Hello,

my friend has an old laptop (P3, 256MB of Ram, now running Win2k). She's going to buy a new one and asked me if I could install Linux on the old machine (well she knows that I can ) and then she would like to give the old laptop to her daughter for playing games.

Now my question: which games will run on such an old machine? Is there a distribution which I should prefer (normally I'd install Slackware for sure)? And my friend's daughter loves to play SIMS, I searched the internet and found that it should be possible to run it on Linux, but all the information I found was quite old, could please anyone provide information about playing SIMS on Linux nowadays.

The daughter of my friend is 13 years old, maybe someone here at LQ knows some other games which are adequate for here and would run on the old laptop.

Thanks in advance

Markus

The distribution you chose won't really have any effect on the ability to play Windows games, as you will just need WINE which can be installed on any modern distribution. I would still go with Slackware, as the machine is older and you would want something lean to begin with, though it is worth mentioning that Slackware doesn't include WINE. You would either need to build it yourself (on another machine, building it on that one would take hours) or find a pre-compiled package online and use that.

As for games under WINE in general, usually older games work better as there as been more time to adapt WINE to whatever specific quirks they have, and popular older games doubly so. So something like the Sims should be fine.

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Thanks for the answer, a slackpkg for wine is available at slacky.eu for Slackware-13.37. I'll try that out on a virtual machine before installing the laptop.

Are there any special requirements for the graphics-adapter? The old machine has afaik 32MB of video-memory, not much in these days.

Markus

Requirements for WINE, or for the Sims?

WINE should run with less than 32MB of video RAM.

Sims 1 should play on that machine, the later versions wont. Sims 2 needs 128 MB video card (plus support for Pixel Shader 2.0).

BTW, since its a P3-era laptop its probably using intel 8XX on board video, which was substandard even when it was new. Pity its not possible to change video cards on laptops that old.....

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You will find Wine in AlienBob's repository.
For your questions about The Sims, it is a pure 2D game, so the graphics card doesn't really matter, as you can see in the minimum system requirements:But besides that, according to the Wine Application Database you will have serious problems to run The Sims with Wine.

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If you are loading a LINUX system, why stop with WINDOWS games? Load a few of the great Linux free games.
Check out the Linux Games Project, and some of the LQ articles listing great free Linux games.

If you can find out what kind of games she already likes and focus on games that relate, you are more likely to make her happy.


[ that last reads like a good philosophy to drive all m/F relationships, now that I think about it ]

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Hello,

thanks for all your valuable answers, I've checked the old laptop again, I found that it isn't an old P3 but a Celeron. The graphics adapter is an Nvidia.

I want try that all out and will also take a look at the Linux Game Project.

And then I'll post here what happened.

Markus

Here's a game idea:

http://narcissu.insani.org/down.html

They love the flash games these days. However with 256MB of ram you will be lucky to even get one of those running on any OS. Good luck.

Hi dugan, thanks for this hint, I looked on the pages, but it (as expected) is advertisement or Ubuntu related and I'm no Ubuntu user.

I'd nevertheless recommend that one gets the software (games and others) from the official repositories of the distribution or at least from the official site of the game.

Markus

Why is xzcallaway wrong for saying that games can be downloaded from the [deleted by Mod.]? That's where I get them. Well if you are an Ubuntu user. I would also recomend [deleted by Mod.] and [deleted by Mod.].

Mod note: Read the posts immediately before & after this one.

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Full of full-page ads for scams and malware. A very dangerous site. DO NOT visit this. It also has absolutely no content that can't be better gotten elsewhere. (Seriously, reputable package repositories don't use Filesonic for hosting).

This is, in fact, one of the links that xzcallaway was banned for posting (in almost every one of his posts, no less). Since your only post was to leap to a spammer's defence and then repost the same links that the spammer was spamming, I'd say it's very possible that you two are the same poster.

Now, I realize that some of the software there is original. I did try to download one of the offerings from that site ("Netpix"), First, I noticed that has never been recommended by anyone who wasn't trying to drive traffic to the site. I opened it and I saw that it would put files everywhere, including executables in both /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin. Tried to run it and it asked for sudo access. For a "wallpaper changer and screensaver adder". Way to follow best practises and standards. That should tell you what kind of garbage the software there actually is.

Furthermore, let me point out that the only people who ever recommend [deleted by Mod.] on the Ubuntu forums are the ones who have it as their signature and/or promote it in every post. The domain name ([deleted by Mod.]) is also calculated to profit off misspellings of an unrelated reputable site (dotdeb.org). These are pretty big hints as to where your motives are.

Now, you might pretend not to understand why xzcallaway was wrong, but no-one else is that dishonest.

1 members found this post helpful.

dugan,

Sorry to butcher your post like that, I did it for to err on the side of safety.


smilepiper`,

If you repost mod deleted spammer material again, you will confirm that you too are a spammer & be banned from this site permanently.

Am I the only person who remembers Mandrake Linux Gaming Edition:

Wikipedia - Mandrake Linux Gameing Edition

That came with an official copy of The Sims that seemed to run with no problems, they used Wine to make it run as well.

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Hello Krane,

it's a nice Idea, but I have to install a wireless USB-adapter on the laptop and this seems only to work with recent kernels. But thanks for your answer.

BTW: I have to configure the machine in a way that formerly non-Linux-users can use it. And because I am a longterm Slackware user (since 1994) it is easier for me to do it with Slackware.

Markus