Best (CD Bootable?) Linux Distro for Dominions?

[Cainehill]

In an attempt to alleviate the crossplatform bugs that keep Windoze / Linux players from seeing the actual battle playbacks when the game is hosted on the other platform, I spent this afternoon downloading and getting Knoppix to run.

With Knoppix, it's enough of a pain that I kept some notes on a step-by-step way to get D2 running, thinking I might post a faq, or pass one on to one of the D2-related sites.

Having finally gotten Knoppix to run (limp?), and gotten Dominions installed under Linux, I find it's unplayable. Now - I know (well, I suspect) it's a driver issue : updated drivers from Nvidia may, and even should, alleviate the performance so it gets more than 0.3 frames per second on minimum detail.

However, since Knoppix boots from the CD (an ISO image burned to one), it's .... "Difficult" to figure out how one could install the updated video drivers (for Nvidia, or whomever).

It'd be possible to do a full RedHat or SuSE install to harddisk and install video drivers, Dominions, etc, on top of that, but....

I'm actually trying to figure out the best, lowest pain way for non-UNIX geeks to be able to run Linux D2 from their Windoze boxes. Telling them to install Linux onto a hard disk partition isn't a good solution.

(I say this because getting a dual-boot system not infrequently involves screwing up drive partitions and having to rebuild everything, with commensurate loss of data if everything wasn't backed up. (And almost no one does proper home backups anymore, not in a day of 60-180 gig drives. Plus, with Windoze, you're -still- likely to lose everything.))

Telling them they can burn a Linux CD, boot from that, and properly enjoy multiplayer, multiplatform, D2 games seems like it would be a Very Good thing.

And I know there's many (more than a few) people playing from Linux platforms here. So - any of you have information on which CD-bootable Linux distros would work well for Dominions? Knoppix, Gnoppix, Feather, etc? Tips for getting updated video drivers working with them?

Or should I scratch the idea, and figure that any such FAQ should simply say "You're going to have to build a Linux partition on your hard disk. If you don't know what that entails, or aren't a unix sysadmin, don't try."?

Regards,
Cainehill

[Gandalf Parker]

The Devs use RedHat. In the early days of Dom1 I had trouble getting it to run on my Debian linux and the answers I received were RedHat answers which I had to translate. Not the answer you wanted but for the most support in future changes Id say RedHat would have some advantage.

[ March 25, 2004, 02:27: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[SelfishGene]

This is a bit OT, but how do you like Knoppix? It should be arriving tomorrow. Im getting it to kill an evil Linux partition Fdisk refuses to handle.

More specificially, QTPartition .

[liga]

I use Mandrake 9.2 for my Dom2 games at "work" at it work fine (I have noticed that under linux, with the same hardware, I got less efficeny in graphical details ... but it could be that I'm using a workstation not really configured well for graphics but just only for calculations) ... a way could be to install dominions 2 in a Linux box running into Vmware but I must admit I never tried yet ... I have one vmware running a Linux Mandrake 9.2 at home (on windows XP pro) ... i could try to install dom2 and post here a report.

good play
Liga

[magnate]

Debian Users should dist-upgrade to Sarge and all should be well. I use Sarge's own Nvidia drivers, not the newest Nvidia ones. (Yes, Sarge is still technically "testing", but it's very stable now.)

I don't mean to be rude, but isn't finding a solution enabling people to play Dom2 from a bootable Linux CD kind of missing the point about it being multi-platform? Wouldn't it be better to fix the bugs which prevent players on different platforms viewing battles? (Muchos apols if this has already been done to death.)

CC

[Johan K]

This bug has been fixed in the next patch. So hopefully you'll soon be able to mix OSes and still get correct battle replays.