What Linux version are you using?

[datiswous]

2 hours ago, revelator said:

one thing that could work would be a hybrid harddrive. these use ssd chips as a buffer for the mechancial harddrive making them quite a bit faster as long as there is data in the buffer.

I have one of 2 tb that I don't use anymore.

[revelator]

thanks but is ok  i pretty much settled on which distro im going to use.

fiddling a bit with some of the more problematic old games now to see if i can get them running on my linux box.

bit of an undertaking seing as it took me years to get them running on modern windows .

also planning on doing some more work on my idtech4 port.

[revelator]

since we are on used hardware anyway i have several mainboards with ram and cpu i no longer use if someone is in need.

asus x79 deluxe. cpu 3930k 32 gb ddr3 kingston ddr3 ram. old but a powerhouse and the only board in the x79 series that supports nvme boot (needs a pcie to nvme riser card which i have). biggest hurdle is that some modern games started using AVX2 instructions which the cpu does not support. it only supports upto AVX. this is not a big problem though as most of those games have fallbacks at the cost of a little speed. it can run 4 gfx cards in sli / crossfire  so yowsa!.

asrock z97 extreme 6. cpu 4970k devils canyon 32 gb ddr3 kingston ram. one of the most stable and still plenty powerfull haswell boards i had. the devils canyon cpu is plenty powerfull and still goes strong even with modern games. the board has 2x nvme slots but only one is full speed at more than 3gb's the other one runs standard ata 3 ssd speed at roughly 500mb's so use a standard m key ssd in that slot for storage if needed.

down side is these take up quite a load on the cpu lanes which the mainstream haswell cpu's dont have a lot of "16 lanes". the board can be outfitted with a mini pcie wifi chip if you want to so it has plenty options.

also have a few retro mainboards for older core2 and pentium series and a ton of older DDR1 ram modules as well as some retro gfx cards.

can probably make an ok nix gamer out of the x79 and z97 boards,

the retro boards are more geared towards old games from the 98 / winxp days.

ill let them go to who pays the shipping 

[JackFarmer]

On 3/17/2026 at 6:50 AM, revelator said:

fiddling a bit with some of the more problematic old games now to see if i can get them running on my linux box.

 

I do not even dare asking (but I do! ) : Which old games are we talking about?

[revelator]

well it is quite a list but of the top of my head blood 2 avp1 and 2 redneck rampage some of the older newerwinter games,

darkstone, alpha centauri, nomad soul, outcast, dark corners of the earth, commanche hokum etc etc.

i got literal hundreds of old games, some i havent played in years but i do have the iso's if i feel the need to revisit them.

some that run without to many problems are the wheel of time or any other game based on the old unreal 1 engine like clive barkers undying (both have gog versions now so my own fixes to them are mostly moot at this point).

thief also runs quite ok with the newdark patches as well as system shock 1 and 2.

also got citizen kabuto and heavy metal fak 2 running as well as soldier of fortune allthough it can be glitchy at times.

[JackFarmer]

1 hour ago, revelator said:

well it is quite a list but of the top of my head blood 2 avp1 and 2 redneck rampage some of the older newerwinter games,

darkstone, alpha centauri, nomad soul, outcast, dark corners of the earth, commanche hokum etc etc.

i got literal hundreds of old games, some i havent played in years but i do have the iso's if i feel the need to revisit them.

some that run without to many problems are the wheel of time or any other game based on the old unreal 1 engine like clive barkers undying (both have gog versions now so my own fixes to them are mostly moot at this point).

thief also runs quite ok with the newdark patches as well as system shock 1 and 2.

also got citizen kabuto and heavy metal fak 2 running as well as soldier of fortune allthough it can be glitchy at times.

Hm...yeah, that`s what I expected from you . Though, I only know a few games from your list - AVP and Nomad Soul.

Nomad Soul...that*s the one that had David Bowie in it, right? I think the game also included a secret performance of the 1999 DB song "Survive".

Anyways,me wonders you are not trying to run old DOS games like Monkey Island!

[revelator]

aye thats the one  apart from the abysmal control scheme it is actually a pretty good game.

 do have some dos games lined up but im currently trying to get dosemu running on solus, which at the moment it is not...

crashes instantly when i try to start the prebuilt version. granted it was built for ubuntu so i might have to rebuild it for solus.

solus does have dosbox but dosemu is loads faster when it runs, so id prefer to use that if possible.

i have blood 1 also which is dos based as well as commander keen alone in the dark and many others.

i also got a good deal of old amiga games i might try with it like beneath a steel sky and the old civilization 1.

[JackFarmer]

@revelator: Regarding Amiga games, shouldn`t they run fine with Lutris? IIRC Amiga is also listed with a runner.

In general: How do you build (I anticipate that is equal to compile, right?) from source on Linux? Could you be so kind and elaborate on that when you have the time? 

