Games doesent work in Fedora test 3

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, Andrew Farris wrote:

>> That's the business reality of things anyway.  I'd love to see 
>> video games work rock solid on all video hardware in Linux, but 
>> that's not going to happen without a large number of volunteer 
>> programmers getting their fingers dirty with gdb and debugging 
>> DRI problems when they have them with OpenGL games, and 
>> submitting patches.
>
>nVidia has a very active help forum, where several developers
>*regularly* visit (unfortunately they have been a bit absent the last
>few months).  The problems that have been mentioned in the last few days
>here are almost all addressed on that forum, by many people who have
>been through them.  It is not necessary for nVidia to give direct
>support of Fedora, the drivers work (in their current blow-away-files
>install design) well for a great many people, and for those with
>problems there is help available.
>
>http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=14
>
>Yes a more robust install method that supports packaging systems would
>be useful, especially if they stopped overwriting files all over the
>place.  The installer does contain a tarball extraction option, from
>which you could easily build an rpm (just need a spec, which there have
>been several floating around).  You could then see conflicts occur
>before the install, thx to rpm.  RedHat isn't responsible for creation
>of these packages however, its not their driver.
>
>To ask RedHat to fix these problems themselves is completely misguided.

Agreed with all of your above points.

>> Games are cool, but not essential to business or the enterprise.  
>
>Yes, and it shouldn't be a primary point of interest for Fedora.  

I both agree and disagree there... While I work on XFree86, and 
will do so for Fedora releases, I still have to prioritize my own 
tasks and time in a manner that gives Red Hat the best bang for 
the buck.  What I do in my personal spare time voluntarily is 
another issue of course, but I don't have much spare time either.

"Fedora" however isn't just about who's doing what inside Red
Hat, it also involves the community out there.  So if there are
people strongly interested in having video games work solidly in
Fedora Core, and they're willing to either debug and troubleshoot
the problems themselves, or get together with others having
problems and form sort of a game-player-hackers-guild of sorts,
I'd be glad to participate when I have time to do so.  Although
debugging video drivers and kernel modules can be very complex
and hair pulling experience, a lot of experience isn't
necessarily required.  What IS required, is strong dedication and 
perserverence to the given problem, and commitment of a person to 
dedicate time to the problem, and to seek the help of other X/DRI 
developers to provide tips/assistance, describe what a given chip 
register does, how to use gdb, etc.

If there is truely sufficient interest in gaming in Fedora, and 
enough volunteers out there to dig directly into the issues 
experienced, a LOT of problems can be solved, and this can lead 
to much stabler gaming experience.


>There are currently no distros that can claim fully working and
>well supported 3D gaming out of the box for all cards, at any
>level close to the windows support.  It would be very cool
>indeed, but circumventing the problem by making each distro deal
>with it in a unique way is the wrong solution.

I don't disagree.  For file conflicts types of issues and other 
installation related problems, I have some potential solutions to 
explore in the future, and I'll be discussing these along with 
Debian, FreeBSD and other distribution's X developers in hopes we 
can come to a common solution.  XFree86 already supports 
everything to do this IMHO, it's more of a concensus of file 
installation and configuration more than anything.


>Yeah, a number of us suffer from similar predicaments I see.  
>Perhaps the OpenSource model can address this in the future,
>there must be a solution if enough geeks start thinking it
>through.

Hopefully the opensource model will yield hundreds of patch 
weilding gdb using video game players.  ;o)


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat