live.linux-gamers.net

About live.linuX-gamers.net is a Linux live-dvd distribution: "boot 'n play"

History The project live.linuX-gamers.net was founded with the idea to present Linux games at the Linuxtag exhibition in a novel way. A collection of games should be shown to directly run from DVD without the user in need to know about Linux or care about his system. After some intense brainstorming sessions the team decided to create and publish this DVD as a live distribution project. Thus an additional and very difficult problem had to be solved: The dvd should run on every x86 PC out there.

At the very beginning the team was split up into two groups. The first group was meant to create a live-dvd based on any existing live distribution and to include games appropriate for younger players. The second group should create a live distribution from scratch, designed for high performance 3d games.

Unfortunately the first team dedicated to the family suited games failed in finding a good live distribution which could be taken to create a base system fitting our ideas. But luckily the second team was successful. They created a livedvd based on archELinux, an embedded distribution arisen of ArchLinux. The archELinux project is still undocumentated yet, but the documentation is currently done in course of a diploma thesis by one of the team members. More details about the technical part of this project will then be available on the archELinux page, please be patient.

Future On the Linuxtag exhibition it turned out, that this liveDVD is a big success and we got a lot of very possitive responses. So we are currently planning the next steps of this project. But first of all we need to do a lot of documentation, bugfixing and stuff like that. After this tasks we will release version 1.0.

For the time after 1.0 we've got a much bigger vision, where this project is going to lead to,.. so stay tuned!

One of the main goals can already be announced: "Try to take over the world" (tm) pinky and the brain ;)

Screenshot Thats how the main interface of the dvd looks like. On the bottom is a panel to directly start the games.
Right clicking in the background opens a menu containing some more tools.

Hardware requirements Your PC must at least meet these requirements:

intel x86 architecture
512 MB ram
videocard with 3d acceleration

The games on the DVD have different hardware requirements, have a look on their project page. But all of them are running fine on a testsystem with this hardware configuration: AMD 1800+, 512MB ram, ATI Radeon 8500 (comparable to nvidia gf3)

Features The current version of the dvd is a developement release, version 0.9.2. Features are:

15 top free native linux games! Most of them with multiplayer mode!
high performance video card drivers (not preinstalled, but very easy to install):
- properitery nvidia drivers for nvidia tnt - geforce8xxx included.
- properitary ati driver (radeon 8500 - radeon x1900 supported).
open source drivers with 3d acceleration for many other video cards
harddisk is not touched!
savegames and configuratoins can be stored on an usbstick and restored
nothing needs to be configured, everything is done automatically
networking is configured using dhcp server
FREE!!!!

Bugs Known Bugs of this release candidate:

tools for joystick support are missing
easy network configuration missing (ifconfig is there)
intel sound/graphic (>=i915) chips may cause problems
graphics/sound settings are not saved to usb stick
chipsets of latest boards may not be supported
two games can be started at the same time, what makes the pc incredible slow
more bugs can be found in our bugtracker

Changelog v0.9.2:

Fixed bug with fglrx driver
Speed up of reading data from dvd
Added game ufo:ai

v0.9.1:

Added games: Blobby2, Foobillard, gl-117, Neverball, Wesnoth, Warzone2100
Removed RTCW:ET and TC:E due to licensing issues
Nvidia driver can be easily installed when the video card was not detected correctly
Speedup of reading data from DVD