As explained here, I have an Intel 945GM graphics card, with the i915 driver, using Ubuntu 10.10 RC. Eschalon book ii is so sluggish as to be unplayable. (Book I worked on my laptop fine back in the days of Ubuntu 8.04, I think it was.) Using the X updates repo doesn't seem to help.

Any suggestions?

(I've also tried the windows version in Wine 1.2, but it fails to load, instead outputting an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION dialog.)

Sounds like you may not have direct rendering working correctly. You'd need a heck of a system to run things fast with no hardware acceleration. Try running "glxinfo | head" and posting the output here. The magic line you're looking for is "direct rendering: Yes".

It might also help to post /var/log/Xorg.0.log (as an attachment, please!) and /etc/X11/xorg.conf if you have one.

Got it...

direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.

There's no xorg.conf, but I added the next closest thing: xorg.conf.failsafe

Yeah, even with direct rendering, the Intel graphics drivers for that thing really just aren't up to running Book 2. I had given it a try on my laptop (which as similar graphics hardware) and it was basically unplayable. Book 1 and run Well Enough, though even that performance wasn't great. It's definitely a driver issue, as the game ran reasonably on the Windows partition that I had on that machine still.

(Which doesn't mean that there may not be a way to get it to run better, but I hadn't found it.)