[Stratus_ss]

Well as for new stuff I dont know but I can tell you that Trine works great out of the box... fun game too

[dark bishop]

would anybody recommend play on Linux or wine doors?

[I.M.O.G.]

Windows is a better experience, taking installation and operation into consideration.

Lots of games run fine in Linux if you are willing to do a bit of configuration and research.

[Mpegger]

Not that I'm a Linux user, but how is Nvidia dropping thier open source drivers going to affect gaming with Linux? Is ATI a viable alternative now, or still not worth it?

[I.M.O.G.]

Makes no difference, the driver was garbage and only supported 2d acceleration. ATI is as viable of an alternative as it would be otherwise, regardless of this change from nvidia.

If you want to game in Linux on nVidia, it's my understanding that you should be using their proprietary driver, or you should be watching developments with the Nouveau driver project:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

[Stratus_ss]

Originally Posted by dark bishop

would anybody recommend play on Linux or wine doors?

Haven't used wine doors but PlayOnLinux has been good to me.

ATI is still a LARGE pain. I mean it can be hit and miss, but for me its been mostly miss. It has been a royal PITA I have a 4670 and it was definatelly fighting an uphill battle to get the stupid thing to work well. It still causes the system to freak out from time to time

[pejsaboy]

Originally Posted by I.M.O.G.

Makes no difference, the driver was garbage and only supported 2d acceleration. ATI is as viable of an alternative as it would be otherwise, regardless of this change from nvidia.

If you want to game in Linux on nVidia, it's my understanding that you should be using their proprietary driver, or you should be watching developments with the Nouveau driver project:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Is there an issue with using nVidia's proprietary driver aside from the fact it isn't open source? I don't currently have an nVidia card, or a linux installation, but it's something I generally come back to from time to time.

[I.M.O.G.]

I haven't had any issues with several ATI cards on Linux. I've used the proprietary catalyst driver, as well as both the radeon and radeonhd. I haven't done gaming, but 3D works.

There is no issue with using the proprietary driver, it's just not open source - if it doesn't work and it's a driver issue, you won't know why really, and you'll only find limited help because no one knows how the proprietary driver works/breaks other than NVIDIA.

[pejsaboy]

ok cool, I assumed that was the case but wanted to make sure. I'll probably try linux gaming with my 4870 at some point, but right now life isn't giving me a whole lot of time for tinkering

[Vovan]

GNU/Linux is awesome operating system. Both technically and in spirit (licensing, structure).
Ive been using ms systems since dos5.0, until vista. That, with me having spent months to learn to tweak xp to my taste, has proven that Im choosing the wrong way.

Besides, hearing that your OS is gonna need extra 150% of memory just installed and 200% more CPU power just for "digital rights management" (DRM) to work smoothly, thing you never want, leaving you without a choice, lifting any work you done tweaking the system to your tastes off - isnt nice at all.
Im not mentioning very very bad security, closed source, running costs, amount of time to keep it running here. Knowning the money you spend every 5 years on new version is used for funding Bill and his bashing of open standarts isnt nice either.

MS just does not care about what people want, but it cares about what its partners(till ms buys them) and itself want. So that sayd I went on and installed Ubuntu Studio 8.04. Kinda didnt boot into XP for two years since then, at all. Now, running amd64 gentoo, I wonder where all this upgrade money go. Seriously, besides winapi and gui stuff, what are they doing with money? Like 90% of dlls in windows are BSD or LGPL(open source). Directx and opengl are sponsored by buying games and videocards.

Now, that was a little,but important background, summing up one thing - linux IS capable to push windows and ms from x86 desktops as an Operating System, as a base for apps you put on it, regardless of the development model(of course GPL is best). It is a VERY capable OS. Technically every part is here already except opengl support. In this fronts we have AMD and Nvidia.

With Nvidia long supporting non-ms OSes for ages, although OpenGL driver stays same as on windows, only small part is changed to make it work on linux. That means, although it works, it will always lag behind windows in terms of release date, performance(when comparing same driver versions) and features. And it will always stay closed source. Having closed source in a driver, thing that stays in kernel, isnt nice at all, something that even Linus Torvalds does not tolerate. Security and stability issues you cannot trace or solve because driver code is obfuscated and debug-stripped, ABI forces you use specific software versions, hardware support dropping when manufacturer decides it.

The reason Nvidia removed their working, but pretty simple 2d driver is - noveau. A bunch of individual developers hacking nvidia drivers, trying to solved some unaddressed issues in xorg-nv, make it do some basic 3D for compiz. Nvidia "did not try to prevent this", but then just decided to stop supporting their opensource driver.

Even their much appreciated vdpau video acceleration on linux was basically remapped from windows driver.
So, to sum things up, nvidia linux driver is just a windows driver, that was very nicely remapped to linux. They are not improving Xorg or linux, they are not providing opensource driver. It isn't even native. But they are making their hardware work on linux to some good degree.

Ati, on the contrary, has two drivers:
closed source FGLRX, which is basically corporate driver for UNIX, sharing some portions of windows code and being very slow and somewhat buggy in 2D and feature lacking in 3D(as compared to nvidia).

And opensource xorg-ati (radeon), which is a complete linux rewrite, opensource, on documentation provided by AMD, with their support(there are three full-time developers working on it). While initially lacking any 3D acceleration, they are catching up quickly( sample, remember its old x1900 card), with 5xxx series support being added, improving linux video architecture as well(Gallium), which nvidia simply ignores, being unable to build their closed source blob on. There is very good chance video acceleration on GPU will be emerged soon, as well as native OpenGL support broadened. This is the driver the way it is meant to be played on linux.

