Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Gaming on ubuntu

I've spent some time enabling my ATI Mobility Radeon X700 on my Acer 1694WLMi Laptop. It gave me some headaches, there was some problem with the official ATI, driver, fglrx, and mesa didn't want to go away. After some tries, I've decided to reinstall everything, xserver and fglrx, with the kernel restrictive modules. After that, I've just "sudo moddep -a" and rebooted. All went smooth, and I can now see:

tiagoboldt@Niath:~$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: MOBILITY RADEON X700 Generic
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6011 (8.28.8)
This means that my graphic card was already recognized and was ready to be user. So, what is a graphic card used for? GAMES, I've just installed the recently released second life client, savage for linux and a couple of games from the repositories, like Xmoto or Tremulous.

Second life runs really good, but I don't see any point in playing that.. It can be freely downloaded here.
As for Savage, it's total fun, just spent the evening playing it. Worth a try!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi there, I have the Aspire 1692 WLMi with the same video card (Mobility X700) and have the "OpenGL problem". I a newbie on Linux (kubuntu) and I'd like to fix this but I don't know how. How do you do this "reinstall everything, xserver and fglrx, with the kernel restrictive modules. After that, "sudo moddep -a" and rebooted"? I've tried the moddep thing but it doesn't recognize it as a command. When you reinstall xserver, do you have to start in Secure Mode (?). Help, please

Tiago Boldt Sousa said...

There are two ways of doing this, the hard way, which is, well, hard, and the easy way, provided by Alberto Milone, through Envy, is personal project. It automates the process of getting ATI or NVIDIA graphic cards to work in a Linux system. I advise you to take a look at his web site,and then follow the instructions. It is really simple, just download and install one .deb package, and it will identify your graphic card, download the appropriated drivers and install it. It should be this easy, but, if any doubt remains, try to let another comment here, or contact Alberto Milone directly. Good luck :D

Anonymous said...

I tried the envy but it didn't recognized my card. At the endI did it the hard way (compiling?) and it's working.

Thanks anyway