After a long battle with technology, der.hans wrote:
> Am 19. Mai, 2008 schwatzte storkus@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
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