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Episode: 1183
Title: HPR1183: Boise Lug meeting Feb 7 2013
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1183/hpr1183.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:10:52
---
This is Kuvmo reporting for Hacker Public Radio.
This is from the Boise Linux Group Meeting for February 7th being officiated by Darren
concerning gaming on Linux, playing Doomwads with Vavoon and installing and using Valve.
This was a great group tonight.
We had plenty of new faces.
This meeting had a lot of help and questions, but I edited this down to just the gaming
section so if it sounds a little chopped up in sections that is my fault and I hope
you enjoy.
Please let me know.
Thanks.
So I was preparing stuff for today's steam presentation.
A lot of stuff under steam is still in beta, there are a few games that are not beta, but
in my effort to demonstrate something that runs on steam, I was looking through some
old discs.
Now, if you have some old Valve software, if you're a gamer from a few years back, if you
register all your old games on Valve, you can download the Linux version at no charge.
So in my hunt for my old Linux disc, I ran across another disc, so I'm going to
segue here for a second.
Does anybody, does anybody replace Doom?
Okay.
You play Doom really, all right?
So in my search to find my original Half-Life discs, I ran across my Doom disc, I'd
heard that Doom or Linux had a Doom player in the repositories, so as long as you have
the Wad files, you can play Doom with the various players under Linux.
So I'm just going to show you, yes, it really does work.
Now there's several different engines that will run Doom.
There's Chocolate Doom, there's VaVoom, and then there's one other one.
The other two work pretty well, but VaVoom seems to be the most flexible.
You can specify and start up your screen resolution.
So in this case, I'm going to try and demonstrate 800 by 600 Doom session.
I'm not going to play it, but I'll just launch it and see what it looks like here.
No, this Doom really is playable under Linux, and I guess we can turn the volume on now
than other in this room.
So any very, the original Doom software, but one thing that's on the Doom discs is the
original Doom 1 Wads.
One thing that's on the original Doom 2 discs is the original Doom 1 Wads.
So Doom was released back when, the first Doom was released on the floppy, so anybody
remember that part?
He had a low Doom, the Cyclone, and the 3 floppy's are so.
Then they came out with Doom 2, and it was big, they had to move it to CD-ROM because
it was almost 30 megens size, so that would have been 30 floppy's.
So on the Doom 2 CD disc, there's the Doom 2 Wad, the Doom 1 Wad, and there's still 600
meg of free disc space on that disc.
So anyways, if you have your own Doom discs, you can play on here, and it plays just like
it used to.
I have it running in the window at the moment, but you can't run a full screen.
And one thing that I don't know, this is actually running quite well with a, this is
interpolated to a higher resolution.
The original Doom was very blocky, very grainy.
The new engines on Linux, they do a good job at scaling it to a reasonable resolution.
So anyways, it was kind of fun to revisit some of these old Doom rooms and shoot some
peak monsters and other things, but I just want to demonstrate this was possible.
So if you want to, if you want to, the details to, how to, how to install this, I can,
I can provide those after the, after the presentation, so yeah.
So yeah, one, one thing is the, in a nutshell, the, the Wad files, or you copy the Wad files
over to your hard drive, and then you, I guess if you know where to copy them, you can copy
them to the respective Doom directories, but the Baboom, the Baboom and the other Dooms,
they install to a user, a slash user library, I think it's user share games, it's what the,
the library is.
Yeah, I think if you copy the Wad files to the respective directory, they will deal, those,
those games will know where to find them, but I, I didn't know where to copy them, but
I found something that says, well, here's a dev installer, just park your, park your Wad files
in this directory and run this dev creator, and it'll create the dot, dev file, so then
you can run the dot dev, and it'll park the, park the files magically in whatever directory
they need to land in, and these games, or these automatically find it.
In fact, there might be a path here that says, yeah, yeah, right here says, user share games
Doom, so he can just copy the files to that directory, you know, it'll find the Wad files.
And then on the drop down here, it shows you which, which Wad files it found, so evidently,
there's Doom 2 Hell on Earth, Doom 2 TNT, Doom 2 Platonia, I don't remember playing these,
so on, didn't realize there's so many Doom 2s on the disk, there's Freedom Heretic, Hexen,
and Stripe, I don't know if those are just on the drop down, or if those are actually
in my, in my directory, I just tried Doom 1, but I know there should be at least Doom 2
in there, so anyways, questions on the Doom at the moment, all right, so let's launch,
let's launch Steam, so I was successful in finding my half-life, oh, I never did find
my half-life CDK, or CD disks, I'm kind of, I'm kind of anal retentive sometimes, and
I'll keep files, I had young kids, and so kids were notorious for damaging CD ROMs, breaking
them, cracking them, scratching them, you name it, so I got in the habit of making a play
copy of the CD ROMs for the kids to play with, and then sometimes they wouldn't play with
the right ones, and they would ruin the original, so in the case that they've lost everything,
I would make lists of my registration numbers, and so I was able to use my registration
number, I had my half-life disk to the Steam, and Steam says, oh yeah, that's a, that's
a valid disk, we're adding those, the half-life series to your, to your Steam account, so now,
now I can just download these, the Steam files, I do not want to explain what Steam is.
