hexen & Quake don't work, why?

I installed both of these games but when I click on them, nothing happens. at all…

Did you install your graphics card driver?

how can I check? I know that sounds incredibly stupid but I am very green (no pun intended) with linux.

Hi. Run them from a terminal. That way, any errors will be output to the screen. I’m guessing that you may have just made a newbie mistake. You can check that your 3d is working with glxinfo | grep direct, which should tell you that direct rendering = yes. glxgears will also let you know. Your not trying to use exe’s I hope, or if you are, are you running them through wine? Also, are these games really important to you? They are both proprietary, as far as I know, and a bit old. If you are just using them because you don’t know about the many free and open first person shooters that linux has, then I’d suggest adding the packman repository and searching for first person shooter and fps and FPS. Watch out for things like this…

NOTE: Hexen II source, and the Hammer of Thyrion source port, are free but the game itself is not: You must have an original copy of the game released by Raven Software and Activision. If you don’t, then download the hexen2demo package and use the hexen2-launcher and add the path /usr/share/games/hexen2demo to play the demo.

Which might be the problem that you are looking at. Personally, those old FPS’s just don’t do it for me anymore. Try sauerbraten, which uses the new cube 3d engine. Tonnes of fun, though the ai still needs some work. Tremulous is also lots of fun. In fact, there are lots of great games that are free and open for linux. Check them all out, assuming your 3d is working. If not, let us know, and we’ll get that sorted out for you the best we can. Good luck.

Mostly this is because your graphic card (driver) is not sufficient to play the game