Games On Linux

I spent my entire Friday and half my Saturday in the SuperGamer-1 livedvd. I’m not a avid gamer as the definition goes, but I certainly love my ’shoot ‘em ups’. Gaming in Linux is much easier of late than it once was. Not too long ago it took someone with a rudimentary knowledge of coding (or inhuman persistance) to get some of those ports to work. These last days it’s become easier to game in Linux than in Windows. Now all that’s required is booting a dvd.

The SuperGamer-1 is a modification of the famous and well respected PCLinuxOS distribution optimized for gaming. It includes 3d acceleration drivers, the underlying pclos system, and several nice games (or demos). It was originally based on P91 and it is still so today. Much of the everyday software included on the disk/iso is beginning to grow a little long in the tooth, but Darin, the shy and quiet developer, states, "this is completely pclinuxos with a few tweaks and can be updated to P92 levels at the very least. The supergamer is completely compatible with all the updates and normal mirrors are used in synaptic…it will update completely to all the new stuff. I will be doing some testing to see how compatible taking the base supergamer up to P93 levels will be." And of course, being based on PCLinuxOS, the infallible harddrive installer we all know and love is also included, as well as the PCLinuxOS Control Center and Synaptic.

Some of the included software includes:

• 3D games: america’s army, cube, doom 3, enemy territory, legends, nexuiz, privateer, quake 4, soldier of fortune, ufo: alien invasion, ut2004, wesnoth
• Arcade: BzFlag, chromium, 3d pinball, frozen bubble, neverball, neverput, penguin racer, supertux, tuxkart
• Cards: Pysol
• Strategy: Foobillards
• Kernel: 2.6.13amd64op-smp squash 3 with source and stripped source installed
• Office: Open Office 2
• Misc: Xorg 6.8.2, gcc 3.3.1, firefox 1.0.7, and kde 3.4.3.

        
        

Perhaps you’ve noticed the distinctive theme running throughout these screenshots. The dragon theme was conceived by Darin’s wife, and created by a talented and perceptive gentleman known as Masta. Darin referred to him "as a genius with how he understands what I try to say in e-mails and puts them into drawings." The theme starts at the boot up screen, runs thru the boot, and lasts throughout the desktop experience. As you can see the icons are customized to correspond superbly and the color scheme matches the haunting wallpaper perfectly. The login background and splash deviate slightly but are no less unique and are quite pretty as well.

        
    

But why a gamers version of an already complete, stable, and supported distro? Darin states, "well really it was from a lot of people who asked for something like this..I had the knowledge to remaster so I just started adding games and the game base grew with ideas from members. Actually I did this for fun. It kinda caught on and people wanted this thing…this has surprised me with the amount of interest in this as anyone can do it really if they wanted to learn how to remaster."

As you can see from the list above, the menu contains many nice choices. It starts with some of the more common Linux games you may have encountered in other distros or repositories such as chromium, penguin racer, or frozen bubble. In testing these offerings, we found not one problem. They all opened and played as designed, with the exception of Privateer that looped through the introductory scene several times (until I escaped) and never did actually start the game. In fact, they even performed very well from the livedvd.

        
        

The wonderful performance didn’t end with the smaller less demanding games. No. I was quite pleasantly surprized at the performance of the larger 3D games notorious for their system demands. For example, while playing the Doom3 and Quake4 demos, action was instantaneous and rarely was a delay encountered. Although the default settings for the two previously mentioned games are set rather low, I cranked up the details and suffered no distinguishable performance loss. In the screenshots below, the first shot depicts some of the graphics at lower quality settings. Notice the poor shading on the characters face? The second shot is medium quality and the last is higher. The game became rather dark with the last adjustment, but this is no reflection on PCLOS Supergamer. I just mentioned it as a point of interest and to explain the dark screenshots.

