Ut2004 freezes right after splash screen.
 

I am running an AMD 3000+ with the Geforce 6600 GT PCIE16

I can install the game fine and run it once, works fine. Try to open it up a second time and the whole system freezes after the splash screen, right when it goes fullscreen. I have to hard reboot and then I may or may not be able to play it again. It is very random, although I'd say it's probably 1 of 8 tries that it actually works. I am running Fedora Core 4 x86_64.

have you updated your nvidia drivers recently?

have you updated your openGl library recently?

if not, try it, if so, that may be the problem

I am up to date on both of those two items. Atleast as up to date for the openGL as comes with FC4.

what kind of 64 bit processor do you have, it may be that UT is unstable on x86-64

The AMD 3000+ 64... and it doens't seem logical to me for it to be unstable as it's bundled with x86_64 binaries under Linux.

just a thought... do any other open gl apps give you trouble?

I do not think so... I can run glxgears for hours and it wouldn't fail. The thing is, UT2004 will run perfect about 15% of the time.

Just so you know: Although there are indeeed 64bit binaries of ut2004, they are actually known to be unstable. I have trouble running ut2004-demo on my Gentoo machine sometimes, but not nearly as frequently as you do.

p.s. I've never trusted Fedora Core, and isn't FC4 still in testing?

I actually just installed Gentoo about 2 or 3 days ago and I am having the same problems. Maybe I'll have to look into running the 32bit app and see if that solves my problems. And no, FC4 was released about a week ago. And you're right.... I wouldn't trust it =]

You know. I haven't had a problem that serious. Everything ran fine for nearly a week running the demo, then it started freezing up on the map ons-Torlan. I'm gonna check the other maps (hoping this is a map-specific bug) to make sure they don't lock up for no reason. Don't have any trouble starting the game though....I do have trouble starting doom3 occasionally though...

possible solution
 

I'm running AMD64 3500+ with an nVidia 6600 GT PCI Express card on SUSE 9.3 with latest drivers, etc. I had this exact same problem. This is how I fixed it:

Go into your ~/.ut2004/System/ut2004.ini file and look for

FullscreenViewportX=
FullscreenViewportY=

these lines will appear under both the [WinDrv.WindowsClient] and [SDLDrv.SDLClient] sections. I changed it in both places. These numbers specify the resolution that ut2004 starts in. Make sure that ut starts with the same resolution as your desktop.

Another thing that worked was to start ut in windowed mode. To do that look for

StartupFullscreen=True

and change it to False. This setting is under the same sections as the other ones above. That also worked but then you would have to play in a window which would suck. Hope this helps.

I have figured out what MY problem was. Although similar to yours, it has what appears to be a different cause:

ut2004 was ported by icculus, and no offense, but his ports are known for memory leakage. With an ancient graphics card and only 512Mb of memory, my computer was simply running out of places to put things after previously addressed space was no longer utilized by the game, but remained "uncleared" so to speak.

I had similiar problems with FX 5600 and axp 1800+.
The 'vanilla' ut2k4 would run fine, most of the time. After an hour or so it sometimes either crashed, froze or rebooted the machine.
With some mods the crash was inevitable and came quicker, especially with Frag.ops. Sometimes it would just kick me back to the desktop and messed up the resolution, but sometimes the machine would just lock down, couldn't even ssh in for a clean reboot.
I've since upgraded to PCI-E 6600GT and a64 3000+ and vanilla ut2k4 seems to be working, though I've only played for an hour of deathmatch, haven't had the nerve to fire up frag.ops.
Doom3 on the other hand reboots the machine when loading levels.
I'll be sure to try your tricks when I get home.

Purple Cow, You Are running the Exact Hardware I setup I am Running... Atleast for the Graphics card and Processor... What distro are you using? It seems that I have had both problems with Fedora Core 4 and Gentoo 2005.0 (Stage 3) and UT2004. Memtest86 ran for well over 24 hours with 0 errors and my tempuratures are fine. Currently are 36CPU and 56GPU. I think those are fine atleast.... What are you doing in order to get the game to run correctly? I've tried numerous things with no luck. 1GB Corsair RAM and DFI-LanParty board is the only two things left out of my Specs. I hope you can help me as I've been really excited to run UT2004 on my new system. Also, Doom 3 would freeze right after I clicked to start the game. Also, GLXGears runs fine for as long as I let it run.

**Sorry for the paragraph that's in no order at all...(It's late)

I'm running Mandriva 2005LE. Maybe you should try the 6xxx nvidia drivers? This is a long shot, but are you sure your power supply is adequate?
There can't be any problems with nvagp, since it's PCI-E. Maybe there's something similiar for pci express? I got the board yesterday so there hasn't been much time to explore.