well, I've been struggling trying to game in Slackware 8.1 recently. I was shocked when I booted into XP the other day and gaming was so much smoother and more playable. The games I'm using are written for Linux (ie, no Wine) like Descent 3 (LOKI version), Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003...

Is there a distro out there that would be good for games, or better yet is optimized for gaming? I'm not too worried about ease of install, the more I have to configure, the more I learn, so it's a positive thing...

Mandrake put out a gaming edition with winex but it's version 8.2 and 9 it already out. The gaming edition is geared toward playing windows only games in linux using winex... it works on alot of games but the frame rates drop approx 50% from what it would do in windows.

www.tomshardware.com did up a review on gaming with winex if you want to read up on it.

Cheers,
Muddy

Ehhhh... ixion is talking about native linux games!
I'd suggest Gentoo, because you build it on your own machine, so you can optimize it to bits! Then I would also suggest a lightweight desktop, such as openbox, fluxbox, waimea or icewm, so you can spend your cpu&ram power at your gamez.

Mandrake tends to be very gaming friendly. I get good response from Quake 3, Descent 3, SimCity 3000, Terminus, and other native games. I also get good response with WineX.

Oh,... the Mandrake Gamer's edition was based on the 8.1 distro not the 8.2. It included The Sims, a version made by Transgaming...

It may be that you haven't optimized your implementation of Slack. I find that it's usually the OpenGL settings that mess things up. It also depends on your hardware. Some video cards just don't have good Linux support yet. NVidia cards kick butt in Linux when configured correctly.

cool, I have a Geforce 3 Ti200.. is there a tutorial or site I can go to for tweaking an NVIDIA card in Linux? I really haven't done any tweaking other than disabling the httpd, inetd, etc. from startup and uninstalling a few unneeded packages. what else do you suggest?

I found this on the linuxgaming website http://linuxgaming.net:
a link to the YanC homepage http://yanc.sourceforge.net/index-en.html
is also on that page.

btw i do play ut2003 under linux (slackware distri) and it works as good as in windoze if not better.

EDIT: fixed the linuxgaming link.

If you're looking for an optimized distro, then Gentoo Linux, which you build from source code updates, is one of the most optimized versions around. I found it took an awful lot of time to put a system together, so the gains in speed are offset by the great amount of time it takes to bulld the system.

For me, at least, a better compromise is to put together a Libranet system, which uses Debian packaging. It's very nicely optimized and runs exceptionally well on my Dell Dimension 4100, and it happens to be a complete system, too, so that's an advantage, plus the Debian packaging enables you to quickly and easily build precisely the software you want to have on the system.

If you want a really fast and responsive system, take care to enable the network objects and startup subsystems that you need, and disable everything else. I think you'll find with Libranet, you have a pretty solid starting point, and you may not even need to mess with it, but you can optimize most any system by enabling only those services that you actually use.