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Showing posts from September, 2017

Trouble Finding Your Linux Game Libraries?

Some Linux games, especially the older Linux games, are installed with the versions of libraries that they need. The problem arises when the specific libraries are unknown to your system and the game won't launch. The old Loki game installers attempted to fix this with some shell scripting. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't. Here's an easy way to fix this problem. First, we use a kernel utility, ldd , to see what shared libraries the binary expects to see. $ ldd /full/patch/to/application/binary You will get a list of libraries needed and a clear indication of whether they are present or not. Trick #1 Assuming your system reports them missing, but you can see them in the directory where you installed the game, rather than fix the script that launches the game, we'll simply tell the system where to look. Become root , and change directory to /etc/ldd.so.conf.d. Once there, create a file, name_of_game.conf and in that file enter  /full/path/to/the

Hexen on Modern Linux

There is a Linux binary housed at  Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion . It is in the Mageia repositories and can be installed using urpmi . The binary gets installed in /usr/bin and the rest of the game files and documents can be found in /user/games/hexen2 . I have not yet experienced Hexen2 since I don't have the retail version. The installer only installs the game engine, so I've purchased an original game CD from eBay to extract the game data files. The Heretic DOS games can be obtained form the AbandonwareDOS site for Heretic and Beyond Heretic . Doomsday is an advanced port of the Doom game engine, capable also of running Heretic, and Hexen games. RESOURCES Index of Games for Modern Linux Hexen II Wikipedia Hexen Wiki Doomworld Wiki Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion Linux-x86 Linux-AMD64 Install HOWTO Hexen II Linux Demo

nVidia Triple-head Display

What with the price of older-but-decent video cards and monitors being very reasonable, I decided to move from the dual-head display I have been using in various forms for the past 15 years to triple-head. I was currently running dual-head using a single vNidia 9800GT card and two monitors. I added a second vNidia 9800GT and a third Samsung SyncMaster 930b 17" monitor which was attached to the new video card. After some aggravation, I got it working, except that the Google-Chrome browser goes wonky in the display, but Firefox and other apps seem to be unaffected. If you want to see the wonky behavior, a video is available . As it was, it was mostly unusable for daily work and completely useless for games. After much tweaking and swearing, I chose the path of least resistance and purchased a newer video card that would work out-of-the-box with three monitors, a 4GB nVidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. There's a lot of help with this setup when using MS Windows as well as special