        

Being from the same artists, Quake4 suffered the same dark atmosphere at higher qualities. Thus most of my screenshots didn’t turn out well, as they rendered even darker than they appeared during gameplay. However, the game itself was extremely fun and performance from the livedvd was amazing.

        

The demo of Soldier of Fortune is another included. This game is about 6 years old now and the graphics were less than contemporary at the time of its release, although I think the concepts were modern. However, the gameplay is as fun now as it was then. One of the reasons SoF follows me around from install to install is its low demand and great performance (and being able to blow someone’s head completely off). It is still fun after all these years. I guess I still play through Soldier of Fortune about once a year. I’m not fast enough to catch the best action in screenshots (such as someone’s decapitated body just before it starts to fall to the floor). In fact, I want to go on record right now as stating I’m a much better shot (and duck) when not trying to capture screenshots.

        

America’s Army is also included. I never played this game very much as it seems to move along too slow for my tastes. I never quite made it out of training. Another factor is I’m not much of an online gamer and prefer single player mode. Although I did find one interesting aspect of America’s Army while testing Supergamer of which I hadn’t known previously. In the third shot you can see what happens if you shoot your drill instructor in the face with an M-16. That is a depiction of yourself in Leavenworth Prison. This is all there is. I left it on for quite a while to see if they’d come feed me or take me to bust rock. But nope, you sit there being tortured by a neighbor’s harmonica until you [hit] escape and restart the mission.

        

Legends is another online only game. It looked like a exciting environment and had some pretty scenary. I suspect this would be great fun with some actual opponents to shoot.

        

Cube and nexuiz are also included. Cube has a single player mode, although I personally haven’t had much luck with it. Seems I run out of ammo and get killed before I get too far along. In yet another demonstration of my amazing abilities, I couldn’t figure out how to get screenshots in those games. So, while looking for docs, I just leeched these from their sites. Although, I can testify that they are very representational of my actual gameplay experience.

        
        

There is a lot more on this 3.6 gig iso than I have mentioned here. It’s a wonderful idea and a great convenience. If you’d like a nice gaming platform, I can recommend the PCLOS SuperGamer-1 system. It retains all the advantages of PCLinuxOS while adding optimizations and software to get the user off to a running start. The demos allow one to easily test the games on their computers and just as easily install them. With supergamer, you’ll know the operating system is ready. Even if one doesn’t own or wish to own the premuim games, the demos still offer hours of fun. The free gpl’d games are a convenience and again, you’ll know your system is ready for about any game you wish to add.

The Supergamer-1 dvd performed very well. I had no stability issues and lag was very minimal. Only after long periods of inactivity or loading a new gaming level did I experience delays while the dvd was spun and accessed. Hardware detection was spot-on with, just to name a few, the net connection, graphics and sound automagically enabled. It was a completely enjoyable experience and I can’t find anything to complain about, (except for Privateer).