Regarding WINE, it is a nice project which also starts to incorporate some risks and contraversy for linux. WINE is awesome when it comes to starting programs or abadonware, which do not run on linux or refuse to run on newest windows version(thats not joke, blood2 runs on wine and fails on xp and later).

But it also introduces winapi on linux(isnt keeping separated better than polluting?). I have not so long ago had had a windows worm run on linux. It didnt manage to infect anything, but it had full access to my user data and everythere I had .exe files on the data partition, it has tried to insert its code, but failed (17K payload in files with random name, even in archives). You basically do huge security hit on linux for using wine.

It falsely informs software developers that their software is linux-compatible(where in fact it is emulated, it is. with slowdowns, bugs etc); hence developers do not publish linux version, but just ask to use WINE. This is very bad.

It performs much more buggy than on windows on recent titles, as result of WINE being a reverse engineered (or chinese walled) software and result of lower perfomance for nvidia drivers(mentioned above). I also, owning legal copies of Painkiller and NOLF2, unable to play it in WINE for keyboard W/S keys behaving very weirdly.

It associates MIME for basic files to itself. After you install WINE, text documents are opened in... hold breath.. notepad. HTML files on... IE or Firefox running on wineserver, if you install it as it suggests. I have no idea why. And although I found out a solution, the bug is not addressed at all.

Hence I personally HIGHLY recommend to play windowze games on windows. Even if it hurts you deeply in the heart. Install it on separate partition, without networking, so you dont need to buy antivirus or risk network attack; just for games. Because if you choose to use WINE, not only you will be exposed to bugs and troubles(like finding no-cds, putting your linux to risk); you will also have to buy(vote with money) NVIDIA card and use their closed source driver(instead of ATI which is actually WORKING on native 3D for linux and making FUTURE possible).

My current card is geforce 9800gt, if you are interested And I tried to buy and use 4650 in linux and failed. Yes, non opensource driver is really bad for work and far from ideal for 3d and games, but they are improving opensource fast(ubuntu,arch,gentoo are quickest to fetch them), something nvidia will VERY improbably ever implement. And with native, bug-free, easily installed opengl3, gaming segment will drastically grow on linux. Im looking to switching to radeon 4830 from XFX(for its thermic design, I have desktop case, and for ati policy) now and from now on start supporting ATI.

PS.
Its been long since I posted on overclockers.com Yay, but it happend.

PPS.
Hope I didnt hurt anyone feelings, no intentions really, just sharing experience.

[Adhoc]

When installing games off of a steam account, do I have to do anything other than letting steam download and install the game?

[Shelnutt2]

Originally Posted by Adhoc

When installing games off of a steam account, do I have to do anything other than letting steam download and install the game?

Most of the time probably not, however you might want to check the appdb and see if there is anything special for your game. So basically install it, and if it has issues go check the appdb and see what's up.

[Nechen]

Not to sound like Johnny Raindcloud here but I have a few warnings and suggestions from my brief adventure with Debian and STEAM.

1.) Use Crossover Linux, sure its $30-$50 but I found it was worth it (So much better than standalone WINE)

2.) Everything on STEAM will be hit or miss, I found all the Source games ran just fine while others like The Witcher had VERY strange issues like the HUD not showing the health bar properly.

3.) Anything beyond Source is probably going to fail, Battlefield BC2 is a great example of utter failure.

4.) I found performance under Debian to be about 25% less at best and only DX9 of course, this was on my sig rig keep in mind.

Of course I only messed with it for about a month and I'm nowhere near "Experienced" by any stretch of imagination.

[petteyg359]

Steam games that work for me:

• Braid
• Burnout Paradise
• Civilization III, IV, V
• Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike Source
• Day of Defeat and Day of Defeat Source
• Defense Grid
• Garry's Mod
• Hinterland
• HL2 and mods (Dystopia)
• Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2
• Railroad Tycoon 2
• RollerCoaster Tycoon 3
• Team Fortress 2
• Torchlight
• Trine
• Tropico 3
• Unreal Tournament 2004, 3

I'm sure there are others (I have 196 in my list), but those are all I have installed right now.

[Nechen]

Wow I never managed to get UT3 or Tropico3 to work lol

[Stratus_ss]

Originally Posted by petteyg359

Steam games that work for me:

• Civilization III, IV, V
• Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike Source
• Day of Defeat and Day of Defeat Source
• Defense Grid
• HL2 and mods (Dystopia)
• Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2
• Railroad Tycoon 2
• RollerCoaster Tycoon 3
• Torchlight
• Trine
• Tropico 3
• Unreal Tournament 2004, 3

I'm sure there are others (I have 196 in my list), but those are all I have installed right now.

I can confirm these work for me with no fiddling.(note that I altered it to remove games I dont have)

[KingAroan]

Do you know if there is a way to share games from duel boxing. I currently have all of my games installed on steam threw a shared hard drive between both OS'es And I do not want to have to download and have the games installed twice?

[petteyg359]

You could try ntfs-3g, it has worked for me in the past

[KingAroan]

I couldn't get the key file to work but its still installing properly it looks like, at least I hope.

[Ba!nesy]

can anyone confirm that the pre-made script works for newer versions of Ubuntu, like 10.04 10.10 and 11.04? Because I see that its originally for 9.04...