Linux Gamers are reporting on wineHQ that games that ran fine under 11.4 are no longer work after upgrade to 12.1.
I did a new install as I was changing major filesystem layouts and encountered the same issue. The retail DVD is the first version with a GNOME shell that did not just crash hard on my hardware.
However, for me, games that worked on wine 1.3.30 and 1.3.33 under 11.4 no longer worked at all on 12.1.
I tested steam, Starcraft 2, Warcraft III, Eve Online all in wine. I also tested some of my native Linux games like Aquaria, Dwarf Fortress and the Unigine Demos.
The root cause of my failures is that I have nVidia GeForce GTX 460 video cards and the nouveau driver ‘supports’ them for GNOME 3 but supports little else. This driver needed for GNOME 3 crashes wine and many 3D OpenGL applications on my desktop. (nouveau also cannot handle the two HDMI monitors I have, but that’s a separate issue.)
Installing the nVidia proprietary driver from the nVidia repository fixes support for wine games, but breaks GNOME 3 and some of the other desktops. (It also restores partial multi-monitor support through the TwinView proprietary extension.)
I intend to raise this as a bug, but wanted to warn gamers that you may have to choose between a fully working desktop environment in openSUSE 12.1 and playing wine games.
The wine games are receiving garbage reviews on wineHQ. Users of other distros are starting object to these ratings. They call out openSUSE and it’s users as the problem. I’ve always sold SuSE as a good distro to game on. This is terrible publicity for openSUSE.
How am I to recommend my favorite distro in it’s current state?
As it is I have to warn people. In my experience from 6 onward, 11.3 was a really high point (at least for eye candy) and 11.4 has had some problems for me. (Dual monitors and no compiz + broken windows for handling wine was a PITA but I finally got a working system.) All I’ve seen from 12.1 is trouble for Linux Gamers.
waveclaw, there are several issues at play here and I would highly recommend to anyone that has a fully working system using openSUSE 11.4 consider waiting for a while before doing an upgrade or clean install where you are trying such things as playing Windows games under wine and other such configurations. As far as I can tell, the developers got little input on these issues during testing and had much more concern on the operation of included applications. The problem outline as I see is:
openSUSE 12.1 is using the most recent kernel 3.1 which is still the most recent stable kernel released and way above the 2.6.37 that came with openSUSE 11.4
GNOME 3.2 is also very new with all sorts of kinks in its setup though again, if you stick with its basics, it seems to work fine.
openSUSE 12.1 came with the new high speed parallel startup package called systemd which can stop some startup scripts from working.
And did I mention openSUSE 12.1 is really new here?
While I have loaded openSUSE 12.1 on a couple of machines and spent all Thanksgiving going through it with a fine tooth comb, it will be weeks in my opinion before many of the kinks you mention get worked out. And a lot of that working out will need to be done by others like at wine HQ to work with the latest kernel. Further, openSUSE has and always will be set on using bleeding edge software, staying just under the point of killing too many users. Having the bleeding edge on software means that things that used to work may not work anymore until those apps we love so dear can catch up. So, I want all software to work for everyone, but don’t load openSUSE 12.1 on your only system that if down, puts you and your well being in jeopardy. Now, none the less, we do want to hear your experience with openSUSE 12.1 and further we want you to file those bug reports, today! And we are not responsible for what some users that don’t properly understand the issues might be doing with the very latest hot off the presses openSUSE 12.1.
I spend a lot of time on the forum at WineHQ, and I haven’t noticed any rash of complaints about Wine not working in openSUSE 12.1. What I have seen lately are a lot of people complaining that Wine is broken in Ubuntu 11.11. Nothing unusual there; we hear the same thing from Ubuntu users every April and November.
The truth is, every time any distro rolls out a new version, it will “break” Wine for some users. OpenSUSE 11.3 shipped with the kernel bug that killed World of Warcraft; that sorted itself out eventually, as I’m sure any current problems will, too. As for the nouveau driver, it has never been recommended for Wine.
On 11/29/2011 12:46 AM, waveclaw wrote:
>
> I tested steam, Starcraft 2, Warcraft III, Eve Online all in wine. . .
> I also tested some of my native Linux games like Aquaria, Dwarf Fortress
> and the Unigine Demos.
and when you tested those games (and all the others now being whined
about by those “Linux Gamers” on WINE HQ) in openSUSE 12.1 Milestone 1
(released May 31 2011), how did they run? And, if they didn’t run
wonderfully then you filed a bug with bugzilla, right?
and, then after the devs worked on those bugs, how did the games run in
openSUSE 12.1 Milestone 2 (released Jun 22 2011)?
and, Milestone 3 (released Jul 14 2011)?
and, Milestone 5 (released Sep 01 2011)? [four was skipped]
and, Beta 5 (released Oct 01 2011)?
and, Release Candidate 1 (released Oct 21 2011)?
and, Release Candidate 2 (released Nov 03 2011)?
see! if no “Linux Gamer” test games during the development phase then
there is little wonder they don’t work.
“testing” after public release might be wonderful if you are paying big
money for your operating system which is intended by its maker to be a
good game system, but here if you don’t test, you have no basis to moan
and groan now!!!
–
DD
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobiles” of operating systems!
Only way to test is is to do it, sadly. Someone has to.
Discovers so far include:
From the Ubuntu community you can use a /lib/mkinitrd/script/boot-btrfs.sh to include a force run of ‘btrfs device scan’ so that you can do things like have multi-part btrfs filesystems mounts on boot. A btrfs RAID10 root filesystem becomes possible with this change.
Replacing the nouveau driver prevents GNOME and LXDE from properly working. As nouveau cannot handle both HDMI monitors, this is not a loss. Multiple Desktop support has been reported to fail since 11.1.