Oh, I'm sorry, yeah, yeah, I was making a assumption, yeah, yeah, it's okay, so the
non-gamer, so Steam, back in the early days, I just mentioned one way, one way to get
around the early cocket protection on CD ROMs, used to put cryptic invalid file names,
or broken file names, or broken directory structures, and the game would check for these
broken structures, and if it found these broken encrypted structures on the disk, it
would know that that game was a valid disk, so it was this game of Spy versus Spy, the
game would come out of, with the way they, or the distributors would come out of the
way to encrypt the disk, and the crackers would come out with a crack to crack the, the
copy scheme on the disk. Well, Valve came up with a method of, you will, you will run,
you will register on their website, and you don't have to have a disk in your drive
to run the game, but you have to log in to their website in order to play, so you have
to be, you have to be a registered user, so you have to use your own account or use someone's
account that has the game in it. The handy thing about Valve, where did it go? Let's try
that again. It is in beta. Oh, I'm getting the message that it's updating. Yeah, so updates
are quite regularly. So Valve came up with this idea that, you can, they will store all
the dog games online, you buy, you register your account name, your CD name, and they will,
they will keep track of all the updates for you, and you just download the game on whatever
PC you log into, and you can play it on that PC as long as you're logged into your account.
So it's really handy if you're walking around to your brother's house or whatever, and
you want to play at his house on his computer, and all you have to do is log into your Steam
account and your game downloads. So essentially, the Valve Steam distribution or Steam is a
distribution center for games. So if you're familiar with the Linux side, Linux has a software
store where everything is free. Valve has a software store, and everything is typically
not free. So it's a way to download games. So Steam has just recently been a little frustrated
with the environment out there. They have publicly specified that they are frustrated with
Windows 8. They don't like the closed environment. It has a store, and you have to go through
the Microsoft store, which means Microsoft takes money out of your pocket if you can sell
stuff through their store. They're going to give Linux a try. So we'll see how that works.
So it looks like they're putting a pretty good effort behind the Linux games. So a lot
of the Linux games are one of the initial games that they started to release for Steam, are left
for Dead 2, the Counter Strike Series, Team Fortress 2, Sirius Sam is on there, and I was hoping
to be able to show you the list, but there's several different games and several of them are in
beta. This laptop under Windows can play all those games without an issue. So I hope I'm hoping for
the same performance under Steam, but some of the initial games, they can play so well. But
they're still working with Nvidia, because everything in historically has been on Windows side,
so Nvidia's got all their optimization for Windows environment. The games have been optimized
for DirectX. When they run in Linux, they run as OpenGL. A lot of games early on, they programed
in both environments, and you could typically on a Valve game, you could pick if you wanted to run
OpenGL, which there's a functionality for OpenGL, or you could run DirectX. I'm running
Ubuntu Linux. There's several different places of Ubuntu, and I'm running a Kabuntu version,
and if you talk to any person that runs Linux, they will have a favorite distribution for different
reasons. Some it's like, this is the only thing that will run on my hardware, because I had
these certain combinations of drivers, or certain combinations of hardware pieces that will run.
I started running Ubuntu early on, back when it had a different desktop environment by default,
and then some of those desktop environments have changed over time, so I've moved around a little
bit, so I've changed from Ubuntu with the GNOME desktop to Kabuntu. I have a list of reasons I'd
be glad to share with you. I don't have a dislike for any of the distributions. Some people
are like a religion. I pick them for which one gives me the least hassle. I like to do certain things.
I like to use all my Windows real estate. I like to be able to hide the taskbar. I notice there's
almost no icons on my desktop, so I like to run a certain way, and so as long as that desktop allows
me to run that way, different environments have different footprints for CPU and memory usage,
so Kabuntu is known to be a fairly one of the heavier users. However, it has a very quick way
to disable the fancy effects, so it's still fairly memory heavy, but memory is cheap these days,
so that's less of an issue unless you have an older platform where you can't feel full of memory,
so if you have like a five-fold system, then you probably want to choose a desktop with the
lighter with the lighter memory footprint. But then there's other desktops that don't have the
memory footprint or the CPU penalty. XCFE is one desktop environment, and then LXDE. LXDE.
