randal's Linux gaming adventure.

[randal]

So with the impending (Valve time?) release of SteamOS, I'm rather excited at the prospect of losing Windows for my main gaming OS. It's been a mixed bag over the years, there's always been a Windows machine in my home in some form or another and has been since Windows 3.1.

However over the years, my career has taken me towards for *NIX based disciplines, and as a result I've seen more and more of said OSs creeping into the home. The media PC/download box runs Ubuntu, my main work machine runs OSX and Windows exists only on my gaming rig. It's not that I don't like it, but more that I'm ready for a change. I like the idea of a free, open source platform, and now a major game developer is getting behind it and GPU hardware vendors seem to be sitting up and taking notice now seems like a good time to get a little ahead of the curve to baseline the experience before a dedicated OS surfaces.

At the moment I'm running:

i5 3570k @ 4.2ghz with Corsair H100i
8GB Corsair Vengeance
Asus Z77 Sabertooth
Asus Direct CUII 670 GTX 2GB
Samsung 830 64GB Boot drive
WD Caviar Black 500GB + 64GB Crucial M4 Cache for storage/games
Corsair 650D
Iiyama E2773HS
Roccat Arvo + Logitech G400
Roccat Kaves

I plan to ditch the SSDs/WD setup, and replace with a couple of Seagate SSHDs, one for Windows and one for Linux so I can do some comparative testing (and still be able to play BF4).

When the drives arrive later this week, I'll get a fresh W7 installation on one and a fresh Ubuntu 13.10 installation on the other (released 17th October).

Both installs will have the latest of NVidia's drivers, Steam and benchmarking tools for each platform. Plus necessary apps like Firefox, Skype etc.

Updates to follow, in the meantime any input/experiences/caveats/tips would be greatly appreciated. I'm very comfortable with the command line and intricacies of Ubuntu having used it for a couple of years, so go nuts.

 

[randal]

Few problems, but I now have a dual booting Xubuntu and W7 machine. What a doddle it was too. Here's the procedure I followed for Dual Boot with Windows already installed and Linux going on to a fresh blank drive.

Caveat: If you've never done this before, I recommend taking backups or using two blank drives with a fresh Windows installation and preserve your working config until you're comfortable to do it. I take no responsibility from misinstalled bootloaders and the loss of your child's baby photos.

OS Installation/Dual Boot Config

This in mind we start with an existing W7 drive setup, so:

• Samsung 830 64GB (C
• WD Caviar Black 500GB (D

Then added a 1TB Seagate SSHD for the Xubuntu drive.


Installation media wise, used the latest Xubuntu 13.10 ISO from here and used Unetbootin to copy over to a USB drive (no optical drives in my machines at home now). Unetbootin alas needed a bit of help in setting the partition active. If you come across a "Missing Operating System" error when you try to boot off your USB installer then:

In Windows:

• Administrative command prompt (new shortcut, cmd, right click run as admin)
• diskpart
• list disk
• sel disk 2 (or whatever your USB drive is)
• list part
• sel part 1 (or whatever your installer part is)
• active
• exit

For Linux just fire up GPartED and set the partition active on the USB drive.

I had graphical problems using the installer option for Xubuntu on the 670GTX, display corruptions and all sorts. So, I booted into the "Try Xubuntu" options after the GPU fraccas and ran the graphical installer from XFCE instead.

Let it do it's thing and select install updates during installation and install 3rd party codecs, and after selecting those basic options it'll detect the Windows installation.

Here you'll be asked if you want to:

• Run it along side Windows (repartition primary disk, dual boot on one volume)
• Blow Windows away and run Xubuntu exclusively.
• Something else.

You want Something else, unless you're happy with the other two.

Now you'll be presented with a disk layout menu, I must stress at this point - DO NOTHING WITH YOUR WINDOWS DISK.

Select the Xubuntu drive (will probably be at the bottom of the list), if you need to erase it just click "Write new partition table". This will do what it says on the tin.

