Best Vista Error EVAR, gaming, and software requests, and an Ubuntu gripe

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, der.hans wrote:
> Am 19. Mai, 2008 schwatzte storkus at storkus.com so:
>> Next up, the question: has anyone tried gaming on FreeBSD?  I've seen
>> past stuff mainly about problems WRT native software liking ALSA over
>> OSS, but I don't know if that's been solved or got worse.  What about WINE
>> and its descendents? 
> I'm always trying to find gaming info for *NIX. I discovered atanks last
> week, but doubt it'd fit real gaming cravings.

The trouble is that different people mean different things by "gaming".  Many 
mean "playing the absolute latest heavily advertised game by $COMPANY", some 
mean "playing Tetris and Solitaire".

One thing that works well for old-school people like me is emulators.  There 
are projects that work pretty darn well at emulating the NES, SNES, GameBoy, 
GBA, and PSX, although the best PSX emulator I found is not fully Open.  
There are other less good emulators for the N64 and PS2.  Many of these 
things should work just fine on *BSD.

Wine is hit-or-miss.  If you have a specific program you want to run, it's 
always best to check it out at winehq.com and see if it can be made to work 
without major hassle.  Wine *still* can't run Progress Quest without 
graphical glitches (sigh).

>> As I'm writing this, I recall that, on modern Slackware anyway, they use
>> modules and an initrd image, so maybe that's it.
> Yup. Everything does at this point. The kernel is too big to boot if you
> don't put some stuff in modules.

It's easy to put together a kernel that doesn't require an initrd.  It's just 
that that kernel will only boot on a very limited subset of hardware.  One of 
the first things I always do when installing a new distro is to get a recent 
vanilla source tarball and build a vanilla kernel that doesn't require an 
initrd because it's got everything needed to mount / built in.  (This also 
removes bugs caused by distro patches, and typically makes it easier to build 
and use third-party kernel modules.)

-- 
   "Oh bother," said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
   --MHR on alt.fan.pratchett
  My blog and resume: http://crow202.dyndns.org:8080/wordpress/
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see