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Linux Live Gaming Project
Fabio writes "The mission of LLGP (Linux Live Game Project) is show to Wintendo users that also Linux can be used to game. And now a new version is out. Features: KDE 3.3 with Plastik theme and Nuvola icons, kernel 2.6.10, Nvidia drivers, TORCS, Wesnoth, SuperTux, TuxRacer and much more! It's based on Knoppix, but contains deep changes in the startup scripts. Now the hardware probing is completely based on hotplug and udev; kudzu was removed. Challenge your friends on LLGP, and convert them to Linux!"
http://www.tlm-project.org/torrents/llgp/llgp-0.1p re0.iso.torrent
I'm not sure about Half-Life 2, but Linux is said to run Half-Life 1 just fine in Wine, and Doom 1 and 2 are ported. You can run the latest GBA RPGs in VisualBoyAdvance, which is ported.
Best of all, Linux can help you get in shape, as Pydance and StepMania are ported.
Doom3 there is a native port which runs great. HL2 runs just as well through cedega. The latest games are being added to cedega support or being ported to Linux.
This is from 0.0.1, but the maintainers claim that it basically hasn't changed.
[Damn lameness filter, had to re-write post]
Arcade
imaze, Abuse SDL, Amphetamine, Armagetron, Atomic Tanks, bomberclone, Bugsquish, Bumprace, bzflag, Chromium, Circus Linux, Egoboo, Galaga, gl-117, Heroes (SDL version), KAsteroids, KBounce,KFoulEggs, KGoldrunner, Kolf, KSirtet, KSmileTris, KSnakeRace, KSpaceDuel, KTron, lbreakout2, Mad Bomber, mangopeeler, mangoquest, Neverball, Neverputt, pinball, Powermanga, Starfighter, SuperTux, Thrust, Toppler, Trophy, Tux: A Quest for Herring, Tuxkart, TuxRacer, WING, X Abuse, Xboing, Xbreaky, Xkobo, XKoules, Xracer racing game, XScavenger, Xscorch, XSoldier, ZBlast
Adventures
Falcon's Eye, GGZ, GGZap, Completition Calendar, Fyrdman, Keepalive Control, KGGZ, KTicTacTux, ModSniffer
Board games
XBoard-ICS, Atlantik, GnuChess, GtkAtlantik, KBackgammon, KBlackBox, Kenolaba, KMahjongg, KReversi, KWin4, Muehle, Penguin Taipei, Shisen-Sho, Xboard
Card games
KPoker, Mah-jong, Penguin Canfield, Penguin Freecell, Penguin Golf, Penguin Solitaire, Penguin Thornq, PySol, Solitario, Tenente Skat, Xmahjongg, Xskat
Games for children
Potato guy
Brain-teasers
Codebreaker, Enigma, Gtans, Imemory, MirrorMagic, Penguin Mastermind, Penguin Merlin, Penguin Minesweeper, Penguin Pegged, Xjig
Shooter
Cube
Sport
CannonSmash, Foobiliard
Strategy
Freeciv, GNU Gaming Zone, Pingus - Enhanced Lemmings
Tactics and Strategy
Boson, Katomic, Kbattleship, KJumpingCube, Klickety, KLines, KMines, Konquest, KSokoban, SameGame
Tetris and similar
Cuyo, Frozen-bubble, LTris, Netris , Quadra
The ______ Agenda
Yeah, the first-person shooters get ported to GNU/Linux rather quickly, but what about things other than FPS? Yes, other game genres exist, even though someone who took his/her nick from the name of the hero of a popular FPS may consider such an idea blasphemous.
And if you're going to try it out, be nice on them and use their torrent link.
The ______ Agenda
This sig is false.
Good God man, do you seriously think nVidia should ditch support on a GF4?
I didn't say that. I said I'm surprised they support it on Linux. It is an old card, and an OS with a small gamer population. It is good that they support it but the work that goes into optimizing Windows drivers may not all benefit the Linux driver. And I bet they throw a lot less effort into the Linux driver.
Sorry, but if you think everyone goes out and buy the newest/best vid card on the market on intervals of anywhere NEAR 3 years, you are SERIOUSLY mistaken.