Then click on the "Free Space" option, and then the little + sign below on the left. It's time to start laying out the file system.

I went for a fairly straight forward, basic setup. So this is the bare minimum of partitions you need really. You can start giving /opt, /var etc. their own, and I expect I will during the final build but for now this is what I went with:

/boot           500mb (primary partition, at beginning of disk) 

/                 100gb (logical partition, at beginning of disk) 
/home         890gb (logical partition, at beginning of disk)

swap           8gb (remainder of disk basically)

Then, tell it where to stick the bootloader (GRUB) - which will be your Linux disk that you've just laid out your filesystems on. This will give you a nice menu, that allows you to select Xubuntu, or Windows. Just remember to change your boot device priority in BIOS to the Xubuntu disk.

That's about it really! Let it churn away, and once completed it'll give you the restart option. Remove the removable storage installation media, reboot, hop into BIOS to set the boot device accordingly and reboot.

If you followed the above, then you should be presented with a GRUB boot menu and a counter ticking down from 10 seconds to select a boot option. Test both of your boot options here and now. Once happy that your Linux and Windows installations are accessible from the GRUB bootloader, go make a coffee and have a congratulatory biscuit.

Steam Installation

Fire up Firefox, and navigate to Steampowered.com.
Top right, install Steam (like we've all done 1000 times before)
Open up with Ubuntu Software Centre, let it do it's thing.

Et voila, one dual booting PC with access to your *Steam library.

*Well the games that have been ported anyway.

Still to sort for me/this guide:

• Asus Xonar DGX PCI-E Drivers + Kaves setup
• Driver installation NV + AMD
• Benchmarking tools

 

[gropingmantis]

Welcome aboard! Like you I have made the leap to linux gaming. I hopped ship from Windows when the Steam beta came out as that was the big gaming push I needed. I had been running Linux on every PC other than my gaming rig till then and Win8 broke a load of games.

I did lose a lot of games switching (400 to 100) but when I look back I didn't really play games that aren't on Linux anyway. The ones I miss are things like CS:GO (on its way), Civ 5 (also coming soon) and Skyrim. Outside of Steam I run EVE through WINE with no issues whatsoever. Couldn't get Hawken to run the other night but I haven't sat down and devoted some time to sorting that out yet.

 

[craptakular]

make sure you go with Xubuntu or Lubuntu to reduce lag/input lag typically experienced in Unity, Gnome or KDE.

I'm going to order another SSD so I can install linux on my gaming PC again. I play a\ bit on the mac mini and its fun, but my GTX680 and 2500k should fly on linux, last time I tried there was a fair bit of input lag/micro stuttering, which is a shame.

 

[stuie]

I miss my linux days, used to run xubuntu as my only os for ages but I missed gaming and trying to get wine working with a fair amount of my collection was a pain. Might go back now steam is working but I know I will loose a lot of my collection as not everything works yet

 

[Addicted]

Welcome aboard! Like you I have made the leap to linux gaming. I hopped ship from Windows when the Steam beta came out as that was the big gaming push I needed. I had been running Linux on every PC other than my gaming rig till then and Win8 broke a load of games.

I did lose a lot of games switching (400 to 100) but when I look back I didn't really play games that aren't on Linux anyway. The ones I miss are things like CS:GO (on its way), Civ 5 (also coming soon) and Skyrim. Outside of Steam I run EVE through WINE with no issues whatsoever. Couldn't get Hawken to run the other night but I haven't sat down and devoted some time to sorting that out yet.

That's why it's not viable as a whole yet, when we are able to natively run most of our games (or run them in wine with less performance loss than we have now), Linux game (imo) will skyrocket. Until then though, it just seems like you're losing out more than anything.

 

[emu]

does everybody ditch unity if they are running ubuntu?

 

[randal]

make sure you go with Xubuntu or Lubuntu to reduce lag/input lag typically experienced in Unity, Gnome or KDE.

does everybody ditch unity if they are running ubuntu?

