(I consider your suggestions to be of hitting quite cause of problem if not because of Dual Core Processor. This morning I have discovered that there are in fact a handful Windows98 main stream programmes refuse to run on dual core and many of them are 3D games written by nvidia themself or their partner like Crytek. I have 11 OS in this Dell system and I have tried on Windows98, XP and NT.

I have collected RPM files to satisfy dependencies from varied sources including mit.edu, sunsite, rpmfind.net and sourceforge as longer as version number are of close proximities and c libraries and compiler have agreed since I was not aware of the existence of openSuse’s own repository. This method did work for Unice and most of Linice for window managers, file utilities, tape tools, spreadsheet math programmes and like even today, but could be of awfully wrong choice for games since games have no common Xlib interface limiting factor such as XmBind inherited from pure Unix.

I tried to learn Linux but my thoughts are still of much old fashioned and fail to think of modern Linux way. Stellarium, celestia and xephem only happen to work since they closely adhere to Unix structure.

:OI was not aware of separate GeForce driver except from three sources: nvidia download and x.org or xf86.org. Years ago, we did have two more additional choices: metrolink.com and xig.com if we are willing to pay for them. I have tried nvidia driver from nvidia.com but they did not always put their files in right places and I have given up using them. **Where else can I download the video card driver that you mention of?
**
:|At the beginning of new century, we did not have much choice of X-server except download source files and locally compile on your machine. Source files did work for SCO, Solaris and even for OS/2 on my single processor machines but I have had much problem with modern Linice in general such as Caldera SCO Open Linux. When you installed xf86 file set to overwrite X-server core and driver of those did not support nvidia GeForce, result was often disaster. You loose X font path, c-locale and like. If you were lucky, you may be able to correct very basic window managers like mwm and build menu by hand using vi, then once you put an xfront of your text editor of choice in mwmrc, then you keep adding exec <programme path and name>.

Using fvwm2, you would be able to add many window behaviours and sound effect much more than 2 that was limited on mwm or dtwm. The idea and technique was again of Unix. Adding each sound effect on mwm required recompilation of mwm to include name of script and writing of additional external scripts to be called such as sessionstart or sessionexit. They included ‘exec /usr/bin/play <xstart.au>’ as such. You practically write everything by hand and is still valid on CDE based desktop today in Unix when you choose CDE1.2.x or 1.6.x. I am so scared to even think about how those external script are called in KDE imagining about the magnitude of sophistication involved to produce modern effects.

:shame:I am just a photographer/graphic illustrator by profession with minimal college education only obtaining a BSEE in Japan for entirely different subject matter quite far and crude from BSCS Hon. English is my forth language and perhaps you have difficulties understanding my broken English. Thank you for very valuable suggestions regarding driver and specific repository of Suse resources

pinecloud,

7

I think the majority of your problems are indeed caused by trying to do things the ‘old-fashioned’ way.
As linux has evolved things moved around and it sounds like most things you are trying to do became obsolete.

I’d say with 99% certainty that your hardware itself is not to blame, I have a core 2 duo combined with a NVIDIA videocard myself and it runs anything I throw at it. (On both Vista and openSUSE 11.1). Even my quad-core desktop has no problems with anything. (WinXP and openSUSE 11.1).
In the other thread you posted I’ve posted a reaction with how to install the NVIDIA drivers, so let’s try to keep that that discussion there.

Where else can I download the video card driver that you mention of?
They can be found on NVIDIA - Driversite (Japanese) but I would HIGHLY recommend not to download them directly and attempting a manual install. I have a feeling that you might run into problems again as your knowledge seems a bit behind on times, instead use the way I described in the other thread.
If you do want to attempt a manual install please do so by following the steps described on: NVIDIA - openSUSE. (Just print them out or have them at hand on a secondary computer)

many of them are 3D games written by nvidia themself
NVIDIA doesn’t actually write any games. Their logo is just often in the startup screen of games because they have been optimised to run on NVIDIA videocards.

I am just a photographer/graphic illustrator by profession with minimal college education only obtaining a BSEE in Japan for entirely different subject matter quite far and crude from BSCS Hon. English is my forth language and perhaps you have difficulties understanding my broken English.
Well I’m a bit of anime addict and if the english in anime sketches a somewhat realistic situation then I must say that I am impressed at your knowledge of the english language! (I’m only bilingual, unless you count my very basic Japanese / German knowledge)
Just that like I said before… you’ve a tendency to post too much at once :wink:

Now as a final word of advice, don’t try to install anything manually without having the following things first:

[ol][li]Enable the packman repository (have to do this only once)[list=1][]Go to YaST software management[]Menu: Configuration[]Menu option: Repositories[]Add (button)[]From the list select community repositories[]Next (button)[]Mark the Packman Repository option[]Ok (button)[]Ok (button)[/ol]Those steps enable the packman repository that contains 90% of the software most people want.[/li]
[li]Everytime you want to install a program[ol][]Go to YaST software management first and search for what you’d like to install there.[/li](Searching for ‘quake’ for example returns the quake 3 demo (3D shooter))[li]Search for it on: webpin which returns a bunch of one click installers[*]Do what you wanted to do in the first place, compiling the program yourself. [/li]And if you run into problems ask for help on this forum :)[/ol][/list]
My apologies if any of this sounds like down-talking to you, it wasn’t my intention.

8

Hi, Welcome back to linux, and please don’t get discouraged. I’ve got about 150 games running perfectly on my PC, so linux is definately not the problem. Some things have just changed while you were gone. With your experience, you’ll catch up in no time.

I noticed your comment about having arthritis, and I thought that I would mention than Linux now has quite good support for voice activation and also mouse gesture control. You might want to have a look at those. They might help minimize your pain while you are computing. Also, your experience might predate bash, so you might not know about command completion, which really cuts down on typing. If so, run “man bash” to get caught up on this.

Now, some game suggestions for you…

Tremulous, Open Arena, Alien Arena, Oolite, Sauerbraten, Smoking Guns, Trackballs, Pushover, Silvertree, BZFlag, Search and Rescue, and tonnes more. Some games listed in the repositories, such as Quake III Arena, require the original data files, so watch out for that, and have fun.

Finally, you might want to rip your personal data off and do a clean install. It sounds like you might have made a bit of a mess. When you do reinstall, stay in the repositories when possible, it makes installs much easier. Don’t always run as root, thats a very bad habit. You can jump into root when you need to just by typing the su command and entering roots password, so there really is no need to run as root all the time. Run exit to get out of running as root. Oh, btw, your english is fine. I understood you perfectly.