Coincidentally, at that time, I was working on a fairly high-end system running Red Hat Linux 6. This was a PIII/450 with 128 MB RAM and 8 GB hard disk. The only shortcoming was that it didn’t have a 3D accelerator card. Instead, I had a simple but adequate display card with 4 MB VRAM. I was running Gnome at a resolution of 1024x768 and Enlightenment as my window manager. Things were running pretty smoothly.

So armed with the arrogant knowledge of an expert action gamer, I decided to download the most famous game of them all—Quake II. But things didn’t turn out to be that simple. I was faced with an array of choices the moment I reached a download page. Was I to download the Quake II tarball or the RPM? Being on Red Hat, I obviously chose the RPM. This was a pretty small 5-point-something MB file. As far as I could remember, even the Quake II demo was much larger. Oh well, I thought, maybe Linux really is great. Maybe they can write real optimized code or something. Then came the choice to download the glibc version or the libc version. Not being a Linux fanatic, I wondered what these were, while searching for some sort of hint. A note somewhere told me to look for a particular file (lib222.so) on my system. If it existed and the version was greater than 2 then I had glibc. So off I went, and looked for and found the file. So I downloaded the glibc RPM version, and then ran "rpm –ivh quake2-xxxx.rpm". This gave me a couple of errors right away. It couldn’t find certain library files. I frantically looked for the files on my system, then realized that these were files for the GLIDE API (part of the 3DFX cards). But since I didn’t have a 3DFX card, why was the installable looking for the library? Couldn’t it detect it automatically? Anyway, I was getting a bit tired by this time, so I decided to a force install. I ran "rpm –ivh quake2-xxxx. Rpm –nodeps" which turned off all the dependencies within the package. This is not the recommended way to set up any package and don’t do this unless you know what you’re getting into (It’s a different matter that at that point neither did I).

Well, the RPM install went off fine. I had a folder /usr/local/games/quake2, with proper-looking files in it. Off I went and fired up ./quake2, waiting for the game to finally start up. No such luck. It was still looking for some files. I gave up. I needed experienced help. I searched for a HOWTO at Redhat.com and found it. This detailed the exact steps I required to get Quake II up and running. It even had a fairly large section on how to get your 3DFX video card recognized, set up the Mesa OpenGL libraries, etc. I won’t go into the other horrors I faced. Like when I had to reinstall the RPM, because I hadn’t run it as root, and so it couldn’t access the video hardware device files directly. Or when I had to manually set up directories and remove a lot of files from the Q2 distribution. Not in the game Quake II, but before I even set it up. Linux is an action game by itself!

To be fair to Linux, once I did get everything up and running, things were pretty smooth. And most things like setting up the video card or the OpenGL libraries were required only once. Installing another game on the system is simpler than the steps above. Performance is comparable to the same game on a Windows machine. I was able to install and get a couple of other action games running in comparatively less time than it took me on the first one.

There are a lot of native Linux games like 3D Pong and others. These are good fun and run pretty well on the system. Linux renders everything perfectly and is a good graphics platform.