LXDE. LXDE? Yeah, yeah. What's that? XFCE and LXDE. LXDE, so desktop environment is
assumed what the yeast stands for, so I do some of those. Those definitely have a lighter desktop
environment, but then they also, the feature set seems to be a little bit more watered down,
than some of the more advanced gnome or the advanced KDE stuff, so all my hardware runs some of
the more advanced stuff, so I usually choose the heavier desktops, and then by like on KDE,
I use the keystroke. There's a keystroke that will turn off the special effects instantly,
and we're good to go. So it looks like it's running fine. So we have feature items,
they're trying to sell you here. This is their Abu Taisman area. Games, I think this is the
list of games. Oh, you know, this is by category, so you're going to list them by category,
so you have free to play. So they do have free, there are free games on here. The funny thing is,
is World of Goo, has anyone ever played World of Goo? He played World of Goo? That's a free game
in some of the repositories, and they charge a couple bucks for it on here, like five bucks,
not very much, but I'm surprised. So, I mean, yeah, they have to host the servers, but I was surprised
that they do have a free category. I don't know why that one's not in there. They sell software,
I haven't even been on this tab, so I wasn't, wasn't, um...
Well, I've come up with a thing where people could petition to put their apps on through their
steam libraries, so that when people get enough signatures or something like that, they said,
they can put it on there, so they created a software section, a group of who got enough.
Is it called Green Line? Yes, Green Line, yes. Yeah, first it was free, and then people then
they're concerned about putting garbage down there, then they started charging like a nominal $100
fee just to prevent a flood of garbage, so... Yeah, yeah, they were trying to promote, you know,
just community development, excuse me, but yeah, now that's nice to see that, so yeah, ACDC,
that's a good little picture viewing app for what is this environment. So demos, evidently,
you can demo stuff. I haven't played much in here, so recommend a games, evidently, the highest
rated games here, I haven't played in Steam all that much. Series Sam 3, Jewel of the Nile.
So, Series Sam is one of the games that does run on Linux, but yet news is the next tab,
but the very last tab here is a Linux-specific category. So, on this top tab, then they show you
what's, what are some of the more popular apps, and then down at the bottom, they have new releases
on a tab down here, and they also have a top sellers, and then somewhere, let's just take this full
screen and see what happens. Okay. Put a Linux in the search. What's that? Oh, it's in the search,
and then when the search comes up, you have to press it a little bit, but leave it. Change,
just delete Linux out of over there on the left. Okay, and over here under any OS, now put in Linux,
click on the drop down, and it makes us a selection. Okay, and that'll show you the games that are.
Yeah, so some of these are full-fledged games, and some of these are add-on. So,
here Half-Life was the original Half-Life was released last week, or the week and a half ago.
I think it's still in beta. Last week you had to install it with, if you knew it was there,
you can install it through some backdoor technique. Right now, it's advertised straight up, you can
download it and install it. Yeah, Amnesia is on here, Crusaders 2. Yes, Seer Sam was on here,
he was trying. I found out last night when I was downloading some of stuff, the Half-Life 2,
the Counter-Strike series, and some of the other Half-Life 2 tiles are on here now, which I didn't
even hear about that in the news. So, if you look, if you could see here, there's a Windows tag,
an Apple tag, and then there's a Penguin. So, there's a Penguin tag, if the game running is ready
for Linux install, then you're good to go. So, if you have games already registered with
with Valve, they show up on your games list, but one thing that this doesn't show up is this shows
me all the games I've ever registered with Valve, but it doesn't show if they're the Linux version
or the Windows version. So, that's one area that could use some improvement until all the ones
that are available in the library, be nice if they told you which ones are which. I have never
tried installing something from Valve, Steam Valve, the Linux version, to run under wine. You can
run Steam under wine back in the old days. That's kind of how you had to run if you underrun a lot
of these games, and a lot of these games run very well under wine, but if you want, you could run
a Steam, a Windows version of Steam under wine, and then play these games. So, I'm assuming you could
do the same thing here. So, if you're thinking of Linux and you're thinking of gaming on Linux,
I would strongly recommend going to Nvidia route. There are way less complaints on the
Nvidia side than AMD side. Okay, so stick with the Nvidia side for your hardware, for the
video card, definitely recommend that. AMD does work, but AMD is slow. You boot to a release
anew. The latest release with latest kernel and the latest, on Linux it's called a video server,
they call it XORG. So, there's a kernel and on top of the kernel is many things, but one of them
is the video environment. The video driver has to communicate with that video environment,
and they're still constantly updating that video environment to add more features, more handles
input, many other things. So, that's changed all the time. AMD is notoriously slow for updating
their drivers. They'll be like, they'll like two or three months by the time something was
the released final to when they have a driver that you get actually boot with their hardware.
