Linux as a Gaming Platform

This past week, I've gotten more and more Windows-native games (as well as *nix ports) to run on my Arch x86_64 box. I originally built the computer with gaming in mind, but with Windows 7 getting worse and worse by the minute, booting into Windows just to play a game was becoming a more and more laborious task, not to mention that dirty feeling you get when you boot a computer and the Windows logo pops up.

I had originally used the latest stable version of Wine (1.0.1) obtained from Arch's User Repository, but found it was just as buggy as my previous Wine experiences. I managed to get Halo to run as mentioned in a previous post, however there were still relatively minor issues that persisted, such as the odd screen flicker, graphical problems on screen panning, and an odd box of discoloration that appeared in the top-right corner of the screen.

On a whim I decided to upgrade to the latest developmental version of wine (1.4.1), which was also in the AUR, though the PKGBUILD required some minor editing as wget was met with a 404 error trying to download the necessary files from the link given in the PKGBUILD. Luckily a fellow Archer posted a revised PKGBUILD in the comments, and it worked like a charm. Once the new Wine was up and running, I double-checked Halo to make sure the upgrade didn't brick it... Far from, it increased performance ten-fold, which is hard for me to say because it really wasn't bad at all to begin with. Suffice to say an immediate performance increase was more than noticeable.

After perusing the Wine AppDB for games I owned that were known to work well with Wine, I decided I'd give Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source a go. I encountered, and eventually fixed the same problem in both games. They would both load, but neither rendered any sound. After a quick trip through 'winecfg' I set the sound to OSS instead of ALSA, and it now works wonderfully. Not quite sure why, since ALSA is recommended explicitly over OSS for Wine, but with ALSA I can only play Halo, and with OSS all three games work. I suspect it has something to do with Steam, but I'll leave well-enough alone for now.

Now for the less-troublesome ports. There are countless remakes of the original DOS doom, most adding additional functionalities such as the ability to jump/crouch or have crosshairs, et cetera. Chocolate-Doom (AUR, detecting a trend here?) is a play on 'Vanilla Doom', as in the untouched original DOS version. It is as close to the original as possible, and preserves only original functionalities, as well as the original bugs. Using chocolate-doom I was able to play Doom 1, Doom 2, TNT, and Plutonia, just by setting the -iwad option on the command line and the path to the wad. Now I bought the id Super Pack on Steam some time ago, so I have access to the WADS on my Windows partition. Of course starting the game via a rather long terminal command isn't exactly efficient, so I wound up toying around with my ~/.bashrc file and got a rather satisfactory result.

~/.bashrc is used to create 'Aliases' for commands entered into the shell, using a very simple configuration file. Here's the portion of my ~/.bashrc pertaining to chocolate-doom:

alias chocolate-doom1="chocolate-doom -iwad ~/Data/DOOM.WAD"
alias chocolate-doom2="chocolate-doom -iwad ~/Data/DOOM2.WAD"
alias chocolate-doom-plutonia="chocolate-doom -iwad ~/Data/PLUTONIA.WAD"
alias chocolate-doom-tnt="chocolate-doom -iwad ~/Data/TNT.WAD"

Now instead of using the -iwad argument and specifying the full file path, I can just append a bit to the end of the command, so 'chocolate-doom1' will launch chocolate-doom using the DOOM.WAD. Much more efficient.

Getting away from the first person shooter category for a bit, Astromenace(AUR) is an extremely addictive space-scrolling 3D spaceship shooter, that is open-source. It also features RPG elements, as you buy a spaceship (from a rather large selection), and set about custom-configuring it with various hardware components such as shields, power-sources, engines, and of course weaponry. You earn money at the end of each level, which you can spend on these things as well as hull-upgrades. The difficulty level is also very customizable, you aren't presented with a simple easy/medium/hard menu, you actually get to specify various game mechanics such as damage bonuses, armor bonuses, and the like. You can also speed up/slow down the game in play using the F5-F7 keys. It is extremely addictive, and took up a few days of my life, but it is by far the best native Linux game of its kind I have ever seen.

My only hesitation about Linux originally was having to sacrifice quality gaming time to gain all of Linux's other benefits, but thanks to an increase in the availability of native/ported games for Linux, and the truly fantastic work Wine's developers are doing, I may eventually be able to rid my HDD of that ugly NTFS partition for good.

A whole 'nother level of geekdom.

Two days ago, me and two friends spent about 8 hours in my 15 degree garage "linuxing". Box A was a server running the new dual core atom 330, and Box B was an old Pentium IV box. We'll start with Box A:

Debian 5 Lenny (i386) was actually a breeze to install, except when we went to install grub it defaulted to hd(0) which was a compact flash card on the motherboard, removed that, reinstalled (just goes quicker) and it was up and running. Since it had no wireless card, I had previously saved several debian packages to a flash drive for installation (such as openssh-server) and installed them after I spent an hour trying to figure out how to mount the drive. I feel a bit foolish actually, I tried pretty much every argument and every configuration of 'mount', but the reason it was not working was simply because I didn't specify a partition. I typed 'mount /dev/sdb /media/Lexar' when I should have typed '/dev/sdb1'. Got that mounted, installed the openssh-server and openssh-blacklist packages, and powered down the box. Then I took it upstairs and plugged it into the router, configured /etc/networking/interfaces to auto connect to an ethernet connection and removed all the peripherals leaving the server on.

We went back to the garage to work on Box B, which was to become a dedicated bittorrent box, and simultaneously worked on the Debian Box off of my laptop via ssh. The Debian box was to become a CSS (Counter Strike Source) server, so we configured that using the following sequence of commands (obtained from this guide:):

$ mkdir srcds
$ cd srcds
$ wget http://www.cstrike-planet.com/dls/hldsupdatetool.bin (usb)
$ chmod +x hldsupdatetool.bin
$ ./hldsupdatetool.bin
$ chmod +x steam
$ ./steam -command update -game "Counter-Strike Source" -dir .
$ ./srcds_run -game cstrike -autoupdate +maxplayers 20 +map de_aztec > srcds.log 2>&1 &

We then ran the server and checked the logs. Everything seemingly went fine except three textures were missing from the map. It was at this point we gave up for the night so I am unsure as to whether it was that particular map, or if there is a deeper problem at hand. We'll figure it out eventually.

While configuring the Debian CSS dedi over ssh, we also worked on the bittorrent box, which contains a rather ingenious little integration of mine that uses an aim client to add .torrents to Vuze's queue. We installed Mint 8 on the box which took about a year and a half running off the live CD, then installed the latest version of Vuze from their website (version in repos is really outdated. Using Pidgin's autoaccept plugin, we configured an aim account running on Pidgin that would autoaccept file transfers from my friend's screen name and save them in ~/Uploads. Firstly the plugin must be enabled, then on the buddy list you must right click the screename you want to authorize then go to autoaccept and always allow. Next, we configured Vuze to automatically scan that directory (~/Uploads) every 60 seconds for new .torrents, copy them to ~/Torrents, and add them to it's queue. Finally we set both Pidgin and Vuze to launch at login (During Mint 8 install we opted to not require login, ergo when the power button is pressed you are taken to the desktop, not the login window) and voila!

I eventually want to get vnc working on the bittorrent box, as well as actually play a game of CSS on the server but yesterday I was just too tired and wound up laying in bed all day watching a Law and Order: SVU marathon. I'll eventually write up a more complete (with pictures) guide on how to get the Pidgin/Vuze integration too.