Help with old comp

[darth_burrus]

Okay, I'm experiencing a problem with a five year old laptop that I've just wiped clean, and put Fedora 8 on. Everything seems to run fine, so long as it's not a 3D game. First, I tried running OpenArena (Quake III: Arena), and I got a strange result: it ended my session and logged me out.

I thought that the problem was that my computer was not powerful enough to play a game that had been originally developed 2 years before it was built. (For a laptop, it seemed possible.) I then tried to run PrBoom, a port of Doom, and got the same result.

So I'm wondering, what am I doing wrong?

Specs of my computer:
Compaq Evo N115
AMD Duron, not sure of the speed
Fedora 8 i386
K Desktop Environment

[oz]

Welcome to the forums, darth_burrus!

Just wondering... did you install the 3D accelerated drivers for your video card? If you are running the default video drivers that came with Linux, you won't get 3D to work.

[darth_burrus]

thanks for the help.

[darth_burrus]

Okay, now I'm wondering how to figure out what kind of video card I have on this machine so I can download a driver.

[oz]

Here are some specs for that laptop. It appears that it has the following graphics controller:

VIA ProSavage KN133 graphics with 3D graphics accelerator and 16-MB video memory
Video memory is user configurable from 8 MB to 32 MB and is shared with system memory

When possible, it generally works best to use your package manager for installing the drivers, but if they aren't available that way, you might have to install them from source.