So, you're forced to stay a few releases behind. So, if you'd like to play with the leading
that stuff, AMD will prevent you from playing games. The open source driver will run, it'll boot,
it'll work with the XORG, but it doesn't play games real fast yet. It's improving.
The newer Intel graphics chipsets run reasonably well. Yeah, that's true. If your chipsets
is via on a VIA run, they won't run. Yeah, the motherboard having a chipset for VIA is fine,
but if it uses their VIA Chrome, right? It's a 77 chipset. Is that what you see like the newest,
like new hotness from Intel? Yeah, Intel is a very pro open source company. So, if they support
the huge, huge graphics. Yeah. And there's Sandy Bridge. What's the new one?
Yeah, we're running 90 degrees. Yeah, so all those drivers are already in the kernel.
Exactly. Come on, flip to the FedEx stuff.
No, I'm running it. It's getting better.
The Intel 4,000 graphics head in my MacBook and Linux runs fine and universal.
The drivers for Intel, the integrated graphics, they are open source, right?
Yes, they are. So, I think I got this right. I think Valve was working with the Intel
integrated graphics and they were actually looking at like the piping for the driver and then
they had the source code for their games so they could see where the bottlenecks were happening.
So, they're actively working on the Intel integrated, so they can better all the time.
Yeah, they could actually tell them, hey, when the drivers are open source,
they could actually try to change themselves, compile it, and then say, hey, this is where the problem
is. So, they expressed there is a really nice change to be able to work directly with the
software providers or with the source code to implement the fixed. Yeah, so Nvidia does work
very well with the game environment, but they continue to leave their stuff close source,
but they have really good close source drivers. So, if you're in a game, I recommend running
Nvidia with their close source software. Unfortunately, proprietary drivers.
So, most Linux systems that you'll install will come with the open source drivers,
and then you may get this little thing that looks like a little add-in card from the circuit board
that will pop up and say, proprietary drivers available or restricted drivers available.
This is the month's main board of the Nvidia card. By the vendor.
Yeah, that's fine. What's that?
I would always go with vendors. Yeah, yeah. So, you can install the stuff that comes with the
package members, the libraries, they kind of group them together at the time, okay,
here's our set of libraries and applications that run together. Oftentimes, especially with
this valve environment, the new valve is in beta, and everything is quickly changing.
Quite often, just with the way it was in the Windows world, hey, if you want to run this game
at highest frame rates, you'll get a X performance improvement if you use layers and greatest drivers.
You may not find those in your regular distribution. You may have to learn how to install those
yourself, and it's not that hard. If you're install drivers on a Windows side, it's very similar
on the Linux side, but it is a little different and being happy with that part.
What's that?
I can't handle it.
Yeah, yeah. It's one of these things. Keep it in a form. I can show you how to set up where,
if you need to reinstall, you can reinstall without losing your personal data.
So you can set the partition.
Set the partition?
Yeah, so what do your partitions do?
Usually, typically, you wind up with three.
Yeah, I don't know if I got two.
Because you don't have to swap with the OS here and there as well.
Yeah.
What does this swap again?
Swark is the equivalent of Windows page file.
Memory overflow?
Virtual memory.
Back in the old days, memory is expensive. You didn't put much, maybe there's a virtual memory on your.
It's a virtual memory, very slow.
If you got to pack a system full of RAM, you probably don't even need one.
I'll just drag your deraps.
If you have an RAM system, you're ready.
Yeah, SSDs, yeah.
Unless you have an SSD.
What do I'm saying if you don't want to go swap with SSDs?
You don't want to go swap with SSDs.
Because SSDs wear out.
I don't know, so I'm going to have an SSD.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, so.
There are limited cycles on those memory circuits.
Yeah, they're fast.
They're life is short.
It's a lot of state drives.
Yes, yes.
So they're very, very fast, but like any electronic circuit,
I feel like a battery can charge and recycle.
There's a limited number of cycles per circuit.
Yeah, so if your Linux doesn't,
Linux is a very swapy by default.
And so you can tell how much to swap and not to swap.
So you can create a swap partition.
I'm running this one with an SSD.
And I do have a swap partition, but I rarely hit it.
But then I also, I've set my swap, they call it swapiness.
I've tuned it way down.
So it only does it if I run out of RAM.