Using the nVidia driver, the kwin can be switched from OpenGL to Xrander to regain all the ‘pretty plasma’ features. Only metacity and kwin appear to be able to manage multiple desktops involving Twinview. The background still will not change on monitors not on :0.0. Video games from Starcraft II and Eve Online in wine to Trine and Aquaria and DwarfFortress play well. (Currently tracing a minor issue related to Alsa and pulse.)
Either way, Desktop Effects are unavailable. But those stopped working in 11.4 when compiz multiple monitor support broke. This is my favorite bug, 679268. Sadly I can only add a ‘me too’ as I have not additional information different from that posted.
There actually are a number of long standing bugs and regressions in the Bugzilla. Most of these appear to just trail off in the comments and have never been reworked. To put it bluntly, they don’t seem to have had much concern on the operation of included applications, either.
In reply to your outline:
kernel 3.1 is working fine with the binary blob. This appears to be limited to the single driver.
GNOME 3.2 and GNOME shell has normally never worked for me at all. They crashed or hung the systems they were tested on in an unsuable state wtih no meaningful information recovered. RC1, which I had time to test just before release thanks to a long holiday, was the first version that actually ran.
I have not had issues with systemd and am familiar with it from Redhat’s documentation as it will be the run control system for RHEL6.1.
Code is code, it is either tested or not. Written today or 50 years ago does not matter.
Only applies if the software is actually catching up. You can walk of the cliff all you want, but others may not follow. (Looking at the disaster of PulseAudio here.) Some of the non-trivial bugs as far back as 11.1 are still present. Some are still marked as NEW and date back years. I think the blood is done drying on those wounds.
I didn’t, someone else did and the fallout was rather colorful. While dual booting on prior systems was possible, the current software RAID test and limited size on my testing system means I prefer to do a complete system clone to a backup media and then wipe/install.
Thank you for your encouragement, unlike DenverD who apparently could not read the first line of my message and simply trolled me. To him I only have to ask: what does anything you are saying have to do with the topic? I am so glad you know my schedule so well that you can assume I’d love to spend all month writing bug reports here.
To dimesio,
The garbage reports and fallout in the forums are on the ‘7.1 - Incarna’ release page. These colorful message by Robin attached to his test data and the following forums discussion were rather unpleasant.
I have submitted a gold report based on my work with the nVidia driver and the criteria for the Crucible expansion with workaround information on the application. However, the first step remains to rip out the shipped driver and replace with the binary blob. Thus you cannot use openSUSE 12.1 with the GNOME 3 or LXDE desktops and wine based games at this time.
On 12/01/2011 08:46 AM, waveclaw wrote:
> unlike DenverD who apparently could
> not read the first line of my message and simply trolled me. To him I
> only have to ask: what does anything you are saying have to do with the
> topic? I am so glad you know my schedule so well that you can assume
> I’d love to spend all month writing bug reports here.
i looked back and read what i wrote–and now realize instead of using
the word ‘you’ five times–which was far too many, and which you took
personal, sorry sorry that was not my intention–i should have in each
instance used “Linux Gamers” (which i did manage to use only twice)…
the crux of the problem which you reported (thanks) is that if all the
linux gamers are too busy to log bugs then they shouldn’t be surprised
that this operating system is not a good game system…
bringing the message back from WINE HQ to this forum doesn’t really do a
lot of good unless the “Linux Gamers” here get the message that they must log bugs (no matter how busy they are, no matter how much it
appears they never get fixed or just keep getting pushed back)
because if the devs don’t get LOTS of bugs reports the “Linux Gamers”
shouldn’t be surprised if Redmond continues to have a much better GAME
System…
now, in my book what i say now and what i intended to say before is
not trolling–it is just fact…
fact aimed not at the individual “you” but rather the collective “they”
who are Linux Gamers…it is they who must do the reporting work…and i
apologize for so carelessly using the word “you” instead of the
collective pronoun.
–
DD
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobiles” of operating systems!
On 2011-12-01 14:45, DenverD wrote:
> the crux of the problem which you reported (thanks) is that if all the
> linux gamers are too busy to log bugs then they shouldn’t be surprised
> that this operating system is not a good game system…
>
> bringing the message back from WINE HQ to this forum doesn’t really do a
> lot of good unless the “Linux Gamers” here get the message that they
> must log bugs (no matter how busy they are, no matter how much it appears
> they never get fixed or just keep getting pushed back)
It is absolutely true.
Here we are just users helping other users. We have no say in bug
repairing. If you want a problem like that, a bug, solved, you have to
report it in Bugzilla. And we can not do it for you.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
That’s not the user’s forum; that’s just the comments section of one AppDB page. It’s not the best place to ask for help at WineHQ. But looking at that page, what I see is one garbage test report from one openSUSE user who freely admitted in the report that he didn’t know what he was doing. In the comments, I see a thread where the app maintainer tries to help that user, one jerk making a couple of snide remarks, plus one long post from someone else (you?) describing problems with the nouveau driver. Nowhere do I see hordes of openSUSE 12.1 users reporting problems with Wine. And for the record, I’m one of the AppDB admins, and I process test reports for unmaintained apps daily. So far I have seen no pattern to indicate that Wine has any particular problems in openSUSE 12.1.
However, the first step remains to rip out the shipped driver and replace with the binary blob.
Of course. Open source graphics drivers (not just nouveau) are inadequate for games in Wine. That’s true of every distro, not just openSUSE. If you search WineHQ Forums View Forum - Wine Users, you’ll see plenty of threads where users of many different distros have been firmly told just that.