TurboAAA

Hi everyone. My name is Michael and I am new to this site but am loving it already and using it as my primary Linux/Unix source of information.

First my background :

I am a PC technician with advanced knowledge of PC hardware and Windows OS. I have taken a small Linux class but that was just worthless. I have used Ubuntu over the years for your standard desktop PC. I also have some experience with Fedora.

On a scale of 1 - 10 10 being All knowing,
I have a 3 understanding of the smb.conf file and making a system Windows Network ready,
A 4 in the FS hierarchy,
A 6 understanding of the synaptic package managers and the use of Debian based installations,
And finally I have a 4 understanding of WINE and getting Win apps to run.

Second :

I build PCs (and do repairs) out of the house for a little extra income. Up till now I have used Ubuntu for my slower systems for the low overhead and the ease-of-use for the end consumer.

Right now I am building my first mid-range "gaming" Linux build and would love to have some help. I have narrowed the Disto to Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE (I have no exp with SUSE). Also I have for some reason always had trouble with ATI restricted drivers so thats something I would love to have a lot of help in.

System Specs :

• MOBO : NVIDIA MCP61S Chipset
• CPU : AMD Athlon X2 4050e (45W edition, will be OC'd)
• RAM : 2 x 512MB DDR2
• VGA : HIS Radeon 2600 Pro 512MB GDDR2 PCIx16 (has the IceQ cooler)
• HDD : 160GB

Besides being able to do everything Linux can do out-of-the-box this system needs to be able to play games. Below is a list of games I want to pre-install, this also includes multiplayer demos so if you know any please mention them. Please note that several of these games I don't like but are popular so please don't judge me.

Games :

• World of Warcraft (No Linux native client, runs in WINE)
• EVE-Online
• Unreal Tournament Demo (latest one for Linux)
• Age of Empires II\Conquerors Expansion
• Original Unreal GOLD Retail
• Elder Scrolls III Morrowind\Tribunal\Bloodmoon
• Original Ultimate Doom for Windows 95
• and several other old old games that will be tested in a VM.

Please list any other games that I should install through the package manager or any demos that would be good.

Last thing for this post, I need specific directions on how to get this system ready. Such as partitioning, drivers, WINE, Wine-Doors, installation priority etc.

I know this is a huge post but I will be selling this PC so I need to make sure it is done right.

techieMoe

Glad to hear you're enjoying it.

This might actually work against you. Just remember that Linux and the other UNIX-like operating system operate quite differently than MS Windows. Not necessarily better or worse, just differently.

If you're building a system, I personally recommend Nvidia over ATI, for the simple fact that I've never had any issues with Nvidia's official Linux drivers and I have had mountains of trouble with ATI's. In all fairness however I haven't used an ATI card in Linux for many years so they may have gotten better.

You're talking to someone whose taste in games goes from Quake 4 and Postal 2 to Peggle Deluxe and Bejeweled. No judgments here.

Ultimate Doom will run natively in Linux using a different engine. Some popular ones are PrBOOM, Doom Legacy, and SDL Doom.

I've had pretty good luck personally running Morrowind in WINE, but there were some gotchas. For instance the game ran fine as long as I didn't try to change my hotkey configurations. It froze every time when I did that.

As far as freely-available OSS games, I recommend Battle For Wesnoth (RTS), Frozen-Bubble (puzzle), SuperTux (platformer), Nexuiz (multi-FPS), and Gweled (Bejeweled clone).

For demos, I recommend Penny Arcade Episode 1 and Eschalon: Book 1 from the RPG category.

I very, very strongly suggest you NOT use something like Wine-Doors. It's unnecessary and can introduce very strange problems into your system. If you're going to use WINE, use WINE by itself.

Partitioning and drivers shouldn't really be an issue. The partitioning is handled by the installer on most distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuSE), so you don't have to touch that if you don't want to.

The only driver you should have to install manually is the display driver, and even that might be handled with Ubuntu's "Hardware Drivers" utility. In that case, just click "Enable" and Ubuntu will download and install the proper driver automatically.

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Registered Linux user #270181
TechieMoe's Tech Rants

TurboAAA

First of all, I am fully aware of the diff in Windows and Linux. I mentioned I have used Linux for a few years personally.

No the only difference between the other systems I have messed with is that this is for low to mid-range gaming. I have used several Linux machines on a regular basis. I even have a few machines I run in command line instead of a GUI.

I am fully aware of the ATI issue and that is why I asked for help in this thread, I have never had problems with nVidia cards such as the 7600GT and the 8800GT with the G92 chip.

I guess I didn't make any of this clear. I just want some guides from people who have had exp with ATI drivers and a good list of either Open Source games or demos and how to install them properly.

Oh and fyi the reason for the ATI card is it needs to be used and it's taking up space.