Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Re: [BLUG] Bloomington Lan party April 18th @ Fountain Squre

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 06:22:23PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
> Its funny, I would think after a few years since having the last one
> and such better support for 3D in Linux now that almost everyone's Linux
> box would have 3d accelleration. Just curious, what kind of machine do
> you have? I understand that a lot of people run Linux on less powerful
> hardware all the time and often do it for several years. My workstation
> at Cook is almost 4 years old now, but I'm fine with it. But it has an
> Nvidia quattro video card in it.

Oh, it's a Lenovo. It has an ATI something-or-other. Until the Jaunty
Beta (Ubuntu 9.04), the non-free driver was the only one that would
work, and that didn't do OpenGL.

Theoretically, OpenGL should now work. However, since I upgraded the
BIOS on this thing a few months back, it has had a problem over-heating.
(Interestingly, I had *no* problems before I updated the BIOS. I've
updated the BIOS once more since then, but it didn't correct the
over-heating issue.) Due to the over-heating issue, I exclusively run
the CPU in Energy Save mode, and have to avoid OpenGL.

I should send the machine off for service. I've just not gotten around
to it. It is much worse in Windows (it over-heats much faster), so it
definitely qualifies.

> I think ATI's drivers are better under Linux now. I loaded Ubuntu on
> a machine with an older ATI card and it had 3D accel from the get go,
> which impressed me.

Yeah, it is getting much better.

> Not all 3D games are FPS. I play Neverball/Neverputt all the
> time. And things like Torcs, etc.

Yeah, that is true. I'm a little old-school, though. I'm a big fan of
ASCII-based games. I like some graphical games, but a lot of the times
they just annoy me.

> I'm all for playing a variety of games and hope that we do more than
> just play games, I'd like to learn off each other and share things that
> we know and have done.

Yeah. I'm expecting that, too.

--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07 78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E

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