The Drunken Lizard Pub

The beta is already out...

The beta X-Fi driver is for 64-bit Linux. I tried to installed Ubuntu 64-bit but it failed, so I went back to the 32-bit edition.

According to what I read, Creative Labs have no intention of releasing 32-bit Linux X-Fi drivers because of lack of DRM on Linux. No problem- there are several other manufacturers that make Linux drivers for their sound cards. Creative Labs is just missing out on that market.

Yes, I notice they don't do any Linux drivers at all for earlier cards.

micks wrote:Whoops, sorry, the Radeon 9000 series is supported by fglrx, while Mobility Radeon 9000 is not. I wonder whether the game wouldn't be a bit too slow on that GPU even if you got it running...

Maybe, however when I bought the laptop it really had good performance compared to other laptops and could handle the fps games back then. This was however a couple of years ago but I would be surprised if it couldn't handle a turn based 2d game.

acoustibop wrote:Actually, I notice you're using a Mobility card. Might be an idea to see if you can increase the amount of RAM used for the card in your motherboard BIOS. How much RAM do you have for your system, how much is being used by the videocard and what's the maximum your videocard can use? Also, what's the size of your AGP aperture (also in BIOS)?

The graphics card has 64MB RAM and the system has 512MB. Yes I know - ridiculously low by todays standards. In the BIOS I can't see or change the AGP aperture - the BIOS is quite limited

I guess I have to stick to playing the game on my workstation. A pity though since I would prefer playing it on the laptop in front of the fire place

TBH, manemannen, looking at the System Requirements for the game, "1.8 GHz processor // 256 MB RAM (512 recommended) // 3D accelerated graphics card," it ought to run on your machine. BTW, BW, I notice the System Requirements still don't include Linux as a supported OS...

Your glxinfo output, "direct rendering: Yes," says you have direct rendering working, which means you have a 3D driver.

Looks like maybe, for ATI cards, the fglrx driver is needed, which means only cards from the 9500 series up can run the game, unless you want to try installing the 8.28.8 driver - checking on the release notes for that driver, the Mobility 9000 chip is supported after all:

ATI Mobilityâ„¢ Product Support

The ATI Proprietary Linux driver is designed to support the following ATI Mobilityâ„¢ products:
Mobility™ Radeon® X1800 Mobility™ Radeon® 9800
Mobility™ Radeon® X1600 Mobility™ Radeon® 9600
Mobility™ Radeon® X1400 Mobility™ Radeon® 9550
Mobility™ Radeon® X1300 Mobility™ Radeon® 9500
Mobility™ Radeon® X800 Mobility™ Radeon® 9000
Mobility™ Radeon® X700 Mobility™ Radeon® 9200
Mobility™ Radeon® X600 Radeon® Xpress 200M series
Mobility™ Radeon® X300

Here's a link to the last page the Unofficial Wiki for the ATI Linux Driver posted for installing the 8.28.8 driver - this was in Edgy, though. Obviously, the " Method 1: Installing Edgy's Included Driver" is no longer valid, but the manual method, "Method 2: Generating/Installing Ubuntu packages for the 8.28.8 drivers in Ubuntu Edgy Manually," is still essentially the same as for current versions and, if the driver will be OK with your current kernel, should work. My guess is that if it's not compatible with your kernel, when you try to install the generated packages it will simply fail (with error messages) and no harm will be done. There is a mention of Edgy in one line that should be changed to Gutsy, I think. If you want to try it, might be an idea to install another copy of Gutsy on your machine as a test bed to try it if you have the hard drive space. That way, if it does mess up, you can just lose it.

BTW, I'd always recommend the Unofficial Wiki for the ATI Linux Driver method for installing fglrx drivers - might look daunting, but it's just a matter of copy & pasting lines into a terminal. It's always worked very consistently for me; other methods seem somewhat hit-or-miss.

Edit: nope - no good. i just tried generating the packages for Gutsy, and the driver isn't supported - the 8.28.8 driver won't work in Gutsy

Hello,

First of all, I'd like to thank you for the great game that Eschalon is. It has already taken 3 full days of my life - and I consider them well spent. I registered on the forums just to share my experience with Eschalon on old ATI hardware.

If you're running any card older than a Radeon 9600 (or with a number lesser than 9500 - which IIRC is actually newer than 9600) - namely any 9200, 9250, 9000, 7500 etc. you can forget about running the fglrx drivers with any modern distribution. The current fglrx driver supports only new ATI cards (9500 and up) and, as pointed out earlier, the last release to support the likes of 9000 or 9200 was 8.28.8. This driver will not install on any modern Linux distribution, because it doesn't support the newer X.Org versions.

I'll make one thing clear: Eschalon DOES NOT require the fglrx driver to run on an ATI card. It runs happily on Mesa drivers (open source drivers for various graphics cards, http://www.mesa3d.org), even if not entirely problem-free.

I am running Eschalon on a notebook equipped with a Radeon 9200 card with 128 MB of RAM (it's obviously a Mobility card - and this is not a problem either) on Ubuntu 8.04. It comes standard with Mesa 7.0.3-rc2 and Eschalon runs on this configuration just fine, only not every time.

I have upgraded Mesa to version 7.1 (I manually compiled and installed it) and it seems to have solved one problem I had.

The game likes to crash with the appstub.linux signal handler 11Segmentation fault after pressing the LAUNCH GAME button from the Launch Menu window, and also on Mesa 7.0.3-rc2 it used to crash often when pressing the Begin a New Adventure button in the main menu before displaying the character generation page - but Mesa 7.1 seems to have fixed that. Not a big problem once I actually managed to create my character and start playing. Once the game is in progress, it has not crashed a single time for me, so if it crashes on startup I just relaunch it until it works (two crashes before it works is the most I've had to endure so far).

A friend of mine tested Eschalon on his Radeon 7500-equipped notebook (running Ubuntu 8.04 with its Mesa 7.0.3-rc2 driver) and he reports that the game starts, but so far it's always crashed on the character generation screen. I'll try to install Mesa 7.1 on his computer to see if it solves the problem.

Also, interestingly, the game will always generate the signal handler 11Segmentation fault when exiting by pressing Exit in the main menu.

On both Mesa versions the graphics in the game are not perfect, although the problem is minor. For some reason, the edges of floor tiles are very visible (showing up as a grid of dark lines on the ground), which brings out the tiled design of the game world (and makes it easier to calculate the distance to enemies). Other than that, everything seems fine.

All this tested on Eschalon at version 1.042c.