Um, the whole parent was talking about "the latest games". Anyone who wants to play the latest 3D games at something faster than a slideshow has to upgrade their graphics card at a minimum every-other generation (which would be ~3 years, at current rates of offerings by nVidia and ATI). Why do you think console games generally outsell 3D PC games? To borrow a favorite term from MS: total cost of ownership.
World of Warcraft, notably, runs on fairly midrange 3D hardware - I believe the min requirement is a GeForce 2. Look at their sales figures. The Sims also has huge sales numbers, in part because it runs on just about everyone's machine.
Also just on a side note, the poster above is trying to play a Source engine game on 512MB ram which is pretty close to the bare minimum. Throw Cedega on top of that and of course you're going to have issues. If he gets another 512MB in there for 70 bucks or so, the game will improve dramatically. I'm stating this from personal experience with Vampire Bloodlines - another Source engine game.
there's a script that you can get here called nvcheck to see if your nvidia drivers are installed correctly. You might have to tweak it a bit to make it recognize an Xorg config file if you're using a newer distro, but it should mostly still work and may help you figure out the source of your problem. Tux racer ran fine for me back when I used a TNT2, so it should work just fine on the 6800.
It might not be relevent to your situation anymore, but for anyone else who's had bad luck with wine, Sidenet might help after wine's installed. It sets up the config file for some of the more tricky installs beforehand, installs some stuff from reactos, manages menus, and some other nice tricks. Though, on the other hand, I've never understood how people can have such different results from wine. I hear about people all the time not being able to run anything but notepad, but I've always had pretty good results from wine, even years back. Heck, my girlfriend, hardly a techy by any means, installed and uses photoshop with a vanilla build of wine. Are some of the major distros severly messing up wine when packaging or something?
Everything will be taken away from you.
First of all, Super-Tux is an alpha game - their site screenshots still show the tiling grids. Not very impressive.
What, do you mean this?
That's the freakin' built-in tile editor! SHEESH!
Not being at all familiar with Settlers of Catan, I did a quick search at The Linux Game Tome and found Gnotan.
Perhaps you can suggest the LLGP folks add it...?
HL2 works fine under Cedega with no configuration, and Doom 3 has native Linux support.
So while the poster mentioned the wrong games, HL2 and Doom3 work just fine. And HL2 and Doom3 ARE "*so* equivalent to HL2 and Doom 3", interestingly enough.
I am a gamer and I always play Americas Army Operations (www.americasarmy.com). It is a free FPS game. Before Linux I was playing it on Windows, and like most people here I was sceptic about the Linux Version. 1) I wasn't sure that Liux and openGL is up to the task in Graphics, 2) Sound quality. That is until I installed it on Linux. It Runs exactly the same, and the sound is eactly the same. The virtual memory in Linux helps it to run faster. I have now ditched the Windows Version and play it on Linux only. I do my part my talking to other on-line users who uses Windows and how over time it slwos down; things llike application runnings, daemon running the background and they don't understand enough to close some of them. Windows give you no hint about these background processes; spywares, adwares, and the virtual memory and filesystem performance itself. The hard of this is convincing them that Linux is not really difficult. You just need to learn what you have Learned on Windows. For example how to find the services and close some of them. On Linux at least it gives a couple of lines of description. Get a Distro, install everyting, get the game and install. The bad thing is that you have to learn how to get a new driver for your card, such as Nvidia and compile and install it (although it is simple, it scares some Windows users). I haven't tried other games, but AAO does a fine job of installing and no configuration necessary except what is in the game itself. Furthermore, it works on every distribution I tried, Fedora, Yoper, Mandrake and Suse. The nice thing about Yoper is that the nvidia driver is installed for you. Just install the game and go. I ditched Windows, unless of course there is a game I want and it is not on Linux. I think game developers need to have a look at Linux and developing a Linux version. Most games are willing to pay for their version. In my experience Linux is a much more stable platform for games. It just need a chance and if game developers work together with Linux vendors they can produce a very competitive gaming platform. My small opinion :-)
I can name any number of apps that are free-as-in-speech and yet have the UI thing down. Going down my start menu, I see... Azureus, Filezilla, GAIM, Keepass, the entire Mozilla lineup, OpenOffice.Org, Putty, ScummVM, and The Ur-Quan Masters... All of which I use on a regular basis to get things done, or in the case of the last two, have some fun. The volunteer nature of open-source hasn't kept these programs from becoming strong, useful applications, and in the case of Mozilla, from being used by millions.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
As per another recent Liux gaming post and an article on Tom's Hardware Guide, Linux may not becomae a gamer's platform for a long time. The problem is that 1) most games are written around Microsoft's DirectX, which cannot be ported to Linux without a blessing from MS. Games need to be written in OpenGL, right now, to be linux compatable.
