Distribution Discussion
June 6th, 2006 by CrusaderWith the recent release of Ubuntu Linux 6.06, I figured this was as good a time as any to have a free-for-all distribution discussion with regards to games. Specifically, things like which distribution you prefer, what ease-of-use functionality is most important to you, what’s still missing in terms of support, and so on. Feel free to share your experiences with installation and configuration as well.
June 6th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Maybe LSB should be developed in direct of better 3d party games providers? Such discussion as proposed, which distro, would be useless ;)
Regards, D_T_G
June 6th, 2006 at 9:49 am
I used both Kubuntu and regular Debian unstable. I like Kubuntu but their sudo method is sort of slow when I want to edit a lot of configuration files… ‘sudo bash’ works though :-)
either way I am Debian based and have been for the last 6 years, after 2 years of Mandrake 6.1-7.2
June 6th, 2006 at 10:24 am
Installation of games is the absolute worst part of Linux. I’ve had several machines made for friends with Linux, and by and far the hardest part of the UI for them was installing the games. Once the games are installed, they work fine.
I keep getting labeled a “troll” for saying this, but I’m trying to just make a simple point: it is easier to install a Windows game through Wine/Cedega than it is to install a native Linux game!
With a Windows game *on Linux*, you pop in the CD and click install, and it, well, installs. With Linux, you pop in the CD, click the install script… and have it silently fail. Possibly because your distro set noexec for the CD drive. Possibly because the script depends on some configuration that doesn’t hold for your distro, like the location of some X binary.
The problem is largely that the only easy installers for Linux are stand-alone binaries that have to be shipped on the CDs. There is no way to create a “package” file that an already installed, testing, and properly configured installer engine can handle, unless you go with the highly distro-dependent package files.
Even then, many package file formats just are NOT capable of handling games. An RPM requires that all the files be in the package. That’s not feasible for a multi-CD behemoth with various optional components (low or high quality textures, for example).
Linux needs an installer framework for third-party apps that can handle not only small simple apps but also huge apps like games. This installer should also optionally integrate with the native package manager (when a game is installed system-wide), and allow a simple per-user package manager for when users install a game into their account.
Once a game can actually be *installed* on Linux, most users won’t have too much of a problem. GNOME and KDE and friends have already given us pretty highly usable desktops, which in many ways are *more* usable than Windows (in my experience). The only problem I’ve ever seen actually bite users is installation.
For hardcore gamers, driver upgrading and installation is also going to be an issue, but that’s another problem altogether.
June 6th, 2006 at 11:52 am
.. what happened to it?
Worked fine (at least) for me (RedHat/Fedora).
And UT2004 did also a nice job without a major hastle (what installer was that?).
Americas Army with its huge shell-script-type installer worked also neat.
Thing is: Linux will never be able to support *all* distributions. New distributions pop up nearly on a daily base, each tailored for different needs. Imagine distributions without default installations for even the basic script-languages (python, perl), not to speak of SDL, OpenAL or ALSA… :-/
But maybe some installer with clearly defined minimal requirements and specification could be made?
And each distribution would need to fullfill those specs in order to be labeled/considered as game-friendly?!
June 6th, 2006 at 11:56 am
I prefer Mepis. We still need big company support not seconhand stuff. People like Lucasarts etc. There needs to be more standrads involved installing outside the repo and better error handling and driver auto-install stuff. Maybe Novel’s new driver system or Ubuntu’s moves into the enterprise as fully free software will help. Also the Open Graphics Card and Cell’s open specs for devs can’t hurt.
June 6th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Gentoo’s ebuild’s work pretty well for the older native binaries; that is if their is an ebuild. Gentoo stuck deprechiated libaries (meaning older) into a lib-compat-loki install, and heroes3 and others work well. Even the libaries necessary for the networking portions of homm3 function because of the automagic installation of dependencies.
What we need for RPM distributions is a *fake* package that fetches and installs necessary deprechiated libaries (and loki-update) if necessary and game patch executables. Then it would install a root executable which performs the same installation steps that gentoo’s build process performs. Something like /sbin/heroes3-install-from-cd. This executable will “grab” and unpack the necessary CD contents and unpack and apply any patch. Then Create a link to install the .desktop execution game menu item.
All of this desired installation data would then be packaged into a new RPM (so it could be uninstalled cleanly) and applied/installed to the system.
