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Best Configuration for Linux Gaming?
werjman asks: "I'm interested in switching completely to Linux but the only thing holding me back is the gaming. What I really want to know is what distro, graphical environment, Window Manager, and so forth are low on the system resources and play games great (and by games, I mean 3D accelerated memory hogs). Does anyone out there actually use Linux as a gaming platform?"
www.xfce.org xfce is my favorite (of course this is an opinion). It doesn't seem as barebones are fluxbox yet is light and fast.
Fire up X with nothing in your .xinitrc or .xsession except for the line to launch your game. X is stopped when your game terminates.
Stop sshd, inetd, any web servers, any mail serers, reschedule any cron jobs for while you are at work or sleeping, and absolutely do not use gdm or other login display manager.
If you are the sort of person who wants to get every last fps possible, then I suppose you could use Gentoo and compile everything with all optimizations for your platform (Gentoo is the easiest way to accomplish this). You just type exactly what each step tells you in the Gentoo installation manual, and it very easy (just don't try this for anything more important than your gaming machine).
As for your original question, I would recommend using any light weight window manager. openbox, blackbox, etc. You could move from gnome or kde to one of these when you are going to play a game. Also, I recomend you to buy an nvidia card. The ati drivers suck badly. I play 3 games on my machine (when running linux) Doom 3, UT 2004, and Enemy territory.
I forgot to tell you, that you might want to check this links:
Wine Application DB"
Frank's Corner
To see how to install several windows games in linux.
I've been wondering this myself. I've gotten CS to work on most distro's, but after getting burnt out for years of trying to get other games working on linux, I've just used my linux boxes for either servers or desktops that needed X.
Gentoo has some nice patched kernels for gamers, and the gentoo forums are the best forums out there. And then use transgaming to complete it.
As for a desktop wm, depends on how much functionality you want. The barest wm is twm. But then whats a 150K or so, might as well run IceWM which has a nice taskbar.
The easiest out of the box setup is Mandrake for gamers, less configuration and config time.
Just my 2 cents.
What you're doing there is actually loading up X again, but instead of immediately loading and running your normal window manager, you're initing straight in to the game. Considering desktops like Gnome and KDE do take up quite a lot of RAM and spawn various background processes, this is sound advice since it'll cut system resource usage right down and make your game slightly faster. Most 3D games still run in X, of course - since this is the best and easiest place to find full hardware accelerated 3D (OpenGL) on the average Linux desktop box, thanks to the open and closed source drivers for various nVidia and ATI cards.
Gentoo has a few dozen different kernels at your disposal. There used to be a gaming-sources kernel that was based on ck-sources. The other popular kernel in portage for gaming is mm-sources by Andrew Morton (the guy Linus lets go hog-wild with the kernel).
Kernels not in Gentoo portage but compatible and designed for speed are:
nitro-sources (ck-sources + reiser4 + framebuffer + other stuff)
love-sources (community maintained kernel to optimize desktop performance and test "unstable" patches)
speedy-sources (love-sources w/ reiser4)
Oh, and looking at the forums nearly everyone uses an nVidia card. So far, nVidia plays nicer with x.org than ATI.
Direct away from face when opening.
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.
I prefer :1
xinit --
which sets up a seperate X11 on CTRL + ALT + F8.
This way you can use icq / irc / firefox on your main WM. And if the game crashes / freezes it dosn't take the WM (+ everything else you have open) with it.
I mostly do it because theres no easy way to switch out of iD's linux games without taking forever to reload the textures. (I also use slack + flux, I don't do it for the resources)
I remember reading somewhere how to set up XQF to start a seperate X11 session like this when you start a game, but could never get it to work.
I don't consider myself a "PC Gamer", I generally prefer console games, though I do have a few PC games that I play occasionally (Neverwinter Nights, UT2k4), I ran Linux exclusively for quite a while (I have a mac now as well, though I've never used it for games). I have to say that, in my experience with a few different distro's (pre-fedora versions of redhat, Mandrake, Debian, and Suse), I've found that Suse is really a nice distribution for 3D support- if you use an nVidia card. You can choose at install time if you want open source 3D drivers, or the official nVidia drivers, and if you update your system, getting the drivers working again is as easy as refreshing the install from YaST.
As for a window manager, Window Maker seems to be pretty light weight, or if you really want to get fancy, you can write a script to drop you out of a window manager completely and just run the game on top of plain ol' X. To be completely honest though, I run KDE most of the time, and have never found it's memory footprint to be a problem even when I'm running rather resource intensive games or applications. I have a buttload of ram though, so YYMV.
Others have mentioned Cedega, which is not free, though you can get the source free from CVS if you feel like messing about with configuring it and compiling it yourself. AFAIK their licensing doesn't prohibit this, it only prohibits you distributing it to anyone else.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
For the love of WINE, don't do an LFS system if you want Cedega to work at all. Between my dillying and dallying with RC kernels, nVidia drivers, supporting libraries and GCC versions, I can tell you that every time I do something, I've gotta fix something in Cedega :S
So make sure your distro is 'non-volatile' before you take the plunge with Cedega.
Too much repetition my too much repetition!
If you are very familiar with Linux, you will likely be very satisfied with your experience, and even likely to have fewer problems than your Windows using friends(for games that run on Linux, that is).