That piece of cake is 'iced' with a another problem, the graphics card driver sets. We already see a 'leadout' type of problem with later release cards where the Windows based game is released and some late release higher end cards cannot support the game, due to a compatability issue with the graphic cards driver sets. Companies such as ATI and Nvidia have a decent sized group of coders to resolve those issues in a resonable amount of time, but they have very very small Linux staffs (with respect the drivers sets), to handle Linux issues with games. This is justified on their part due to their sales in each catergory. It is going to take a lot more Linux based higher end graphics card sales to push the manufactures further in the right direction. Of course without the support for gaming in Linux, the sales aren't going to be there. There is a BIG chicken and egg problem with gaming on this platform that needs to be overcome before it's going to be prevalent.
Just a small note if you hadn't been paying attention for the last oh.. decade or so..
Linux *IS* a major operating system on the x86 platform. It has backing by *major* companies such as IBM. It has a solid background derived from the *NIX world which makes all of those "oh so difficult" configuration text files, quite standard.
Now as for the "Every setting should be in a GUI" mentality, I'll express why at least I believe that would be a downgrade for any OS.
Linux is a *very* versitile and flexible system. It can be made to run on very old hardware, small devices, supercompters, or the average Joe User's desktop. Linux provides basically the kernel, which you can then run any number of applications under. The default and easiest user interface for Linux just so happens to be a shell prompt (of which even that there are several varieties.. it's all about choice). Now this is not to say that Linux is purely text-based and you must now a bazillion arbitrary text commands to do any actual work on a Linux system. There's also a nice graphical interface that you can run (Several actually), such as X.org or FreeX86.
Now as we all know, graphical environments have settings.. things such as your screen resolution, refresh rate, or bit depth. In most OS's these options are chosen by the user, or maybe the beginning settings are set by the OS upon install. I've recently had an upgrade to a newer graphics card (Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT) which has drivers for both Linux and Windows. Now in windows, after installation and a reboot it mysteriously set my monitor to 115x4000, which my monitor cannot display at all so it turns itself off.. I can't just close the graphical part of windows and change the oddly chosen starting numbers in a simple text file from a text prompt.. in fact I cannot change any settings at all because I don't have any of my pretty buttons on the screen. The only way to fix such a problem is to reboot into "Safe Mode" and change the values from there or uninstall the defunct drivers.
Granted Linux may be a small bit more work.. I have to actually open up a config file and type in my resolution numbers into the heavily commented xorg.config file. It's not easy for the Joe User to find where that xorg.config file is if they've never touched Linux I'll admit.. and maybe they won't know how to follow the directions as well.. but will the same Joe User be able to know that he's going to have to boot into Safe Mode (or that even it's a driver problem and maybe something windows did didn't just destroy his hardware) ?
This is just about a simple graphics configuration. It may not seem so benifitial to Joe User, but a system admin with over 100 systems may need to implement changes to all users desktops in some arbitrary fashion, and being able to telnet or ssh into all computers and run scripts to change *any* setting because they're in easy standard text files... well let's just say it's better than changing a radio button 100 times in a graphical box.
GUI's definatly make certain tasks easier.. generally for the actual desktop user.. but for a system admin or any sort of technical department, text files are a lot easier to work with. And it's not like Linux will take away the GUI functions completely... the daily work tasks can be done perfectly fine with a mouse and icons in X.
This is already longer than I wanted it to be.. but in short: keep config files in text files.. it really *is* easier when you understand why they're like that.
And nothing is holding Linux back.. it's already a major player. It may not be what you want it to be, but it's still here to stay.