Unreal Tournament on Linux

I wanted to have some 3D gaming goodness available when I am under linux, and Unreal Tournament seemed a good choice, especially as I had the GOTY CD lying about. But as I had it installed under windows, I didn't want to waste precious disk space by duplicating content, so I wanted to share the data content with my UT installation on the windows parition. So this is a brief guide which should (hopefully) help someone else with the same quest, and serve as a reminder to me when I need to attempt it again. This was performed on Ubuntu Edgy running on my laptop with Intel GMA 900 graphics.

First you need to set up 3D hardware acceleration for your graphics card. Intel graphics users have it easy, you need not do anything. Although UT under windows supports software rendering, I could not find the option for that here.

There are several installers available under linux for UT, and I have no idea which one will work best for you. Try them all is my only advise. I used ut-install-436-goty.run available here.

Some other installers are available here and here.

Make the downloaded file executable, and launch it as root user (sudo ./filename with ubuntu).

The first two files I linked to allow installation of only the game engine, which is what I needed. Uncheck the "data files" option for that.

Now, we need to link the windows data files, I used this guide for that. Use these commands -

for i in Cache Logs Music Textures Help Maps Sounds Web;\
do ln -s /path/to/windows/ut"$i" /usr/local/games/ut/"$i";\
done

cd /path/to/windows/ut/System
for i in $(ls *.u *.int *.ini *.dll);\
do ln -s /path/to/windows/ut/System/"$i" /usr/local/games/ut/System/"$i";\
done

Then run "ut" to start the game. If you get a "dirname: missing operand" error, run this command

export UT_DATA_PATH=/usr/local/games/ut/System/

Replacing the path with the one appropriate for your system.

Welcome greyworld2

It is a testimonial to the geek in me, that formatting a partition is like saying good-bye to an old friend. This particular partition was set up just a little more than an year back, when I switched from Slackware to Arch Linux 0.7.1 noodle. So it had the memories of an eventful year, from the projects/programs which were made in the last days of the 12th standard, to the collecting PDF sample papers of entrance exams, to regular geeky stuff like tutorials, crazy hacks suggested by forum users, custom built packages of unknown software etc...

(I have had it with ext3. Twice I have seen an ext3 partition corrupt itself without the slightest provocation. This time I am going with jfs, just as my instincts told me when I first tried linux.)

I normally change the hostname of my machine each time I install a new OS, but this time the old hostname will live through. Goodbye greyworld, welcome greyworld2.

Portland, troika and NPL

The portland project is quite promising, I really hope it is developed and used widely. I hope there would be something related to that in Google's summer of code.

Next week is festival week in our (and probably many other) colleges. Atleast five or six different tech/cultural fests will take place simultaneously. Troika seems the most interesting, and I have hopes on the AI bot programming event.

Tomorrow we head towards the national physical laboratory to present our progress on the project. Our small project will seem odd among the bigger and more impressive sounding one's around us.

The switcheroo

Well I switched to Blogger Beta for this blog. (Not that there is any point in that, but I am bored and I like new things).

Why are google services like Blogger and Orkut so loosely integrated with one's google account? I have a seperate blogger username which is linked to my google account which is linked to ... anyway I hope things change later.

I am spending my time on this saturday morning updating and fixing my Arch Linux box. Xfce-svn needs fixing (I love Xfce) and Opera needs updating (I love Opera). There are about 130MB of updates in queue but I have only 2.4MB free disk space ... oh boy. I need to switch a lot of stuff from this hard drive to the other, a switcheroo which would actually make sense.