So first off, you need the proper hardware. You _need_ an NVIDIA card. Don't bother with ATI, their drivers are unstable and perform terribly. With NVIDIA, you will be up and running in no time.
Second, you need a decent sound chip. If you have a laptop, chances are you're screwed, unless you're seriously willing to tinker. You will want a card that supports hardware mixing, all common audio frequencies(many newer cheap cards only support 48000). A SB Live is probably your best bet, unless you know of another card on the market today with those features that is supported well in Linux. If you use the alsa drivers, be sure to load the oss compatibility modules, and you may have to $ echo "binary 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss, to get some games to work. Google is your friend. Substitute "binary" with the actual name of the program, eg. "quake3.x86" or whatever.
Build yourself a custom kernel, do not include DRI or agpgart. The NVIDIA drivers have their own agp support, with better support for different/broken hardware.
Get yourself a gig of memory already, and you won't need to worry about your WM. Just don't have any silly CPU consuming applets running.
If you have to ask what distro to use... well, I don't know quite what to tell you. Any distro can be made to work if you know what you're doing. But since you're asking for a recommendation, I heartily recommend Gentoo. It will, hopefully, teach you a bit more about how your system works, and it is the most flexible of the mainstream distros, IMO.
Cheers, and good luck.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I run openbox on XOrg for my desktop environment, since I like a clean , fast, no nonsense desktop that relies on hotkeys rather than stumbling around with the mouse.
The only time I use Windows for gaming is when I go to LAN parties, as it's usually quicker to get games going on Windows. The good news is more and more games are being released with Linux clients, and I think the next few years will see Linux clients being fairly normal with major game releases.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Unfortunately VMWare 4.x (on a linux host) doesn't support the level of Direct X required for most games. So unfortunately that won't work. - I tried this not to long ago. But if you have a windows license anyway, why not just throw a second disk in the box and install a native copy of windows on it?
I'm a believer in using the right tool for the job. This is why I have a Linux web, mail & file server, and my games machine is a windows box. - That's not to say Linux isn't any good for games, but for me the games I want to play require windows, and transgaming/winex isn't an option for me.
On the Linux side of things, I run Gentoo and just use the regular old Gnome desktop with Nautilus even. My system is fast enough to keep up with it, and Athlon-XP 2400, GeForce FX-5900, 1G of RAM, a fast 120G HD, 20" Monitor, SBLive! sound card, and some USB joysticks and game pads. I use the JFS filesystem in Gentoo because it has the lowest CPU usage and its speed is comparable with the other guys.
One of the greatest things for the Linux gamer is DOSBox. Using that program, I can play Wing Commander: Privateer, and X-COM UFO Defense in Linux. You can adjust the speed of DOSBox so the game feels about right. You know its getting pretty good if it can run Privateer (which is now abandonware and a free download from The Underdogs). In fact, you can probably run most of the great old DOS abandonware games in DOSBox with zero problems now. This one program increases your Linux gaming library to thousands of freely available commercial quality games.
Next are the nice commercial games which have a linux port. Neverwinter Nights and Doom3 stand at the forefront of the pack and run great on my system. Also there are great ports of Quake1/2/3, RtCW, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 1/2, and Doom.
After that, you enter the realm of Open Source games, with great titles like the Ur-Quan Masters, Vega Strike, Battle for Wesnoth, and any of the thousands of other games listed at The Linux Game Tome. Having Gentoo is an advantage here because the compiler toolchain is particularly strong, so its easy to compile and try out the latest cutting edge CVS versions of these in-development games.
Then you have the Wine and Cedega games. I use this for Jagged Alliance 2, Fallout1/2, and Diablo II. These (and other) well programmed games are totally playable in Wine, so there's no reason to have to special boot to windows just to play them, might as well just use Wine to play them. The windows versions of most of the old Loki games that are now broken typically work under Wine.
I won't even go into the other emulators, but suffice it to say that there are emulators for most consoles, such as ZSNES, and arcade games, like MAME. There are thousands of games which will work great using these things. I sometimes boot up ZSNES and play some ShadowRun.
Which leads me finally to the unfortunate state of the Loki titles. A lot of these are linked against older libs and may or not work on a new system without some serious fiddling around and building of compatibility libs. Some still work, some don't, but chances are that they will all eventually die of bit-rot. Poor Loki Games, you are missed.
I've been doing serious Linux gaming since 1998. There are tons of great games available, thousands that can be emulated, and the best part is if you want to take a hand at making your own games, you have every tool and library under the sun right there at your fingertips.
Clickety Click
If you've got a computer capable of running a 3D accelerated memory hog, then you've got one capable of running a 3D accelerated memory hog and KDE. It's not a very noticable performance hit.
Now, if you're trying to run Doom 3 on three-year-old hardware, the case might be different, but if you've got something up to snuff, you shouldn't have much of a problem running almost anything. When I'm in KDE on my machine, I typically have a memory usage of around 200 MB, even after days, with several programs loaded up. Can Doom 3 really not handle itself with 800 MB of ram (assuming about a gig of ram is standard on a gaming machine these days)?
If you want a lightweight window manager, use XFCE or Fluxbox or something. However, don't listen to people who tell you that on a 3.5 GHz machine with a gigabyte of memory you need to use Ratpoison because anything else uses too much memory. Use whatever you like to look at. You bought a giant machine; you don't need to treat it like a pentium 90.
I've come for the woman, and your head.