Seems that way... Xubuntu seems to be the preferred platform from what I've read so I'll probably go with that once they release their 13.10 distro.

I'm going to order another SSD so I can install linux on my gaming PC again. I play a\ bit on the mac mini and its fun, but my GTX680 and 2500k should fly on linux, last time I tried there was a fair bit of input lag/micro stuttering, which is a shame.

So how bad is the input lag/stuttering on vanilla Ubuntu/Unity?

I've gamed a bit on the Mac Mini, but even Godus is starting to push the HD4000 to it's limits which is why I've decided to throw some proper hardware at the experience. I'm particularly interested to watch the driver improvements as NV/AMD get on board with Linux in a bigger way. At the moment it seems the 3.12 kernel favours AMD so I may end up swapping vendors...

That's why it's not viable as a whole yet, when we are able to natively run most of our games (or run them in wine with less performance loss than we have now), Linux game (imo) will skyrocket. Until then though, it just seems like you're losing out more than anything.

Yet, being the operative word there. Which is why I want to get involved sooner rather than later to see it all unfolding. Agree though, as it stands things are still in their infancy but the future looks brighter than it ever has for the humble monolithic kernel OS.

 

[mortals]

If you are serious about moving to linux, try different distro's etc
I personally dropped ubuntu years ago

At the moment it seems the 3.12 kernel favours AMD

Not really

There are improvements to AMD drivers with the 3.12 kernel depending on the games build etc but nvidia have always had better performance and support than AMD when it comes to drivers on linux.

 

[Rroff]

There are improvements to AMD drivers with the 3.12 kernel depending on the games build etc but nvidia have always had better performance and support than AMD when it comes to drivers on linux.

No changes to the drivers themselves IIRC? just the Kernel has some optimisations for hardware support that gives better (closer to what it should be) throughput.

 

[mortals]

No changes to the drivers themselves IIRC? just the Kernel has some optimisations for hardware support that gives better (closer to what it should be) throughput.

Yer

Think I worded it a bit wrong

 

[randal]

If you are serious about moving to linux, try different distro's etc
I personally dropped ubuntu years ago

What are you running out of interest?

There are improvements to AMD drivers with the 3.12 kernel depending on the games build etc but nvidia have always had better performance and support than AMD when it comes to drivers on linux.

Oh definitely, I remember compiling Catalyst from scratch on my first media PC build and it was incredibly frustrating given the number of kernel recompiles needed every time there was an update. Not to mention half of the features didn't work properly anyway even when built.

Nvidia has always been a much better experience on Linux for me, add PPA and job done. Auto kernel mod each time you update, much nicer.

 

[mortals]

What are you running out of interest?

I'm currently running archlinux with openbox.

I used to run ubuntu in 2000 for playing quake3 (mostly played quake3 back then in div1 tdm/ra3/osp/3w)
But moved to gentoo and found it much easier to use/customise aswell as gaining a lot more speed.

Nvidia has always been a much better experience on Linux for me, add PPA and job done. Auto kernel mod each time you update, much nicer.

I still use the catalyst beta drivers at the moment with my HD5770
There are hooks for auto module compilation on kernel compile/update with the catalyst drivers on archlinux & also a optional service for auto fglrx check/compilation. (currently using AUR pkg catalyst-test)

 

[randal]

Noted, I'll keep all this in mind if I get hold of a red team card further down the line.

I'm liking the lightness of Openbox, but I'd rather not stray too far from Ubuntu so maybe Lubuntu might be a better way to go over Xubuntu... hmm.

I expect the Linux portion of my machine is going to get rebuilt several times over the coming months anyway with various distributions and configs. Can't hurt to add another one to the list.

 

[Hades]

Tried Mint Cinnamon? Derived from Ubuntu, keeps to a traditional desktop feel and looks great.

