[ Thanks to Robert
McMillan for this link. ]
“Quake III: Arena is one of the most highly anticipated
games of the year on any personal-computing platform, not just
Linux. But getting Quake III running on your Linux box may be as
fierce a challenge as any battle you’ll fight in the game.
This isn’t just popping a CD into your drive and clicking on the
“Install” button like it is in the world of Windows. No, instead of
fighting warriors hell-bent on blasting you to smithereens, your
nemesis here is Linux itself.”
“Quake III uses Linux technology that is on the proverbial
bleeding edge: 3D OpenGL video acceleration. Unfortunately,
depending on the distribution that you have and the 3D card that is
in your computer, getting the right pieces together to get 3D
support running can be a real pain in the butt, as not every
distribution has the right components installed, and every
distribution deals with package files in a completely different
fashion. That being said, you’re going to find a lot of the video
companies supporting the RPM packaging standard because it’s common
to several of the major distributions. If you are running Slackware
or Debian, you’ll want to make sure RPM (or in Debian’s case, alien
for handling foreign packages) is installed on your system.”
“For the purpose of simplifying things, I will go with a typical
Quake III configuration, that being Red Hat Linux 6.1 with a
Voodoo3 card, since Red Hat is the most popular Linux distribution
and the Voodoo graphics series of accelerators is by far the
best-supported currently in Linux. That being said, it took me two
days to figure out how to get Quake III to run with this specific
setup.”