Gosh, what a difference. I’ve been wanting to do more game playing on my Linux laptop, but I’ve been stymied with trying to get the video system in it up to par. Today I went over the last roadblocks.
For the truly geeky, I have DRM working on the Radeon Mobility 9000 chipset in my IBM T40. The only tidbits I can have for folks who are trying to do this are:
- Have the Radeon kernel module installed
- Make sure you’re NOT running at 1600×1200. You don’t have enough memory to run GL in that. Running on the native 1400×1050 is fine.
- Make sure you have a Mode 0666 line in your XF86Config file for the DRI module:
31 Section "DRI" 32 Mode 0666 33 EndSection
- Watch your /var/log/XFree86.0.log file for any warnings.
Once that was all set, and ‘glxinfo | grep -i direct’ showed me ‘Direct rendering: yes’, I ran glxgears. WHOAH! 865 or so frames per second (before I got this running, I was getting about 180. A slight performance increase, to say the least)
One of the motivations for this was to take a look at “Jake2” – a full Java port of the Quake2 engine. As advertised, I just needed the binary download, plus the Quake2 demo data files (see the webpage on how to get them), and voila! It just worked!
Go go gadget Java!
Anyway, now that it’s all working, I’m looking for more GL games to play. I’ve played Tuxracer, bzFlag, CannonSmash, and Neverball (MAN that’s a weird game). I jsut downloaded Flightgear, I’ll let you know.
Any other recommendations?
