Games Knoppix

Quiberon writes "A distribution of Knoppix loaded with games has a bootable CD with 700 MB of open-source games, 3d support for NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel Extreme, gamepad support for XWindows. uni-kl is University of Kaiserlautern, the first on the list for distributing SuSE fixes - they are good. Every kid should have one for Christmas morning."

Yay! Ati is supported

[holymoo]

Interesting a distrobution that actually has support for a ati video card, where 3d is already setup. Heck, its worth downloading just for that.

GPL?

[mowler2]

Isnt it a GPL violation to ship the Linux kernel together with nvidia binary modules?

News from the future, indeed.

[MMC Monster]

December 25, @08:30AM "Every kid should have one for Christmas morning."

Re:Am I correct...

[shoolz]

Good man, michael! Being a Christmas rebel myself, it can be a bit hard when you feel like others don't understand your motivation and generally call you a scrooge or grinch (or mod you down :P ). I too have had enough of the crass commercialism of Christmas (note that marketers don't even use the C word anymore... now it's the "season" or the "holidays").

In October, I made up my own little notes based on ideas I found on xmasresistance.org [xmasresistance.org], and sent them out to my family and friends.

They basically read "Dear family/friends/loved ones, I am truly looking forward to sharing in the friendship and togetherness of Christmas this year, however, I will not be buying gifts and I kindly ask that you do not buy a gift for me. I sincerely look forward to spending time with everyone close to me. If you feel compelled to make a gesture of giving, in lieu of a gift to me, please make a small donation to the charity of your choice on my behalf. Love Chris."

Re:Nah

[Goldberg's Pants]

Nice! Daddy likes the rough stuff.

My wife bought me a watch for my birthday. Knowing full well she had done it, my mother-in-law has bought me a watch for Christmas.

I think chucking a Knoppix disk under the tree for someone is cool. SO LONG AS YOU'RE NOT A CHEAP BASTARD AND ACTUALLY ALREADY HAD SOMETHING ELSE FOR THEM.

It's a good stocking filler I think. Slap a disk under the tree, slap it on a computer, keep the young kids happy, and let's face it, Tux Racer is a laugh.

Re:what about a commercial game like this

[Minna Kirai]

This way, as the developer, you would have a custom OS to run/design your game in.

And you can support maybe 50% of the user's hardware, and never ever add drivers for newer things, etc, so the games become useless after a few years...

I always thought a 2 CD system would be perfect...

[Belial6]

I always thought that a 2 CD system would be perfect to 'Consolize' the PC and specifically linux. At the prices of CD drives today, it would be pretty inexpensive to have two CD\DVD drives in a system. You could then make the hard drive optional. The first drive would be the OS/Driver drive. The second drive would be the game drive. You would have something like Knoppix to initialize all of your hardware in drive 1, and if there is a disk in drive 2 it would automatically load like a console.

This would give all the benefits of the console. Specifically, put the disk in and it runs. No seeing the OS at all. It would also allow for simple upgrade when new hardware came out. Just replace the Disk 1, and all of the Disk 2's still work.

Heck, the Disk one could even be a USB/SD/Compact Flash drive. Then people would freak out about the second CD. They would just see the system as "upgradeable".

With this system, geeks could 'roll there own' game system. And, white box dealers could very easily put the effort in once to make their first "console", and just make copies for the hundred other systems they sell.

Re:Dilema.

[Azureflare]

Have you tried disabling Plug N Play OS in your bios (you can also pass pnp=off to the kernel in the /etc/lilo.conf file), as well as passing noapic to the kernel?

Happened to me recently on this mobo, nvidia drivers wouldn't get loaded unless I did this.

It might also be as simple as you needing to have a kernel-source installed which matches your running kernel (if you use an rpm based system, rpm -q kernel-source should do it, or rpm -q kernel-source-2.6 on the recent mandrake). If you're not on a rpm based system, usually ls -l /usr/src/linux works as well. Then type uname -r. Make sure the numbers match up, then try reinstalling the nvidia drivers from the download off their site.

Good luck, and you can probably find help in your distro's irc channel on irc.freenode.net, or on linuxquestions.org.

Good for benchmarking

[yem]

If you can convince the nice man in the tech store to let you boot the CD, you could run a set of linux gaming tests on each of the PCs you're considering for purchase.

Damned if I can find any comparisons of mobile 3d performance in linux so this is pretty much my only option.

Pity they couldn't load it up with the Quake 3 and UT200x demos which would be more useful.

Re:what about a commercial game like this

[Noodlenose]

You could just use a mini distro like Damn small Linux [damnsmalllinux.org]. With 57 MB for the full version (which I'm sure could be further stripped and then added the 3d drivers) that leaves you 400 MB for data. Not bad. Driver support / Hardware support could be as simple as a monthly "apt-get update".

Mmmh. *gets out his coding gloves and yells for coffee*...

Re:Dilema.

[towndowner]

regarding your audigy, did you check that it's appropriate output channels are unmuted and volume raised? often by default they're muted and potted down on startup. and audigy has so many channels in its mixing matrix that it takes me five minutes to figure out which one's the main out.