one must always trust one's distro. for about a month now, i've been trying to run windows games on linux. a crazy notion, given the bleeding edge nature of wine. i went crazy and even went so far as to install ubuntu on my linux box--- as a separate partition beside my gentoo. i was desperate to get direct rendering running and thus opengl.
the applications for third world nations would be great! people can run games on cheap hardware, something most internet cafes would probably benefit from. after all, if you could somehow do away with windows and its inherent security flaws, that would be great isn't it?
i don't mean to emphasize the flaws of windows--- i rather think there is a place in the world for it. but given a public terminal that lets you browse the internet, play games and do limited word processing, one can not possible contain the myriad users who would be running the system. linux would be an ideal platform for a multi-role public terminal because you'd be able to limit their access rights. and no, vista would just be too darn expensive to deploy.
i've been going crazy trying to get gentoo to run direct rendering. i couldn't get it to work. and a quick look at the gentoo forums said that though ati's linux drivers are sucky, my radeon 9250 card should run. hmm. insane.
i decided to run ubuntu on a separate partition. i just need to know my video card could work.
ubuntu feisty is a great distro! it ran direct rendering out of the box. its installer is one of the prettiest i've seen--- and very easy to run. it was able to detect all my peripherals. my one comment is this: i had to manually run pppoeconf to get my dsl running and the network panel remains a close sibling of the one windows xp has. it may be because mac os x has spoiled me on that regard--- networking is a breeze on os x with zeroconf networking.
wine--- on the other hand wasn't available on feisty. it is on edgy and some of the drivers had to be installed. still: no big, right? so i did and winehq's wiki worked rather well.
knights of the old republic's install ran pretty well just as it did on my gentoo. it is my only game, so pretty much there isn't much of a choice. then i hit a snag. the game wouldn't play, wouldn't go past the menu. winehq's app db revealed that there have been successful installs of knights and that they were able to play.
i decided to copy my ubuntu's xorg config and transfer it to my gentoo box. after all if that worked... it should on gentoo right? it didin't. direct rendering wouldn't work.
i killed X, ran eselect opengl set xorg-x11 then, rsync'd and updated portage and downloaded the newest gentoo-sources (gentoo's patched linux kernel). i decided to remove the dri--- (it was recommended by the gentoo howtos for ati) from the kernel but i wouldn't be installing the ati-drivers. i fetched xorg-x11's drm instead. the compile was a success. reboot.
login to gnome and ran glxinfo | grep rendering yielded: success! direct rendering was working! i loaded up kotor's disc one. then ran wine. start game. and kotor's video came to life! yes!
then it crashed.
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