Gaming in Linux; slackware 13.37
Posted 08-17-2011 at 10:23 AM by linuxpokernut
Back in 2008, I started playing Eve Online. Its one hell of a game, some call it "spreadsheets online" because you wind up needing a spreadsheet to play. It's the worlds largest single shard game server. And back in December of '08, it had a linux client.
It was not a true stand alone client, but it was a Cedega crossover. When you installed it it installed the Cedega engine with just what you need to play. Back then the game had 2 graphics options, "classic" and "pro". The classic was simply the textures from 2002/3, the pro was the revamped graphics.
At some point in time after I started playing, they removed the "classic" option, and removed support for the linux 'client'. And that's when I really started trying to understand gaming in linux. As you can see from my previous blogs, I have played both WoW and Guild Wars in linux, and ETQW (linux native). I purchased Cedega for a 6 month period and ran EvE.
But alas, this is a recession, and I don't have the money to pay to play video games. I can pay for my 52 dollar a month habit with in game currency in Eve. To me, that really made it the perfect choice for open source gaming. I thought posting a quick walk through would help at least one person on their way.
The first order of business when arriving at the new desktop was to install the graphics drivers. There is some sort of new fangled graphics driver named nouveau, which in French means 'new fangled'. Ironically, I had tried Kubuntu 11.04 prior to slackware 13.37, and it was unable to replace the nouveau driver with the nvidia driver. Slackware had no such trouble. I just ctrl-alt-backspaced my desktop to run level 3 and installed. The nvidia driver script worked flawlessly both in disabling the pesky driver and installing the new one.
Next was the package manager. I use sbopkg, simple enough. That's what I used to install wine. It builds a package from source just for you, its like pseudo compiling. Well, it is compiling, it's just someone else's script.
Well, that wine didn't work. So I uninstalled.
Luckily, there was a slackware package for wine 1.3.26. The sbopkg was 'stable' and this one was 'development', but I care about that like I care about (insert comparison to something I don't care about here). The slackware package was quite easy to install...
Yeah I know, right? No compiling this time so no waiting.
At this point I did not have to do anything else to get World Of Warcraft and Guild Wars working. Simply run them in wine and for wor throw the -opengl flag after the run command. To get eve running I had to pull a few more tricks out of the bag...
I found that on a general walkthrough a while back and used it in my own slackware walkthrough later. Wine has those files, but they ain't right.
I needed to install winetricks also. I had found the sbopkg for it on my first attempt so I used that.
This allows you to actually read the EULA, scroll down, and accept. Fortunately for me I'm also an amateur lawyer so I didn't read it, I just scrolled and accepted.
The last part was the only tricky part, or confusing to a new user perhaps. I had to open 'regedit', the editor for the pseudo registry and enter this information...
And thats that. I now have 3 popular MMO's up and running on my slackware desktop. Its so easy a slacker could do it. And then blog about it from work.
It was not a true stand alone client, but it was a Cedega crossover. When you installed it it installed the Cedega engine with just what you need to play. Back then the game had 2 graphics options, "classic" and "pro". The classic was simply the textures from 2002/3, the pro was the revamped graphics.
At some point in time after I started playing, they removed the "classic" option, and removed support for the linux 'client'. And that's when I really started trying to understand gaming in linux. As you can see from my previous blogs, I have played both WoW and Guild Wars in linux, and ETQW (linux native). I purchased Cedega for a 6 month period and ran EvE.
But alas, this is a recession, and I don't have the money to pay to play video games. I can pay for my 52 dollar a month habit with in game currency in Eve. To me, that really made it the perfect choice for open source gaming. I thought posting a quick walk through would help at least one person on their way.
The first order of business when arriving at the new desktop was to install the graphics drivers. There is some sort of new fangled graphics driver named nouveau, which in French means 'new fangled'. Ironically, I had tried Kubuntu 11.04 prior to slackware 13.37, and it was unable to replace the nouveau driver with the nvidia driver. Slackware had no such trouble. I just ctrl-alt-backspaced my desktop to run level 3 and installed. The nvidia driver script worked flawlessly both in disabling the pesky driver and installing the new one.
Next was the package manager. I use sbopkg, simple enough. That's what I used to install wine. It builds a package from source just for you, its like pseudo compiling. Well, it is compiling, it's just someone else's script.
Well, that wine didn't work. So I uninstalled.
Luckily, there was a slackware package for wine 1.3.26. The sbopkg was 'stable' and this one was 'development', but I care about that like I care about (insert comparison to something I don't care about here). The slackware package was quite easy to install...
Code:
$installpkg wine1.3.26.txz
At this point I did not have to do anything else to get World Of Warcraft and Guild Wars working. Simply run them in wine and for wor throw the -opengl flag after the run command. To get eve running I had to pull a few more tricks out of the bag...
Quote:
Download or otherwise obtain "d3dx9_35.dll" and "d3dx9_36.dll" and place it in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/
I needed to install winetricks also. I had found the sbopkg for it on my first attempt so I used that.
Code:
$sh winetricks corefonts
The last part was the only tricky part, or confusing to a new user perhaps. I had to open 'regedit', the editor for the pseudo registry and enter this information...
Code:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D] "MaxFragmentUniforms"="1024" "MaxVaryings"="52" "MaxVertexUniforms"="1024" "Multisampling"="enabled" "OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo" "PixelShaderMode"="enabled" "UseGLSL"="enabled" "VertexShaderMode"="hardware" "VideoMemorySize"="1024" "DirectDrawRenderer"="opengl"
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