Being an avid gamer who loves Linux, I felt that it would be a good idea to go try out the new Linux-Gamers.net live dvd. This is a live dvd built on Arch Linux and designed with one purpose in mind. Gaming. No desktop apps, no office suites, no web browsers. Nope, nothing but gaming. So I popped the DVD into my test machine and booted it. Immediately after initial boot I was greeted by a screen that notified me that it had detected my Nvidia video card and that no proprietary driver would be installed, although one would be available later for install should I want to use it. There’s a quick legal explanation of why this is so and goes on to explain about some open source projects that are working to provide free Open Source drivers for Nvidia and ATI video cards since neither company will provide this themselves. There’s also a short blurb to the Linux development and enthusiast communities of Linux on why they did this. The general claim can be summed up like this. “If we don’t build it, they won’t come.” I admit that’s a bit of a rewording of a famous line from the book “Field of Dreams”, but it applies very well here.

There’s a big discussion out there between the purists who want everything open sourced, and the realists who realize that everything can’t necessarily be open source and that some proprietary software can and may be needed from time to time, including drivers. So inclusion of such software, especially drivers, into a Linux distribution is a heated issue. I for one fully support open source everything in Linux. That obviously can’t be true all the time, so I’m flexible enough to accept proprietary software where and when nessisary, and sticking with open source software whenever possible. But that’s a whole other debate, so I’ll leave that for another time.

After clicking ok you’re given an EULA for your video drivers, be they Nvidia or ATI. In my case it was Nvidia. Once you click ok, you’re asked if you agree to the terms. After clicking yes, it was off to the races. The Nvidia driver quickly installed and within a minute or so the system fully loaded into the desktop for the live dvd. Also, for those who are curious, I tested this dvd on a nearly identical system that had an ATI 9600xt card in it.  Even with the ATI card I had few issues. There was a bit of artifacting and strange program behavior that’s likely due to the ATI driver, but other than that it worked great. Now once you’re booted completely into the live cd, the closest thing you get to a typical gui interface is a taskbar with a bunch of quick launch icons. The games that are included on this disk are:

• Blobby2
• bzFlag
• Foobillard
• GL-117
• Glest
• Neverball
• Nexuiz
• Sauerbraten
• Torcs
• Tremulous
• UFO:AI
• Wesnoth
• Warsow
• Warzone 2100
• World of Padman

The original version of the live dvd included “Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory” and “True Combat: Elite”, a mod of WolfET. Both have since been removed due to licensing issues and an apparent hissy fit by the creators of WolfET over the inclusion of the game on the live dvd. But that’s moot argument at this point given the wide range of other games on this live dvd. Now, if you right click on the desktop you will be presented with a short menu that lists all the games in alphabetical order. You can also change your monitor resolution from this menu, open Xterm, shut down the machine or save/load previous configuration changes from a USB stick, which is good considering that any changes you make won’t be saved when you reboot since this is a live dvd. The Xterm does provide you with a limited amount of Linux functionality that should give anyone needing to make some configuration changes or troubleshoot a problem with their system ample ability to do so. It’s also interesting to do a process list and see what’s running.

Keeping to the kiss principle, everything about the live dvd is more or less point and click. So while the dvd won’t show off the power of Linux, it does make it simple to demonstrate the gaming potential of Linux. After getting this far without incident, it was only fitting to give each of the games a spin and see how they did. This is important considering that a typical live dvd tends to vary in some ways from a live system. Here’s a general overview of how each game performed.

Blobby2
The game loaded well and got you started, but after that it had a lot of control issues which made playing the game nearly impossible. There also seemed to be hang-ups that appeared to just suspend gameplay for no apparent reason leaving the ball hanging in the air with no way to get it back down. A quick dive into the options to make some adjustments fixed this, but it wasn’t immediately apparent that this was required in advance in order to play the game properly in single player mode.  Not a big deal for me, but definately a strike from the point of view of a less savy computer user.

bzFlag
For a simple tank game that operated using a simple capture the flag type of gameplay, it performed very well. That’s really not all that surprising though considering the game has been around since the early 90’s in one form or another and has grown into quite a fun game despite its simplistic graphics. While I couldn’t tell what the frame rates were, they appeared to be pretty high given the zero evidence of lag in the game.

Foo Billard
This is a simple 3D pool game done in the old billiards style with about late 90’s level 3d graphics. Given the light weight nature of the game it played fast and flawless. The only glitch I found is that on ATI cards it seems to have trouble properly rendering the balls, so you can’t tell which is solid and which is stripe, and that can get frustrating at times.

gl-117
gl-117 is a simple 3D combat fighter sim done in a mid to late 90’s graphics and gameplay style.. Overall load times for the main screen and subsequent game sessions is decent, although not spectacular. I also saw a varying amounts of lag. One other thing that really stood out was that it had no sound and there were control issues. I don’t know if that’s the fault of the game or not, but I hadn’t had either of these issues before trying this game.