Somehow we should have the newer RPM link to the previous *fake* package, possibly a newer versioned file replacing the previous *fake* version.
Just my thoughts.
–
ljkopen
June 6th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
I used both Kubuntu and regular Debian unstable. I like Kubuntu but their sudo method is sort of slow when I want to edit a lot of configuration files… ‘sudo bash’ works though :-)
either way I am Debian based and have been for the last 6 years, after 2 years of Mandrake 6.1-7.2
____________________________________________________
You can still su – into root on Kubuntu if you need to. Might have to sudo passwd root first, but root is by no means removed from the system.
Also, if you want to use sudo, but dont want to put in a password each time you use it for the first time after a 5 min lapse, just add/change this to sudoers:
%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL
as long as you are in the admin group (should be by default).
June 6th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Gentoo, of course, though I might be a bit biased.
Currently, Gentoo has some pretty decent support for many things, including older games. Most of this work is done by me, being the only Gentoo developer that owns most of the older Loki games. Of course, ebuild submissions from users are *always* welcomed and appreciated.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is that there’s no single way to get anything done. Even using loki_setup doesn’t solve most of the problems, as it doesn’t integrate with the various package managers in any way. Perhaps one day we’ll have a consistent way of getting things like this installed, but until then, there’s always Gentoo to help you get your game on. ;]
June 6th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Chris,
Thanks for your work. I have apprechiated it for a few years now. What you point out is one of the great strengths of gentoo. It does whatever is necessary (thus scripted) to build the installation package. And then installs that (from a tar.bz2 — I believe). This is what the RPM distros lack, and thus why gentoo gaming is currently *easier* to initially set up.
Thanks again.
–
ljkopen
June 6th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
Unbelievably fast, light, clean and runs everything.
June 6th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
works great for me.
My Radeon x800GT works fine, yum is a great way to keep updated and install a lot of things. RPMs really haven’t been that hard to manage for me, and I haven’t run into any major issues. I set up my tv tuner by simply typing: yum install tvtime and it worked right off the bat.
If you need to build things from source, yes you have to go about installing some libraries and packages via yum first, but I’m sure that can be avoided by making certain choices during install as a lot of its available during then.
I also run it on my laptop, has support for my NIC and wireless built in, turns off the monitor when the lid is closed, monitors the battery fine, and handles everything just peechy.
June 6th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
I’m running Slackware for some years now, but I want to try the new xorg release (7.1), and I don’t know when there will be packages for it.
I’m considering giving Gentoo a try.
How easy it is to upgrade software with it? Specially core software that others depend on it (libc, gcc, X..)
Is 64bit working fine? (Athlon64+nforce3_chipset+nvidia_fx6200)
June 6th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
This is a dirty way to do it, but as the 7.x series of xorg is split in millions of packages, it’s a lot easier this way than tell which packages would be drawn from the “unstable” portage.
[b]ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 emerge xorg-x11[/b]
If you build something that isn’t backward compatible, then you use [b]revdep-rebuild[/b].
When it comes to Xorg, Gentoo has been crawling quite slowly, myself I went and made myself a Xorg 6.9 ebuild (not that difficult, more or less just copy of the 6.8.999 ebuild).
June 7th, 2006 at 1:34 am
Anonymous: A general purpose computer is not a console. If a user is not prepared to do some basic investigation (a.k.a. RTFReadme, in combination with basic knowledge about the system being used), the user ought to reconsider the use of such a powerful machine.
While ease of installation is certainly a goal to be pursued, it is not the primary goal for computer games. Accordingly, computer games should focus on what they do best (being open for modification), and consoles games should focus on what they do best (PnP installation).
However, I don’t want to completely dismiss your points. More can and should be done to ease installation. What about Autopackage?
[Insert obligatory, but mostly off-topic, rant against hardware companies for withholding information about instruction set architecture for their hardware---which is not microarchitecture, which is a legitimate thing to be protected---that makes writing open drivers nigh-impossible.]
