What's the deal with playing games on Linux?
I've been using Linux as my main OS for about a year now and my only OS since about July and the only thing I can't get to work is games.
I battled with getting a pre-installed Unreal Tournament functioning through Wine and it ran sweetly for about 4 months before deciding for no reason apparent to me to stop working.
I figured that its just one of those things and decided to try finding something else to play.
My computer has a 700MHz Celeron Processor with 192MB RAM. It has on-board sound and graphics (Intel 810i). At this particular time there is no chance of me upgrading until at least the summer.
Because of my computer specs OpenGL runs soooo slowly that its not worth bothering with.
I've been trying to get various versions of Doom or Quake running but for reasons that I don't know I just can't get them to compile, and on the one occasion that I did compile something it just wouldn't load.
Why is it so hard to find any games that work on linux? I used to have Doom running on a 486 for christ's sake!!!
Can someone give me some advise or suggestions of something to keep me entertained? Thanks

doom3 and ut2k4 work without wine, there are native linux binaries for them.

Sadly valve didn't follow suit.

Idsoftware games tend to work very nicely under linux and usually come in linux versions.

Now, as to why your game just stopped working, there are many reasons to this problem. Try starting the game up through a console and see if it returns any error messages. Sometimes its something trivial like re-installing alsa-drivers.


Just post the error here and maybe we can help fix it .

america's army is pretty fun, but am not sure if playable on your hardware. neverwinter nights also has linux binary available if you own the cd for window. then of course there is tuxracer, tuxkart, armagetron, gltron, frozen-bubble that i play periodically

nwn I got a few days ago, it's a fantastic game

ror, it just gets better with time. There a couple addon games available once you clear that one.

nwn was working well for me...
but after an update a while back
i lost all my menu buttons and cursors
in the game that made it kinda hard to play

just wondering...are you referring to Doom3 or the original Doom series?
(eg. doom, doom2, tnt, plutonia playable with prBoom or equivalent)

The original stuff. The reason I started looking at older games is because nothing recent will run on my computer.

Things like TuxRacer, Frozen Bubble, TuxKart, GLTron, Doom3, America's Army wont work because its too slow.
Open Gears clocks out at about 42 fps.

As for the trouble I had with UT through wine, its not a problem on the Linux side, its just decided that it was never setup properly and it can't detect my video device becuase it thinks its being run on Windows....

I tried using xdoom, but it just refused to compile, and I've had a lot of trouble with compiling SDL_net and SDL_sound.
If I install as a package then they're undetected. What the hell is wrong with my computer?

There are also Sid Meier's Alpha Centaury, Postal, Medal of Honour, Hopkins FBI, Homeworld, Heavy Gear...etc

Listing games at me really isn't much help you know...

have you tried the PrBoom slackpack off of linuxpackages.net?

also, don't know if you remember these older games...
but there is a Z interpreter for linux to play the 'ol infocom games.

what error(s) do you receive when trying to compile PrBoom, Doom Legacy, etc. from source?
can you compile something like NetHack?

I run the Linux native version of Unreal Tournament with few problems.
It's been stable for over 2 years & runs great.
Just download the linux installer & patches & you can install from your windows cd version.
That will probably be easier than running/fixing wine.

Quake3 is super easy to install in linux & it's about as hard on the pc as Unreal T is.
So you might want to check out that.