Command Description • apropos word Show commands pertinent to word. See also threadsafe which command Show full path name of command time command See how long a command takes • time cat Start stopwatch. Ctrl-d to stop. See also sw • nice info Run a low priority command (info in this case) • renice 19 -p $$ Make shell (script) low priority. Use for non interactive tasks • look prefix Quickly search (sorted) dictionary • grep –color expr…ion /usr/share/dict/words Highlight occurances of regular expression in dictionary gpg -c file Encrypt file gpg file.gpg Decrypt file • alias hd=’od -Ax -tx1z -v’ Handy hexdump. (usage e.g.: • hd /proc/self/cmdline | less) • alias realpath=’readlink -f’ Canonicalize path. (usage e.g.: • realpath ~/../$USER) • set | grep $USER Search current environment • ls /usr/bin | pr -T9 -W$COLUMNS Print in 9 columns to width of terminal touch -c -t 0304050607 file Set file timestamp (YYMMDDhhmm) dir navigation • cd - Go to previous directory • cd Go to home directory (cd dir && command) Go to dir, execute command and return to current dir • pushd . Put current dir on stack so you can popd back to it CDs gzip < /dev/cdrom > cdrom.iso.gz Save copy of data cdrom mkisofs -V NAME -r dir | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz Create cdrom image from contents of dir mount -o loop cdrom.iso /mnt/dir Mount the cdrom image at /mnt/dir (read only) cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast Clear a CDRW gzip -dc cdrom.iso.gz | cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom - Burn cdrom image (use dev=ATAPI -scanbus to confirm dev) cdparanoia -B Rip audio tracks from CD to wav files in current dir cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio *.wav Make audio CD from all wavs in current dir (see also cdrdao) oggenc –tracknum=’track’ track.cdda.wav -o ‘track.ogg’ Make ogg file from wav file archives tar c dir/ | bzip2 > dir.tar.bz2 Make archive of dir/ bzip2 -dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar x Extract archive (use gzip instead of bzip2 for tar.gz files) tar c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote ‘dd of=dir.tar.gz.gpg’ Make encrypted archive of dir/ on remote machine find dir/ -name ‘*.txt’ | tar c –files-from=- | bzip2 > dir_txt.tar.bz2 Make archive of subset of dir/ and below find dir/ -name ‘*.txt’ | xargs cp -a –target-directory=dir_txt/ –parents Make copy of subset of dir/ and below ( tar c /dir/to/copy ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar x -p ) Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to /where/to/ dir ( cd /dir/to/copy && tar c . ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar x -p ) Copy (with permissions) contents of copy/ dir to /where/to/ ( tar c /dir/to/copy ) | ssh -C user@remote ‘cd /where/to/ && tar x -p’ Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to remote:/where/to/ dir dd bs=1M if=/dev/hda | gzip | ssh user@remote ‘dd of=hda.gz’ Backup harddisk to remote machine rsync (Use the –dry-run option for testing) rsync -P rsync://rsync.server.com/path/to/file file Only get diffs. Do multiple times for troublesome downloads rsync –bwlimit=1000 fromfile tofile Locally copy with rate limit. It’s like nice for I/O rsync -az -e ssh –delete ~/public_html/ remote.com:’~/public_html’ Mirror web site (using compression and encryption) rsync -auz -e ssh remote:/dir/ . && rsync -auz -e ssh . remote:/dir/ Synchronize current directory with remote one file searching • alias l=’ls -l –color=auto’ quick dir listing • ls -lrt List files by date. See also newest find -name ‘*.[ch]’ | xargs grep -E ‘expr’ Search ‘expr’ in this dir and below. See also findrepo find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -F ’string’ Search all regular files for ’string’ in this dir and below find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F ’string’ Search all regular files for ’string’ in this dir find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do echo $dir; echo cmd2; done Process each item with multiple commands (in while loop) • find -type f ! -perm -444 Find files not readable by all (useful for web site) • find -type d ! -perm -111 Find dirs not accessible by all (useful for web