i've posted about this before, except it's a bit different this time.

i've got a handful of games that don't work. no errors, no explanations, nothing. the computer just sits there like i never told it to run a game. before the answer was solved by using the run command prompt, but even that does nothing now (since i've reinstalled linux). the games are:

tuxracer
chromium
armage tron

and there's a "toy" that does the same :

open universe

anyway, like i said there's no explanation of error message. i've reinstalled the games and that didn't work either. any help is more than appreciated.

thanks.

i think they are all OpenGL games... have you got that set up right? can other GL programs work?

Try starting the game from a terminal window. That should usually give you error output. Or check your logs. Finding out what's going wrong might be easier then guessing what could be wrong.

-those are the only games that don't work as far as i know...all the others do.

-how would i go about starting a game from a terminal window? i know how to get a terminal window, but i dunno how to actually run executables, i don't think.

thanks.

i figured out how to run tuxracer from a terminal and it gave me a "no GTX" error or something to that effect. so i decided to check out my display settings (i thought that's what GTX has to do with...?). I tried changing from FreeX 4.2.0 to FreeX 3.2.2 with 3d exceleration. as the warnings said it froze my computer...not a problem really...i switched back to FreeX4.2.0 only to find that the games will now run, but they are very sluggish, making them impossible to play anyway. i changed my monitor, since linux recognized it incorrectly, but that had no effect on it.

so what now?

could it be my resolution?
maybe video card drivers? (it has recognized my video card correctly)

thanks for reading.

What grpahics card are you using?

If it is an invidia card, then you will need to edit your xf86config to support the nvidia card. I believe that there are a couple of threads about this in the forums, so a search should give you a few.

i have an Nvidia GeForce 2 Mx 32 MB...if i were download a linux driver from their website, would that change the mxconfig or do i still need to do that manually?
tanx.

OK, first of all, it's XFree, not FreeX. Secondly, you should not downgrade. Although 3.2.2 claims to have better GLX (not GTX... that's a type of motor oil... doh!) support, it doesn't work with GeForce cards. You will need to reinstall 4.2.0 and then go to here and download the files. A word of advice: get the source files (the ones that end in .tar.gz). They're not hard to install, providing you follow the instructions in the README file, and they're more flexible than their RPM counterparts.

As for editing the XF86Config-4 file, it's all explained in detail in the README file, and I know for a fact that I have explained it several times on this board.

You will need to be in runlevel 3 to do the following (type telinit 3 in a console).

A very quick rundown:
cd ~
mkdir nvidia
cd nvidia
tar -zxpvf /somewhere/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-2960.tar.gz
tar -zxpvf /somewhere/NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2960.tar.gz
su root (then enter root's password)
cd NVIDIA_kernel-1.0.-2960
make install
cd ../NVIDIA_GLX=1.0-2960
make install
cd /etc/X11
cp XF86Config-4 XF86Config-4.original
emacs XF86Config-4
Then you need to find the section that loads modules, and add
Load "glx"
and make sure that you remove the entries for dri and GLcore. You then need to go to the bottom and replace the line that reads:
Driver "nv" with Driver "nvidia"
Save the file and exit emacs. Then:
exit (to return to normal user's mode)
cd ~
startx to check that it all works.

Hope this is helpful. If you get into more trouble

i have already fixed the problem by editing the XF86Config-4 file...thanks for your help...