Glest
Glest is a 3d fantasy strategy game done in a style resembling Starcraft or Warcraft. Initial load into the menu screen was fast, but load times into a game were painfully long. Well over 5-8 minutes for me, which is saying a lot considering that most of the other big offenders for load times took barely over two.  I also ran into several spontaneous reboots and complete crashes to the desktop while trying to play this game. So I’m not quite sure what’s up with that, but there’s definitely some issues with this game operating on the live dvd..

Neverball
If you’ve ever played with one of those rolling marble puzzle games, you’d love Neverball. It’s more or less a 3d version of those marble puzzle games and is tons of fun. It’s also a very touchy game. It becomes incredibly easy to over-tilt the table and have your ball screaming off in directions you never intended. Gameplay was smooth and while I couldn’t get sound working, the rest was great and the game was fun.

Nexuiz
This quake 1 style shooter (see our review of it here) works surprisingly (or unsurprisingly depending on your viewpoint) well in the live cd. Gameplay was smooth and load times were decent. It had a few sound issues, but overall gameplay wasn’t that bad.

Sauerbraten
This is another quake 1 style shooter, done with a touch of wolfenstein flavor. There were some really bad stability, lag and sound issues with this game. More so than what would appear in a full install. Sure, the game itself has a few bugs, but they don't appear much in a full install.  However, they were very blatantly apparent here on the live cd. So much so that it made the game nearly unplayable in more ways than I can count.

Torcs
This is a classic style PC racing game done in the classic rally derby style. I could comment on gameplay, if I could have played any games that is. The game was so flakey it was unplayable. That is, when it didn’t crash to the desktop repeatedly.

Tremulous
This is a classic team vs team deathmatch style game with the added twist of capture the flag, but without the flag. Gameplay was smooth, load times were good, and the game was very stable.

UFC: Alien Invasion
I’m not really sure what genre to slide this game into, other than maybe an offbeat RTS. It loaded very, very fast, was solid as a rock, and gameplay load times were nearly non-existent. I have no real complaints with this one at all.

Wesnoth
This is a simple turn based RPG done in the old Zelda style of gameplay. While Zelda wasn’t turn based, you will very much feel like you’re in an old Zelda game. The cutscenes are a bit cheesy, and load times are on the poor side, but otherwise it’s not that bad overall, and definitely quite playable. The random lag bothered me the most about it. And when it’d lag, it’d really, really lag.

Warsow
This is a Quake 3 Arena deathmatch style FPS done in a cell shaded style that gives it an almost crazy, cartoony style that gives it a sort of Anime/Japanese game feel. Overall, the game ran very smooth, very fast and while the weapons were a bit odd, I really found no issues at all with the game. Even load times were very fast. And all this despite having fairly modern gameplay and graphics.

Warzone 2100
One of the things that surprised me with this game is it is played in a window rather than full screen. That really isn’t bad consider that it’s an RTS, but it’s still a bit hard to get used to right away. Sound was so-so, and had some issues, but graphics were good and the game appeared to be fairly stable. Load times were also good.

World of Padman
This zany, loony, ever popular FPS had some rather annoying lag issues. Even navigating menus it had some real problems with operating in a consistent manor. There were also random volume issues with the sound and problems with sounds sticking in a looping mode. Overall load times were pathetic compared to its fully installed live counterpart. It took seemingly forever for just one level to load. There were also a number of strange irregularities that occurred in the game that I’ve never seen in its live counterpart. It was bad enough at times to make the game generally unplayable. The game even locked up on me a couple times. The regular fully installed game is tons better and doesn’t suffer from the same issues found here on the live cd. For more information on this game, check out our review here.

Well, that’s a general overview of how each of the games functions and what to expect from them on the live cd. The next thing up was to test the save and restore abilities of the live dvd. So I right clicked, selected “Save configs on USBstick”. Initially it took several tries for the live dvd to find my pendrive. Finally when it found it, it backed up the configs. Not quickly, but it did back them up. Total time was about 3-5 minutes to save all the configs. It was about the same to load them back into the system. A quick check of the pendrive afterwards found all my previously stored files intact and an additional file titled “lg.net-live.tar.gz” which weighed in at about 338k and contained all the configuration files for the live dvd and the games.

Overall I like this live dvd of popular free Linux games and I wish the absolute best to the developers of the Linux-Gamers.net Live DVD and I want to encourage them to continue their work. It’s very, very much appreciated. While it’s still got some growing to do, and some bugs to iron out, it really has been a very enjoyable distribution to experiment with. I especially like the idea that I can take it with me anywhere I go and play some of my favorite Linux games, even if the system I’m playing it on doesn’t have Linux. There’s one last thing I would want the developers to consider for their next live dvd distribution. Since large sized pendrives (2gb and above) are becoming fairly cheap and easy to come by, why not make a version that can be written to and loaded from a pendrive?  Since every machine has USB ports (but not nessisarily a DVD drive) and since a pendrive tends to be a lot smaller and easier to carry, it would be a completely acceptable way to take their live dvd to the next level. :)

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