 

[gropingmantis]

Xubuntu is what I'm rocking at the moment for gaming pc. All my other PCs use arch. The only reason for using an Ubuntu flavour was that valve actually have official support for it...that said the arch community support is also top notch, I'm looking to switch back to arch after SteamOS release just in case SteamOS has some funky shiz that I want that wont be available elsewhere. Definitely use Xubuntu or Lubuntu over anything with GNOME or Unity.

 

[Gibbo3771]

I'm wanting to fire linux on this laptop, well I had it dual booting with Win8 (terribad) but was going to use Linux for java development and everything non "entertainment" related.

Being fair, I actually find Win8 pretty good for media related stuff, games all on the start screen, use it has a game launcher and nothing else.

What linux should I hop to for gaming? I mainly play EVE and Terraria 1.2 atm. Wanting to play some other things down the line but nothing to fancy, i'm rocking a 750m so can play modern games at med graphics.

 

[Bluelion]

I'm just running plain old Ubuntu LTS 12.04.3, with Ubuntu (I've actually got used to it... ). Unfortunately my aging ATI 6970 is struggling to play LOTRO at 1600p - its playable for I have to get used to 30fps.

Native Linux games seem to run well though - the Kerbal Space Program and Dota 2 (both installed through Steam) work very well. I think I'm at the point of ditching the Windows box now, its not been switched on in a month. On the other hand, there's no sign (yet) of a Linux port for Star Citizen which means I may have to dust off the Windows box in 12 months time

 

[randal]

So many distro recommendations...

Tried Mint Cinnamon? Derived from Ubuntu, keeps to a traditional desktop feel and looks great.

I do like the simplistic, clean look of Cinnamon but I'm not 100% sure I want to go to Mint for my distro. Saying that I've just read this article and the author does come up with a number of valid points for making the switch to a pure Debian code base.

https://micahflee.com/2013/01/why-im-leaving-ubuntu-for-debian/

I agree that forced advertising in a free OS is a bit of a kicker, but it's easily disabled. Also, and I guess Bluelion and I are in the minority but I kinda like Unity. However if it's known to compromise the gaming experience then I'm out. I'd imagine SteamOS doesn't use it, or has it's own optimised version of...

Do you game on Mint, if so what's your take on it as a gaming OS?

Xubuntu is what I'm rocking at the moment for gaming pc. All my other PCs use arch. The only reason for using an Ubuntu flavour was that valve actually have official support for it...that said the arch community support is also top notch, I'm looking to switch back to arch after SteamOS release just in case SteamOS has some funky shiz that I want that wont be available elsewhere. Definitely use Xubuntu or Lubuntu over anything with GNOME or Unity.

Which is why I'm also still leaning towards a *buntu based distro, as SteamOS is likely to use the same seeing as they officially support Ubuntu. I'd like this baseline to be fairly close to the SteamOS product, so I think I'll follow your lead as a starter with Xubuntu.

I'm just running plain old Ubuntu LTS 12.04.3, with Ubuntu (I've actually got used to it... ). Unfortunately my aging ATI 6970 is struggling to play LOTRO at 1600p - its playable for I have to get used to 30fps.

Have you tried the latest kernel yet on your 6970? If the improvements are to be believed then there might be life left in the old girl yet...

Native Linux games seem to run well though - the Kerbal Space Program and Dota 2 (both installed through Steam) work very well. I think I'm at the point of ditching the Windows box now, its not been switched on in a month. On the other hand, there's no sign (yet) of a Linux port for Star Citizen which means I may have to dust off the Windows box in 12 months time

KSP is on my list of games to grab. Ideally I want a graphically rich Steam based game, FPS preferred but I think I'm out of luck save for Episode 2 or L4D2 - and they're hardly taxing games for a 670.

 

[randal]

Doing some reading up about Shuttleworth's attitude towards the open source community, and whilst I love what he's done for Linux adoption rates and the OS as a whole I think his approach to Mir, and advertising/information gathering stinks.

Saying "you don't trust us? We've got root" is a pretty arrogant statement in my mind.

Alas, I digress and should probably get used to the idea as Mir will probably surface around the same sort of time as SteamOS...