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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.
First set your system up without graphical login, which most distributions configure by default. /etc/inittab and change the default runlevel to 3, this means find the line /usr/local/games/doom3/doom3
To do this edit
id:3:initdefault:
which will normally read 5 and change it to 3 (like mine is), Fedora inittab files are well commented and explain what to do, others are probably similar.
To go into X (the windowing system) you type startx after logging in, this gives you your regular desktop, gnome, kde, xfce, whatever.
When you are bored with email quit out of X and run your game with (I think)
xinit
I read that here
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.
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
To those of you suggesting that a lightweight window manager is the way to go, I have to ask, what exactly is the point? The last time I did this was back in the early G400 days, when things like CPU meters updating add significant X server context-switch overhead (far more than the under 1% of CPU time such apps might take). It saves some RAM, sure, but think about it:
1) RAM costs next to nothing these days - 512MB goes for under AU$100 locally.
2) Even without enough real RAM, this is a classic example of what virtual memory is for. After a quick game, is logging back in to your desktop, reloading all your apps and then getting back to your work really quicker than just leaving the OS to swap your apps back in?
For me, one of the joys of Linux is the ability to have my desktop and applications open 24/7 for weeks on end. If you're going to log out every time you play a game, you might as well just hit the reboot button in your login manager and go play in XP.
To answer the topic, I'd suggest an NVIDIA video card (the 6600GT is, by all indications, awesome, and NVIDIA's Linux drivers are better than ATI's), a Creative SB Live! or Audigy card (no need to knock yourself out - an older OEM Live! card will do fine), and an Athlon 64 CPU. There's no Linux-specific reason to go for the Athlon 64 over the P4 (though playing with 64-bit Linux can be fun), but they just seem to be a better chip for the money overall, and a better gaming chip in particular.