64-bit linux, Intel VGA hack to resolve frequent crashes

Linux support forum for Eschalon: Book I
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pal.illes
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Joined: January 9th, 2010, 2:53 pm
Location: Linuxland

64-bit linux, Intel VGA hack to resolve frequent crashes

Post by pal.illes »

I have a little story for those with Intel VGA and Linux. Since the last two updates of the opensource linux driver the Eschalon native client has shown a bit of a boost in performance. It started to be playable. But on my end the openGL libraries (libGL) produces frequent crashes with the mesa/intel-vga combination. I couldn't really get it right...till today! :) I was looking for the error message it produces and found this thread here: http://www.basiliskgames.com/forums/vie ... =11&t=2055 . Now this gave me the idea - why not try to install the nvidia libGL instead of the mesa. I knew it couldnt work, but tried. And hey, it works! :D At least so far I can start the game without the 1 out of 2 crash and runs stable so far. I'll test further myself now that I can, but thought other intel users might be interested too.

In this post I've written a detailed description of what I did. Basically using a hack by overriding mesa libgl with nvidia's libgl. That way it works like magic (and yeah, it's really magic as it's stupid that it can, but that's life, irracional things happen).

Another tip: switch off Day/Night cycle widget and switch to low detail, switch off direction signs (which is obvious as for some strange reason those signs are cut off when in Low detail mode). That way the speed of it increases to more playable. (Again I'm on intel gma965 which is one of the most performant of the intel chips)
Thanks BasiliskGames for providing linux client.
pal.illes
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Posts: 10
Joined: January 9th, 2010, 2:53 pm
Location: Linuxland

Re: 64-bit linux, Intel VGA hack to resolve frequent crashes

Post by pal.illes »

okay. 2 hours of playtesting. No crash so far. For me it's official. I can play it. :D

update: another 5 hours without crash.
Thanks BasiliskGames for providing linux client.
parabarbarian
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Joined: April 29th, 2010, 2:54 pm

Re: 64-bit linux, Intel VGA hack to resolve frequent crashes

Post by parabarbarian »

The following is based on the demo version so YMMV.

I couldn't locate the recommended version of the NVidia driver so I grabbed the latest one: version 195.36.24 at the time of this writing. I extracted it with the -x options, copied the libraries to $HOME/games/nvidia/lib and ran ldconfig -n on that directory. It segfaults if I try to run as a non-root user but will run as root. However, it still crashes in generally predictable places.

Chipset is Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (i810 driver)
Mesa version 6.5.1
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