On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 12:26:48AM -0700, ben wrote: > send me a list of what he'd need to do the same, and i'll work on enabling > the transition.
At the time I did this, I was taking a PII 450 with a 15GB drive, 100MB RealTek nic, and a nVidia GeForce2 AGP and 256MB of RAM. More is better on the processor, video card and RAM. I would recommend at least a 1GHz CPU, 384MB RAM, and any current nVidia card. Pick a sound card that the kernel itself can handle. My ISA soundblaster 16 still rocks the house. For a box primarily used for gaming, go with a base Debian install with as few daemons as you can get away with. Run the MTA from inetd. Go with sid so you always have the newest X; STAY AWAY from KDE and Gnome; it'll slow down your machine dramatically and you're gonna have a bad time. Use the most minimalistic WM you can tolerate (though one Linux gamer I know doesn't even have a wm installed on his LAN party box). It's not that all these things take up huge amounts of resources, it's that you can squeek every last drop of power out for the game and reclaiming a few CPU cycles and even a little bit of RAM gives the game that much more power when you need it. Especially considering if you're at a LAN party, getting absurdly high frame rates at high resolutions and deep color depths is where it's at (I never understood this part for anything other than a DSW, if I play on a resolution higher than 800x600 or 1024x768, I start to lose the ability to orient myself quickly and keep a razor-sharp aim at higher resolutions (past that, to me, the picture starts to feel a bit too concave. I'd rather have a narrow range of vision and depend on audio in my headphones than try to aim with the field of vision of an insect crammed into a 21" CRT.) It has dramatically sped up the LAN party set up and take down process when I've served DHCP, and it didn't take anything away from the game that I noticed. Selection is a little bit slim pickins, but out of the bigname stuff, we have everything you can find on ftp.lokigames.com, and all idSoftware games from Doom I to Wolfenstein 7: Return to Castle Wolfenstein. (Linux got Quake III before Windows did, id develops thier games on Linux and backports to Windows, so id games run pretty damn well, and thier most recent releases run flawlessly). We have a Civilization compatible clone, FreeCiv, in main, as well as Linux gamer classics like xpilot and for the truly old-skool, the bsdgames. I had a generic login on my gaming box (since it only came up at LAN parties, I even installed Debian on it at a LAN party to demonstrate it to friends) that had no password so folks could log in and play hunt in putty from thier machines when everybody else was playing WarCraft (cult hit among my group, the rest of us hate the brutally slow gameplay, even if though it's a nice change of pace late in the party). > forgive the ignorance, but what's ut? Unreal Tournament. The good news is, for all the stuff Loki Games ported over and all id Software's stuff, if you have the Windows version already, you can just snag the Linux binaries off the appropriate website, the installer will often copy the data files off the CD to the drive, and then you don't have to carry around a box of CDs to deal with the anti-piracy BS the Windows folks have to deal with on a lot of those games. UT, Quake III and Return to Castle Wolfenstein is like crack, adrenaline and caffine to me. 8:o) -- Baloo
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