site) • locate -r ‘file[^/]*\.txt’ Search cached index for names. This re is like glob *file*.txt networking (Note ifconfig, route, mii-tool, nslookup commands are obsolete) • ip link show List interfaces ethtool interface List interface status ip link set dev eth0 name wan Rename eth0 to wan ip addr add 1.2.3.4/24 brd + dev eth0 Add ip and mask(255.255.255.0) ip link set dev interface up Bring interface up (or down) ip route add default via 1.2.3.254 Set default gateway to 1.2.3.254 • tc qdisc add dev lo root handle 1:0 netem delay 20msec Add 20ms latency to loopback device (for testing) • tc qdisc del dev lo root Remove latency added above • host pixelbeat.org Lookup ip address for name or vice versa • hostname -i Lookup local ip address (equivalent to host `hostname`) • netstat -tupl List internet services on a system • netstat -tup List active connections to/from system wget (multi purpose download tool) • (cd cmdline && wget -nd -pHEKk http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html) Store local browsable version of a page to the current dir wget -c http://www.example.com/large.file Continue downloading a partially downloaded file wget -r -nd -np -l1 -A ‘*.jpg’ http://www.example.com/ Download a set of files to the current directory wget ftp://remote/file[1-9].iso/ FTP supports globbing directly • wget -q -O- http://www.pixelbeat.org/timeline.html | grep ‘a href’ | head Process output directly echo ‘wget url’ | at 01:00 Download url at 1AM to current dir wget –limit-rate=20k url Do a low priority download (limit to 20KB/s in this case) wget -nv –spider –force-html -i bookmarks.html Check links in a file wget –mirror http://www.example.com/ Efficiently update a local copy of a site (handy from cron) windows (note samba is the package that provides all this windows specific networking support) • smbtree Find windows machines. See also findsmb nmblookup -A 1.2.3.4 Find the windows (netbios) name associated with ip address smbclient -L windows_box List shares on windows machine or samba server mount -t smbfs -o fmask=666,guest //windows_box/share /mnt/share Mount a windows share echo ‘message’ | smbclient -M windows_box Send popup to windows machine (off by default in XP sp2) math • echo ‘(1 + sqrt(5))/2′ | bc -l Quick math (Calculate φ) • echo ‘obase=16; ibase=10; 123′ | bc Base conversion (decimal to hexadecimal) • echo $((0x2dec)) Base conversion (hex to dec) ((shell arithmetic expansion)) • echo ‘pad=20; min=64; (100*10^6)/((pad+min)*8)’ | bc More complex (int) e.g. This shows max FastE packet rate • echo ‘pad=20; min=64; print (100E6)/((pad+min)*8)’ | python Python handles scientific notation • echo ‘pad=20; plot [64:1518] (100*10**6)/((pad+x)*8)’ | gnuplot -persist Plot FastE packet rate vs packet size text manipulation (note sed uses stdin and stdout, so if you want to edit files, append newfile) sed ’s/string1/string2/g’ Replace string1 with string2 sed ’s/\(.*\)1/\12/g’ Modify anystring1 to anystring2 sed ‘/ *#/d; /^ *$/d’ Remove comments and blank lines sed ‘:a; /\\$/N; s/\\\n//; ta’ Concatenate lines with trailing \ sed ’s/[ \t]*$//’ Remove trailing spaces from lines sed ’s/\([\\`\\"$\\\\]\)/\\\1/g’ Escape shell metacharacters active within double quotes sed -n ‘1000p;1000q’ Print 1000th line sed -n ‘10,20p;20q’ Print lines 10 to 20 sed -n ’s/.*<[tT][iI][tT][lL][eE]>\(.*\)<\/[tT][iI][tT][lL][eE]>.*/\1/p;T;q’ Extract title from HTML web page sort -t. -k1,1n -k2,2n -k3,3n -k4,4n Sort IPV4 ip addresses • echo ‘Test’ | tr ‘[:lower:]’ ‘[:upper:]’ Case conversion • tr -dc ‘[:print:]’ < /dev/urandom Filter non printable characters • grep ‘processor’ /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l Count lines set operations (Note LANG=C is for speed) LANG=C sort file1 file2 | uniq Union of unsorted files LANG=C sort file1 file2 | uniq -d Intersection of unsorted files LANG=C sort file1 file1 file2 | uniq -u Difference of unsorted files LANG=C sort file1 file2 | uniq -u Symmetric Difference of unsorted files LANG=C comm file1 file2 | sed ’s/^\t*//’ Union of sorted files LANG=C comm -12 file1 file2 Intersection of sorted files LANG=C comm -13 file1 file2 Difference of sorted files LANG=C comm -3 file1 file2 | sed ’s/^\t*//’ Symmetric Difference of sorted files calendar • cal -3 Display a calendar • cal 9 1752 Display a calendar for a particular month year • date -d fri What date is it this friday. See also day • date –date=’25 Dec’ +%A What day does xmas fall on, this year • date –date ‘1970-01-01 UTC 1234567890 seconds’ Convert number of seconds since the epoch to a date • TZ=’:America/Los_Angeles’ date What time is it on West coast of US (use tzselect to find TZ) echo "mail -s ‘get the train’ P@draigBrady.com < /dev/null" | at 17:45 Email reminder • echo "DISPLAY=$DISPLAY xmessage cooker" | at "NOW + 30 minutes" Popup reminder locales • printf "%’d\n" 1234 Print number with thousands grouping appropriate to locale • echo "I live in `locale territory`" Extract info from locale database • locale | cut -d= -f1 | xargs locale -kc | less List fields in locale database • LANG=en_IE.utf8 locale int_prefix Lookup locale info for specific country. See also ccodes disk space (See also FSlint) • ls -lSr Show files, biggest last • du -s * | sort -k1,1rn | head Show top disk users in current dir. See also dutop • df -h Show free disk space • df -i Show free inodes • fdisk -l Show disks partitions sizes and types (run as root) • rpm -q -a –qf ‘%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n’ | sort -k1,1n List all packages by installed size (Bytes) on rpm distros • dpkg-query -W -f=’${Installed-Size;10}\t${Package}\n’ | sort -k1,1n List all packages by installed size (KBytes) on deb distros • dd bs=1 seek=2TB if=/dev/null of=ext3.test Create a large test file (taking no space). See also truncate monitoring/debugging • strace -c ls >/dev/null Summarise/profile system calls made by command • strace -f -e open ls >/dev/null List system calls made by command • ltrace -f -e getenv ls >/dev/null List library calls made by command • lsof -p $$ List paths that process id has open • lsof ~ List processes that have specified path open • tcpdump not port 22 Show network traffic except ssh. See also tcpdump_not_me • ps -e -o pid,args –forest List processes in a hierarchy • ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args –sort pcpu | sed ‘/^ 0.0 /d’ List processes by % cpu usage • ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS List processes by mem usage. See also ps_mem.py • ps -C firefox-bin -L -o pid,tid,pcpu,state List all threads for a particular process • ps -p 1,2 List info for particular process IDs • last reboot Show system reboot history. • free -m Show amount of (remaining) RAM (-m displays in MB) • watch -n1 ‘cat /proc/interrupts’ Watch changeable data continuously System information (see also sysinfo) hdparm -i /dev/hda Show info about disk hda hdparm -tT /dev/hda Do a read speed test on disk hda badblocks -s /dev/hda Test for unreadable blocks on disk hda • mount | column -t Show mounted filesystems on the system (and align output) • cat /proc/partitions Show all partitions registered on the system • grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo Show RAM total seen by the system • grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo Show CPU(s) info • lspci -tv Show PCI info • lsusb -tv Show USB info recode (Obsoletes iconv, dos2unix, unix2dos) • recode -l | less Show available conversions (aliases on each line) recode windows-1252.. file_to_change.txt Windows "ansi" to local charset (auto does CRLF conversion) recode utf-8/CRLF.. file_to_change.txt Windows utf8 to local charset recode iso-8859-15..utf8 file_to_change.txt Latin9 (western europe) to utf8 recode ../b64 < file.txt > file.b64 Base64 encode recode /qp.. < file.txt > file.qp Quoted printable decode recode ..HTML < file.txt > file.html Text to HTML • recode -lf windows-1252 | grep euro Lookup table of characters • echo -n 0x80 | recode latin-9/x1..dump Show what a code represents in latin-9 charmap • echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..latin-9/x Show latin-9 encoding • echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..utf-8/x Show utf-8 encoding interactive • mc Powerful filemanager that can browse rpm, tar, ftp, ssh, … • screen Virtual terminals with detach capability, … • links Web browser • gnuplot Interactive/scriptable graphing