essay/rant: the pain of giving up windows (games)

[tba]

lets be serious. for 50% - 90% of what the average joe uses a computer for (email, web surfing, instant messaging) windows works well enough for everyone. if you have been enlightened to the advantages of alt. os's (i cut my teeth on beos) you quickly learn that with a little effort (considerable for some) you can go from "well enough" to snappy, smooth, and efficient. It's great.

The problem is games. When I first tried linux i quickly went from corel to mandrake 8.0. after getting everything set up how i like it, like only linux gives me the flexibility to do, it was time to enter the final fronteer. No not gay porn, but 3d hardware acceleration. Getting glide, mesa, and the like up and running was a nightmare. The whole system was slow and buggy, and even my good buddy, the guru that turned me on to alt. os couldnt solve my problems. i hated rpms, which i saw as a cheap and complicated version of windows' self extracting executables. gnome wasn't as good as kde 2.0 which was too slow, and enlightenment just didnt work quite right with either, especially kde. the biggest problem i had was the inability to use quake. so back to windows i went.

gentoo is truly a breath of fresh air when it comes to most of my problems with linux. i dont care what anyone says about gentoo's complexity, i've learned more in a few weeks than in months with mandrake and corel, the performance is comparable to beos, and kde 3.0.1 is a great desktop enviornment (its fast enough on my pc now). But i still cant get games to work well. On my original 1.0 install i had a radeon 7200 with crappy 3d support. So i switched to an nvidia card which is better supported, and after my own stupidity slowed me for a short while i got 3d working again super easily. Unlike last year on mandrake, quake worked GREAT. Wolfenstein however, was giving me strange problems where i couldnt use my mouse to interact with the program, which would only run as an unresponisve "fakey window" on a virtual desktop. moving the mouse caused me to slide around to the rest of the desktop. if this sounds wierd and hard to understand read my post from a week ago concerning the problem. No solution was found.

close is never good enough for me, and being pretty acustomed to reinstalling oss (read: mandrake never works quite right) i dove into 1.3a. Install went almost without a hitch and i was prepared for any roadblocks by this forum (which i would be totally lost without). once again, my growing affection for gentoo was reinforced (though not by the impossibility of emerging xmms and gaim this time but thats another thread). so the moment of truth again arrives. once again, quake runs great, but NOW wolfenstein crashes every time i try to load a level; even on the poorest quality settings! WHY GOD. sometimes i dont get past "loading maps" sometimes to "loading character models" and every 1/10 times i can play the game for a few minutes. Not using KDE doesnt help and i dont even know where to start. I've poted on every forum I can think of, including this one, and thus far no one has a clue.

I guess the only thing left to do is try version 1.2 and wait for a stable release of 1.3. I'm sure my 3rd gentoo install will be even easier, but i dread what new problems it will introduce me to. Perhaps, it will actually give me some sort of error message nexttime besides simply "process killed ./wolfx86 51142." NO SNAP. Killed, crashed, whatever; the end result is the same.

the purpose of this post is to make me feel better by sharing my frustration, not to get answers. dont let that stop you from responding, as i always enjoy good conversation. im going to give the forums another day or two to solve my wolf problem and then im going to have to install Gentoo 1.2. One day, i'll get EVERYTHING running just right. I wonder which OS ill be using on that day.

[tba]

a guy on another forum said he had this problem when he was using an older version of glib. i assured him that i had 2.2.5 but the first thing i see when i try and resintall the binary is:

You are running a x86 machine with glibc-2.1.
Distribution: N/A 0.0.

anyone know where i can start looking for a work around or is this just a standard message for glib versions > 2.1?

[tba]

i feel a little stupid now but only a little.

as it turn out all i had to do was double my swap space... duh!! frantic guesswork can be helpful, even in linux land. but seriously, you'd think it might mention in the terminal something besides "process killed." how about "out of memory" for instance?

all is not well in 3d land. 6/7 servers now tell me "failed pure server check." i can only assume the answer to this one will be easier to find. hopefully a patch or upgrade i need will solve the problem. Hopefully...

i feel alot better now, and if one believes in the theory of philisophical determinism, i probably wouldnt have found the answer this soon if i hadnt expended all that energy writing my rant.

best wishes

[Zu`]

I understand your frustrations, however you should never give up with trying. Always keep trying and you'll see it pays off.

Good luck

Greets

[BonezTheGoon]