So yeah, exactly.
Yeah, if you do hit the limit,
it's like, wait, I have something important running.
Then yeah, you don't want to have an out.
But if I have four gig on this system,
but if you have, if you have more than four,
it'll probably be like, you know, when you have more RAM,
people make bigger software packages that take advantage of it.
But that was like 32, actually.
Yeah, okay.
So yeah, so RAM RAM is much cheaper than it used to be.
The size of my first hard drive.
I was just surprised.
I have a 12-year-old computer right now.
I just have a working lens.
Wow.
I'm going to give you my tech about it.
Okay.
Okay, so I've got a server that's running Windows NT 4.0.
Oh, wow, yeah.
And it's been running now for 15 years.
I'm going to say that's before the turn of the century.
I don't know.
Wow.
Seriously, but yeah.
Hey, where's 24%?
So, actually, wow, that's amazing.
Like, out of time, you're like 15 years,
as ridiculous.
Have you ever heard of that?
You haven't rebooted that much.
Oh, well, yeah, okay.
It's like my way ahead.
Machine is still there.
Oh, yeah.
So.
Just don't click on Windows updates.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Years.
Yeah.
So.
So.
Any questions about Steam?
We want this.
This is still the beta.
Steam.
I think they've had a beta program.
And they first had a limited number of users, like 500 or 1,000, and sign up.
Yeah.
But it's wide open now.
So it's not.
I think they can still beta if I'm correct, but it's open to anybody.
But no hoops or tricks, you can do that.
Well, no, no, good point.
So I installed the early, I installed the Steam, because there used to be work around
if you did a certain number of hoops, you could get Steam running under Linux before
you were officially invited to the beta.
And Steam or Valve didn't shut anybody down that was using that technique for a while.
But then I tried doing that same trick.
And I had an old version of Steam on my computer.
So when I launched it and there's a new version available, it would fail to download.
So I was going to show, actually, it won't be good to show you the path here, because
you guys can't even see it.
So I'll publish those in the notes, the path to the Steam.
So there's a Steam repository online that you can download the latest Steam.
And then once that's downloaded and installed, it's been self-updated ever since then.
But that was as of Sunday.
Do you have the software sensor or do you do the turn over?
I Googled it, and I found a link that says here, download Steam here.
So I navigated down and called it the rest of the SteamPower.com, they'll have it
download.
Really?
Okay.
Yeah, it's easy, easy now.
So, okay, I hadn't tried that yet.
I tried.
What did I try doing?
I ran into some brick walls when I was trying to do some of the solutions that were proposed
by the Steam window when it was popping up.
They were old.
Like I said, it was the old version of Steam.
So some of that stuff was already outdated, even though it's only a month or two old.
So I just went directly to the Steam site, downloaded their latest daily build, and it installed
just fine.
So one other thing.
Here.
So let's...
I do want to show you this.
I'm running 64-bit Linux.
So if you run 32-bit, the most memory you can address without using any physical address
extension is 3.4 gig.
So I strongly recommend running 64-bit, and 64-bit will allow you to address 182 gigabytes
of memory.
But Steam is 32-bit.
So it runs a 32-bit environment.
So if you want to see a preview of a game, and let's see, let's go back to...
I can't see.
Let's go back to the store.
So let's say I want to view this game.
This window right here is a Adobe Flash window, and you have to run Adobe Flash in the
session.
Here again, I have...
I compiled some notes.
There's several different websites that says, here's how you make Steam run.
Unfortunately, I had to take a combination of advice from three different websites to
make Steam actually run in my environment.
One says, download this file, another says, okay, yeah, take that file and put it here,
and then there was one other thing that I had to do that I put in the notes.
I can't remember exactly what it is at the moment, but anyways, I'll post those instructions.
But once you download it, then this environment does work, and I clicked on it, that's going
to see if there's a...
Let's go to Linux.
So yeah, so now it's playing this video here, and it works just fine.
So it is possible.
It does work.
You can run the 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system, but you have to make sure that you put the
right flash player.
There's a specific version of Flash, another thing, Adobe Flash, Adobe stopped officially supporting
Linux at all, both on the Android and on the desktop environment.
They still...
There's 64-bit player.
They at least finally released one that's workable, but it's no longer updated.
So there's an 11.2 version of the Flash player that you can download, and it will run
just fine.
It will run your Steam stuff just fine.
Google Chrome, they have a Pepper Box environment, a Pepper Something environment, where they keep
the latest version of the Adobe Flash player downloaded with their browser.
So fortunately, Google is keeping us up to date, so you do have an up to date Flash
option through Google Chrome, if you need it for whatever reason.
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