With more people using Linux for gaming, certain distributions are waking up to this and making their own plans to improve and it looks like Debian is next.
The planned event is named MiniDebConf Online #2 "Gaming Edition", which is part of a wider event happening across four days in late November (19-22) and it seems the gaming section will be November 21-22. Over these days, they're planning to have various sessions with "broad appeal" that should be interesting for people who want to play and / or create games on Debian Linux. So it may be interesting to gamers and developers alike.
Some of what they have planned includes:
- Talk to upstream game developers about their experiences, how they develop, how they fund their projects or keep it sustainable
- Cover some great free game engines and game creation tools
- Look at the tools we have available to create graphics and music for games
- Fix bugs in game packages and work on game related issues
- Showcasing great games already packaged, as well as DFSG free games that needs packaging
It appears they're still taking on people for talks too, you can find what they're after and submit here if you wish to get involved in the event.
You can follow on their official site here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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slaapliedje Oct 5, 2020
This is good news to me. I recently switched to a Debian derivative, after Canonical made their announcement to drop 32-bit computer support. Whatever their current road map entails, it made me realize that, for gaming, I should look elsewhere than Ubuntu and its derivatives. I was previously using Linux Mint.I have used many many many Debian based distributions over the years (anyone remember when Corel had their own Linux? Or Storm Linux?) But always ended up going back to normal Debian. The ones that are derivitaves tend to make some odd decisions that break compatibility with normal Debian, and just saturates the market with incompatible .deb packages. It is annoying and causes a lot of the 'which distro do we support?' Questions that developers have.
I realize that it is an adaptation of Debian, but I have been using MX Linux now for several months as a gaming platform with equal success in all ranges of new and old games to my previous Linux Mint installation. I was attracted to it because of the stability of the distribution base. It is still an adaptation, like Linux Mint, but at least I feel more confident that Debian won't up-end its current support based on market research or other transient metric to capture an audience.
I hope that the talks are productive for gaming and development.
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slaapliedje Oct 6, 2020
He skipped 2000! That is my favirite version still.They've done it for Stretch. I'm betting it's just going to take time. They have support backports of software a lot more than they used to, it does keep Debian much fresher than it used to be.Nice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).You want unstable, possibly with Mesa packages from experimental if you're interested in in rc-releases.
(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).
Backporting Mesa to stable would be difficult. You would need backports for drm, llvm, and the kernel too.
Still, I recently was bored when I found an old hardrive that had Debian 5 installed on it. Tested the theory that it'd still upgrade to 10 without issue.
Left it on overnight as it was going at it, and then the motherboard died... I swapped motherboards and then it finished. Only thing I changed was instead of using Gnome 2.x, I changed to using lxde, as the original motherboard I was using was only a P3@466mhz. The motherboard swapped in was an Athlon 64 @.. 3.5 I think?
Try doing that with any version of Windows... or most other Linux distributions! I bet even Ubuntu would puke along the way.
its possible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP7AkJo3OE
from windows 1.0 to windows 8.
i'm not sure if you can update from this 8 to an 10, but you're being spoiled too much at that point ;)
Also, it is one thing to iterate throught them like that when nothing is installed. I can't even get my desktop to update to build 2004 of Win10 because the installation crashes. Nit sure why, but I suspect it is something random I have installed.
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slaapliedje Oct 6, 2020
Something needs to be done to set up all the ultimas with enhancements so I can finally sit down and play them all with MIDI music!I hadn't heard of play.it though.That’s expected, as ./play.it is newer and we have not enough time to spend communicating around itIf you already used game-data-packager, our tool is similar in its very focused objective: building packages, nothing else. The main differences are in our support for multiple package formats and non-free game engines, as well as our refusal to support any DRM scheme (so no Steam game at all is allowed in our collection).
Until very recently, it had almost no community activity outside of a mostly French-speaking IRC channel and a couple French-speaking forums… But the software itself has been under active development for several years already, and has support for several hundreds of games.
We are slowly trying to share news in English too, mostly on Reddit and a couple forums including of course GamingOnLinux. But this is time that is taken away from the development itself.
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its possible:Right, but can Windows do the i386 > amd64 transition? Debian can
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP7AkJo3OE
from windows 1.0 to windows 8.
i'm not sure if you can update from this 8 to an 10, but you're being spoiled too much at that point ;)
(It's very much a work in progress, and not for the faint of heart, but it is possible.)
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Right, but can Windows do the i386 > amd64 transition? Debian can
(It's very much a work in progress, and not for the faint of heart, but it is possible.)
How I love having old stuff lurking somewhere on the disk. :D
I had my Debian up for some 10 years in 2010 and wanted to keep it, so this is how I've done it back then:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xMn9B_LxJmcJ:https://v13.gr/2008/10/09/debian-i386-to-amd64-conversion/+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk
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Nice!Right, but can Windows do the i386 > amd64 transition? Debian can
(It's very much a work in progress, and not for the faint of heart, but it is possible.)
How I love having old stuff lurking somewhere on the disk. :D
I had my Debian up for some 10 years in 2010 and wanted to keep it, so this is how I've done it back then:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xMn9B_LxJmcJ:https://v13.gr/2008/10/09/debian-i386-to-amd64-conversion/+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk
I must admit, I chickened out and made a fresh install. Interestingly though, it there appears to be plans to make crossgrading an easier and supported upgrade path in Debian.
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I must admit, I chickened out and made a fresh install. Interestingly though, it there appears to be plans to make crossgrading an easier and supported upgrade path in Debian.
My install died some years later when I had an old entry in my X configuration file that nobody had ever tested again decades later. Still a bit sad, but I guess I would have missed improvements when I still had my 2000's system upgraded so many times. :D
Last edited by Eike on 6 October 2020 at 5:10 pm UTC
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slaapliedje Oct 6, 2020
They're all available on GOG. Ultima IV is actually available for free to download anywhere, it was released as free years ago.Something needs to be done to set up all the ultimas with enhancements so I can finally sit down and play them all with MIDI music!We can probably do this
Can you point me to DRM-free versions of these games? Abandonware is not allowed by current ./play.it rules, but otherwise any DRM-free legit source is part of our scope.
By the way, it would be even better if you opened new issues on our forge about these games, so our other contributors will notice them (I am not sure they follow GamingOnLinux comments threads).
https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_4
https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_1_2_3
https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_456
https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_7_complete (of course is supported by Exult)
https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_8_gold_edition
https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_9_ascension
https://www.gog.com/game/worlds_of_ultima_the_savage_empire
https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_worlds_of_adventure_2_martian_dreams
https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_underworld_1_2
I mean the only Ultima they don't have on GOG is Ultima Online :)
Granted, scummvm is working on some of them;
https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=Ultima
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