June 7th, 2006 at 4:17 am
i just installed ubuntu a few days ago on my notebook
except the installing of the ati driver (proprietary, ubuntu used the free xorg driver which already had rudimentary 3d working, but not all the needed gl extensions), which i had to enforce manually, all hardware was detected and ubuntu installed really easily
bluetooth, wlan, sound, usb peripherals, all working just as it should out of the box
i also do like the debian format and the source sites, for being a quick and easy way to keep all updated
—how-to-quickly-generate-a-deb-package-
- by the way, it is easy to generate debian packages:
just configure the prefix while configuring the source to another empty directory, so you get the structure in the filesystem the application installs, without any other stuff mixing (like ./configure –prefix /tmp/deb/root/)
then you just need a subdirectory DEBIAN (like /tmp/deb/root/DEBIAN) where you put skripts for post/pre install and removal (postinst,preinst,postrm,prerm) doing stuff in etc and other configuration paths and a few control files (best decompress another archive with ar -x package.deb and check control.tar.gz together with online doc) and then you can do dpkg -b /tmp/deb/root mynewpackage.deb
then your done and only need to include your local package directory in /etc/apt/sources.list to be able to install it with apt-get
putting together dependencies is not difficult, when using ldd on libs and binary executables to find out, which system components they use (hint: dpkg -S file)
—how-to-quickly-generate-a-deb-package-end-
that is astoundingly easy in my opinion, and i will try to use that to include packages in my system which are in no source site, so i will always be able to remove apps with the standard apt-get … it was always a hazzle for me, to mix source packages with binary packages in an installation …
about gentoo:
gentoo is really nice and easy to install, but you should be willing to get some basic dev knowledge + knowledge about your hardware to be able to use it properly
on the other side you can be on the front with software packages for gentoo, and 64bit works best together with gentoo, as you are able to get most of your applications as native 64bit binaries (which is not the problem with other distros for 64bit as well, as long as you don’t have more wishes for new packages …)
gentoo also uses a clever layout to enable 32bit applications to work flawlessly in a 64bit environment
the main contra against gentoo is though, that you really need a powerful cpu to keep your system updated, esp when bigger updates come in – most often though, this is not the case, and a daily update is done in 2-3 minutes max on a 64bit 1.8ghz sempron
ha, thats all i wanted to say about this :)
June 7th, 2006 at 7:05 am
I’m using Mandriva 2006.0 x86-64. I’ve yet to have an issue running any games, even under Cedega (those that work with x86).
June 7th, 2006 at 7:26 am
Switched from Fedora after that I installed Ubuntu Linux on my fathers computer last summer. He still use it by the way and seems quite happy about it. During that summer I got the chance to learn the basics of Ubuntu and that made me switch as soon as I got home to my own computer. Fedora was(at this time) more polished that Ubuntu but I changed dist anyway. Ubuntu 6.06 is a very nice dist even if it has been quite hyped. But it does what I expect most of the time.
June 7th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
When you install and use Linux, you want things to just work. That’s what you can do with Slackware.
It’s the oldest distro, and it’s the most stable and powerful i ever tested. Even Debian seems unstable compared to it.
Of course it has the reputation to be a difficult distro designed for professionnals, but it’s not true. Mastering the installation is a joke and configure the system is a very good way to learn how Linux and Unix works. The packaging system is very strong because there’s no RPM hell.
For the gaming part, all you need is shipped with the distro except that damn proprietary Nvidia and Ati drivers (well it don’t seems Ati do so-called drivers). Quake 3, Doom 3 and Quake 4 run as thunder. And all hits like foobillard and glest too.
So if you have a PC + a brain, you should at least try it. And believe me, you’ll like it.
June 8th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Vector is based on Slackware, and after running RH 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9.0, FC3, Suse 9.1, Suse 9.3, Xandros 2, and 3, and a little dabbling with Knoppix and Kubuntu, I landed with Vector (read Slackware). Nothing else compares. I might give full Slackware a run here shortly, and if Vector is any indication, all your comments about Slackware will hold true. I really love Vector though.
June 9th, 2006 at 10:27 pm
http://www.slamd64.com
great^H^H^H^Hgood port of slackware to x84_64 platform.
June 13th, 2006 at 9:09 am
I use openSUSE 10.1 after Testing Redhat 8.0, PCLinuxOS and MAndrake 2006.
This is the best linux distro i’ve bhenn testing, since i installed all packages ;)
June 13th, 2006 at 9:10 am
I use openSUSE 10.1 after Testing Redhat 8.0, PCLinuxOS and Mandrake 2006.
This is the best linux distro i’ve been testing. First i did not like it at all, but since i installed all packages everything seems to run well ;)