Best (CD Bootable?) Linux Distro for Dominions?

GavinWheeler · #1 March 25th, 2004, 04:55 PM

I like Knoppix in general, but tend to keep my games on my lingering Windows partition. I did test the Doms 1 demo on linux (Mandrake 9.2) and found it to be surprisingly slow - way slower than on windows on the same, admittedly old, machine.

This seemed odd as it has always been the other way around for me - programs that ran on both platforms were generally way faster on Linux than on Windows. But Tuxracer also crawled when I tried it, which makes me wonder in Mandrake haven't messed up the graphics drivers somehow??

Anyway, we'll never get linux geeks to agree on the 'best' distribution. At least we can all agree that vi is the One True Text Editor.

Cainehill · #2 March 25th, 2004, 05:16 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by magnate:
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

Well, until Johan posted in this topic that the bug is fixed in the next patch, there was no indication that it would be. Given that I don't have the source code, I felt that yes, it was worthwhile to devise a bootable Linux CD workaround. Presumably I'm not the only Windows based player involved in MP games via the mosehansen.dk site who is disadvantaged by hallucinatory battle scenes, and was surprised to find this to be the case.

PhilD · #3 March 25th, 2004, 05:17 PM

I shortly tried to get Knoppix to work, but wasn't very successful. Mostly, all my machines(*) are either dual-boot from the day I start using them, or Linux only. Repartitioning a mostly empty drive for dual boot isn't too hard, and only bothers you the very first time you have to do it.

But I'm not sure how you'd go about getting Knoppix to write your game data to a real partition... does it do it transparently?

(*) Two office desktops (one in each of my 2 offices), one office laptop, my home PC, my girlfriend's home PC, and my old personal laptop, though this one's mostly dead; yes, I qualify as a geek.

PhilD · #4 March 25th, 2004, 05:19 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 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.

Hurrah! (it's not fun booting up to Windows just to watch important PBEM battles, and I can't really do this for my TCP/IP games...)

Now, if you could give us a (prospective) date for this marvelous patch...

Cainehill · #5 March 25th, 2004, 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 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.

Well, as a long-time UNIX programmer, I'm somewhat dismayed by the "User Friendly" desktop display Knoppix has. It screws things up both for the UNIX/Linux people -and- the Windows people it targets. (No easy/visible way to change the screen resolution via GUI, and no mention of what the command line configuration program would be.) The GUI is dumbed down overly much, even compared to Gnome (and I would hope, stock KDE).

That said - it did do an admirable job of detecting and automatically working with video cards, USB devices (albeit my USB mouse was very slow & jerky), onboard ethernet, router, etc. Quite painless to be back Online after booting.

For my own purposes, though, I went ahead and downloaded RH's Fedora iso's overnight and will look at doing a proper Linux install on a newly empty partition. Hopefully it won't trash the other partitions on that drive.

Cainehill · #6 March 25th, 2004, 05:33 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by PhilD:
But I'm not sure how you'd go about getting Knoppix to write your game data to a real partition... does it do it transparently?

I found it necessary to first copy the entire Dominions 2 install CD to a hard drive, then booted Knoppix. First thing to do at that point is to mount a partition and make it read/write instead of readonly.

I then went from bash into csh, set the HOME environmental to where I wanted to place the install, and ran the unix_install script from the directory I'd copied the CD contents to. (This was necessary because my sole CD drive on the machine is my burner - with 2 CD drives, you could boot from Knoppix and still install from CD.)

After this, you have Dominions installed on your hard disk, but would need to mount & toggle the readwrite status on that partition each time you booted Knoppix, so Dominions2 can write out the data files.

Happily, come the Inquisition, I mean, when the new patch arrives, this won't be necessary anymore.

Gandalf Parker · #7 March 25th, 2004, 05:53 PM

Personally I prefer to use WinXP to play from. And I prefer Linux (in a completely non-GUI mode) to host from. I think the new switches for things like AI setting, preexec, and if they can get the "create game and quit" mode to work we will have all the command-line switches to make a really good web-based management for multiple games. Game settings selection, maps selection, sign-up, start game, and upload/download turns.

I will wait until thats all working before I start asking the devs for better export of data so the games webpage can reflect game progression.