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Indrema Announces Partnership With Red Hat

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the video-games-for-everyone dept.

Jacek Fedorynski writes "Indrema (the Linux gaming console guys) and Red Hat have announced that they have formed an alliance to "jointly manage branding and distribution" of DV Linux, a Linux distribution for gaming consoles."

3 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Linux and Gaming by Grasshopper · · Score: 4


    This sounds like really interesting news actually. Linux outperforms Windows in nearly every category *except* gaming. Many games have been ported to Linux, but all those I know of are at least fractionally slower (I'm sure someone can point out an exception).

    If Linux were to become a good foundation for future gaming consoles, we would see a lot more attention paid to building extraordinary (as opposed to merely working) drivers for various video cards, etc. I know many people who use Windows for the purpose of playing games due to this fact.

    Also, if Linux were to become more of a gaming platform, we might see more games being released for it, instead of someone having to hack out a port to nearly everything we want to play.

    All in all, this has at least some potential. Oh, and for the sceptics that I'm sure are already popping up, making Linux perform better in these areas will *not* degrade its usefulness in all the areas it already dominates. I would even highly doubt that it will take away any of the motivation for progress in other areas. I'd even argue that this would bring more attention to Linux in general with the possibility of having more intelligent people working on some of the details.

    Not everyone who uses Windows is lame. Some haven't been exposed to anything else, so how can we judge them? There may be another Linus out there dialing into AOL on his Win2K machine just dying to find something better...

    --
    Source code is a lot like a parachute; it needs to be open in order to function properly.
  2. Why does this matter? by Nexx · · Score: 4

    Linux DV won't take off as a console platform until the following happens:

    1. Boot-up times slashed from the current implementations. Noone will want to wait minutes for the console to boot up, as most consoles go with the "boot for each game" approach. Will this approach be any different with the Linux-based console? Will it have "load game" and "exit to OS" functionalities?
      • Of course, having a unified and standardised hardware base will do wonders wrt the drivers probing hardware, dropping the bootup times a bit.
    2. A mature 3D driver/library support for the graphics hardware becoming released.
      • Currently, the Linux versions of the nVidia drivers lagg behind the Windows implementations. Can anyone comment on the 3Dfx side?
      • Is there an OpenGL implementation that is stable and fast? Without such a library, it will make ports difficult at best.
    3. Ease of programming will be paramount. Sega Saturn was legendary in its difficulty to program for, and we all know how successful that platform was. Sega learned its lesson with the Dreamcast, and subsequently, it became one of the most straight-forward consoles to program for. Yes, UNIX is easy to program for, but how about the graphics? Are they fast and easy to work with? Will there be accelerated libraries?

    I'm not saying that the X-box will be easy, but it will at least be easier for MS to port all the crap needed to the X-box's OS, seeing as it's basically a stripped-down Windows (9x? NT?)-based OS.


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  3. Linux on a game console... by ackthpt · · Score: 5
    What better way to introduce millions of children throughout the world with the words:

    Segmentation fault (core dumped)


    Welcome to the club, kiddies!

    Vote Naked 2000
    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar