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1. Video Cards, and
2. Games

When I am at home, give me an XP platform for my Far Cry and Half-Life2. When good games are released for Linux, then I'm onboard man... until then, I'm with Bill.

When I am at home, give me an XP platform for my Far Cry and Half-Life2. When good games are released for Linux, then I'm onboard man... until then, I'm with Bill.

Cedega. http://www.transgaming.org/ http://www.transgaming.com/ Works great for me and no need for Windows at home ... I played Everquest with Cedega up until November of 2004 and then moved on to World Of Warcraft. These games play flawlessly. It's not free for the packaged version but the CVS installs are. I pay $5 a month to support the project and well worth every dollar.

Cedega is a non-free version of wine with directx capabilities. You can browse their supported games here.

Of course not all games now-a-days require wine or cedega in order to run on linux. Games like unreal tournament and doom III include fully functional linux versions.

There are several open source games developed for but not limited to linux. torcs, flightgear, tuxracer are some examples.

Projects like libsdl are making cross-platform game development easier.

Probably the biggest problem you'll encounter is building drivers for your video card. I've heard it argued both ways but as I understand it, both nvidia and ati drivers are ass-pains in linux. Nvidia's drivers are free as in beer, not speech. If you don't really care about free-software principles and philosophy then this is not a problem for you. ATI's drivers I understand to perform less than ideally. If you haven't already purchased your video card, I would encourage you to do extensive research beforehand.

In reality, linux distributions have few differences. Any recent, major distribution should be able to accomodate gameplay. I myself use debian unstable for amd64.

As far as performance, it really boils down to hardware. My advice is to install the linux distribution of your choice. Once you get glxgears to run, give ut2004demo a try, and if you like the way it works, then stick with linux.

As for gaming on Linux, a nice stop-gap measure until true native support is implemented (at the code level) is Cedega (formerly WineX). It currently supports Half Life 2 (for all you cutting-edge gamer types), among many others. They frequently add games to the compatibility list, and they add old favorites as well as bledding-edge titles. Well worth the $15 (but I'll bet you can even leech off P2P if you're that damn cheap). I recently bought Windows CDROMs of Medal of Honor and Battlefield: 1942 and installed them on my Linux box with no problems. I realize those aren't exactly hot off the press games, but to see them install and then actually work was truly beautiful.

Go on, check it out.

Cedega is not Open Source software. We make no bones about this. Some of the code is available under the AFPL, and we release other portions under the X11 and LGPL licenses to share with the ReWind and Wine community occasionally, but our core technology will not be released. You can read more about some of the related issues in my column here.

As far as Final Fantasy XI goes, we have not done any work on it, and I have no idea whether or not it works. We do our work based on our users' votes, so if you're interested, subscribe and vote for it!

Steam and Half Life both work. Half Life 2 has been consistently voted #1 on our lists for several months, but as it's not released yet, we can't really talk about support for it at this time.

Finally, benchmarks can vary significantly depending on the application and the system. Some titles run as fast as they do in Windows, others are slower (some significantly so), and we sometimes get reports of a title running faster under Linux for some users. You can check out our forums for more info on what works well.

Take care,

-Gav

Opensource? Uhh.. done: transgaming.org. No binaries, but this script makes things a snap.

First off i've only been using linux about 6 months. The realization that win98 wasn't going to cut it anymore, combined with a growing hatred for MS drove me there. now i won't buy anything from them, not even if bill himself swore to resurrect my beloved dog smokey from the grave.

Before i made the switch, i did a lot of reading about linux. my real question was "Can it run or replace the software i use most?" Yes it can, for the most part. in the end my biggest concern (foolish, but probably true for more potential linux users than one might think) was gaming. to make a long story short, transgaming gave me the comfort to switch over because (based on their database) i knew i could run my games with them IF i couldn't find another solution.

i used linux 3-4 months and actually played all the games i wanted (read: CounterStrike, and please don't flame me for that) on openGL-enabled installs of regular old WINE. about 3 months ago, i decided to subscribe to wineX because 1) $5/month was worth the time it took me to compile WINE as often as i did. rpm=easy 2) wineX works better than reg. old wine for games. 3) "Wow, this is $15 dollars towards supporting Linux!" so imagine my surprise a few days ago when i started reading this anti-winex stuff. Transgaming was part of the reason i even tried out Linux, and now i find that i could be hurting linux gaming by supporting it?

Obviously, native ports of games are the best option. I don't even like UT but it's on my buy list now only because it runs natively. One solution i have to the 'if you buy it at walmart, it counts as a windows sale' argument is this: when you buy your copy, e-mail ID/Atari/whoever and tell them that you use this game on linux, you appreciate their efforts, and that Ryan Gordon should be king.

others have addressed most of the 10 "P" arguments against Cedega. I find that the strongest and hardest to answer is Prevention. e-mails to ID/Atari are great, but I won't lie, $ makes the strongest argument for the developer.

when i first started with linux, I e-mailed Valve a few times about porting their games. No surprise that they didn't respond, but elsewhere they've stated they have no plans for that. Knowing this, i was very surprised to see this from valve on this forum yesterday. (forums are open to public)

In an e-mail exchange with a branch of Valve Software, I recently recieved this:

We are working very closely with Transgaming to get our games to continue to run well on Cedega in the future.

Well I guess Valve knows about Transgaming. I doubt that they would consider a linux port even if WineX didn't exist, so no "prevention" is probably occuring, but it is interesting. Mostly because Valve is looking more and more like microsoft to me these days. why? 1) steam 2) said refusal to port 3)Gabe Newell used to work there. I don't know what his relationship with MS is these days, but he's an intelligent man and he has been using Outlook for his e-mail (look at info on the source code theft for HL2) so that doesn't bode well. one wonders if i should support them at all anymore...

On the flip side, we can look at LucasArts. Surely they know that you can run many of their games (i've personally run JK2 even on regular WINE) but apparently they are at least considering porting to linux. We'll see about that... either way their path here could be indicative of the truth or slander behind the 'prevention' argument.

IMHO, the best way to find out if 'prevention' is a real threat is to find Ryan "Icculus" Gordo

I have actually. And yes, I'm a member. What point were you trying to make anyway?

http://www.transgaming.org/forum/
I'm glad they now have proper forums set up. The other system was a complete pain.

No, it just got Slashdotted. :P

Unfortunately I've read some horrible stories on their own website (in the support section and new forums) about people having a bad time getting their already-working games working under Cedega. In fact, I've read an unfortunately large number of posts saying that they've downgraded to WineX because of the number of bugs. I'm not sure whether the editor noticed this but those facts certainly don't merit a 20/20 in my book...

"TransGaming.Org CVS

As of November 2003, TransGaming's WineX CVS has moved from SourceForge to our own servers. We hope this will provide a better experience for our users."

No, it's still public. It was moved to transgaming.org because of stability issues with Sourceforge.

The CVS page links back to transgaming.com though, for the actual download instructions, and it seems to be down right now.

Actually, they aren't required by Wine's license. And the CVS hasn't gone anywhere, it just doesnt have the copy protection stuff needed to play these commercial games. For reasons explained here