[revelator]

you can get the survive performance if you look into the qualizar bar, the performer singing it even looks like bowie , he also plays the role of a virtual omikronian whose soul got trapped in what goes as they're internet. you also get to bonk his wife iman . 

the controls are rather annoying unfortunatly with 3 control schemes and only one uses the mouse (shooting mode) which is not even used that often. the camera can be a bit wonky as well. the amiga port runs pretty well though and i suspect the problem was that the game was actually ported from amiga to pc and while the control scheme worked fine with a controller it kinda got messed up with mouse and keyboard.

the story is kinda out there (like really really out there) but its a fun game with magic and fight sequences like street fighter mixed with a little gun fu. magic unfortunatly is only really harmfull to demons and basically worthless against anything else. the guns are powerfull as hell but chew through ammo like a fat boy in a candy store except for the waver gun (first one you get) which is plenty powerfull for most things. strangely the fist fights are probably the most deadly in the game. with high enough skill in it you can literally rip even demons to pieces. the only thing it cannot handle are security robots for which you need one of the big guns.

there are also a lot of puzzle solving so it is a long game.

[JackFarmer]

7 minutes ago, revelator said:

you can get the survive performance if you look into the qualizar bar, the performer singing it even looks like bowie , he also plays the role of a virtual omikronian whose soul got trapped in what goes as they're internet. you also get to bonk his wife iman . 

the controls are rather annoying unfortunatly with 3 control schemes and only one uses the mouse (shooting mode) which is not even used that often. the camera can be a bit wonky as well. the amiga port runs pretty well though and i suspect the problem was that the game was actually ported from amiga to pc and while the control scheme worked fine with a controller it kinda got messed up with mouse and keyboard.

the story is kinda out there (like really really out there) but its a fun game with magic and fight sequences like street fighter mixed with a little gun fu. magic unfortunatly is only really harmfull to demons and basically worthless against anything else. the guns are powerfull as hell but chew through ammo like a fat boy in a candy store except for the waver gun (first one you get) which is plenty powerfull for most things. strangely the fist fights are probably the most deadly in the game. with high enough skill in it you can literally rip even demons to pieces. the only thing it cannot handle are security robots for which you need one of the big guns.

there are also a lot of puzzle solving so it is a long game.

Found it:

...though, the live action video with the real DB is much better, of course.

The guitar player (also depicted in the game) is Reeves Gabrels. He worked with DB from 1988 to 1999.

Reeves Gabrels (my fav guitar player of that time period) worked on the soundtrack of the very first Deus Ex game. However, I used to switch the music  off (same true for SS2) as IMO it really does not add to the game`s atmosphere.

[revelator]

for linux you use the gcc or clang compilers. get the sources unpack them then run whatever configure command is needed (linux has a whole ton of them).

if you look in the source folder and see a configure script then it most likely uses autotools (old style) if you see a meson.build file then it uses the python based meson build system for cmake look for a cmake.txt file. there are also some non standard build systems out there which can be confusing for a first timer but mostly there are documents in the build folder explaning how to build it (read the INSTALL file if it is there). 

so for an autotool build you ususally open a console the cd to the directory with the sources and do ./configure && make && make install. for meson it is meson setup && meson build && meson install. and for cmake it is mostly cmake -Gninja && cmake build . && cmake install . <- remember the dot.

sometimes though you have to pass flags to the build tool to tell it where stuff is located or enable/disable stuff you might or might not want. i could write a book on all of that but ask around on the source maintainers site. most are pretty helpfull.

[revelator]

hehe aye i usually also turn it way down unless the song is catchy . but otherwise it distracts to much.

[revelator]

most builds nowadays use meson for glib based sources (GTK) or cmake + ninja (KDE or XFCE), but both can and do see uses for other non system libraries / tools. autotools are perl based and very very powerfull but unfortunatly the syntax is hard to grasp because it is so complex and is getting left more and more behind today (most linux devs hate it with a passion).

in retrospect autotools is what was used to help build linux originally but maintaining it became a nightmare as things got more advanced so the devs looked to simpler build systems.

there are however still cases where you are left with having to use it because it enables stuff that is next to impossible to achive with the other build systems. for one it allows far more advanced operations than either meson nor cmake can handle.

there are also ide based build systems though most linux devs dont use them often if versed in the above due to it being to restrictive compared to a script based system where anything can be automated. but for simple development you can use both codeblocks codelite anjuta kdevelop and a whole slew of other ide's. hell you can even use msvc in linux 

 

[revelator]

whoops forgot to answer on the amiga stuff. yeah linux has several emulators that can run amiga games so it should not be to problematic.

there are even amiga emulators for windows (one ships with msys2 even) .

as for emulators most things can be run in both linux and windows with a little "know how" some games however can be damn annoying to setup like the dead space game (extraction i think) that only came out for the Wii and playstation because you have to map the controller scheme manually to keyboard / mouse.

[SeriousToni]

On 2/18/2026 at 11:14 PM, SeriousToni said:

Can Linux or the GREP bootloader somehow affect my windows installation ? I have installed Linux on a separate ssd and since then when I boot up Windows it will show the wrong time and also sometimes make my speakers creek really loud or they won't work at all. Never happened before that.. 

So what I’ve done so far is switch both systems to use the same interpretation of the hardware clock to eliminate the 1-hour offset in my dual-boot setup. On Linux (TUXEDO OS), I configured the RTC (hardware clock) to use local time instead of UTC and ensured the correct current system time is written back to the hardware clock. On Windows 10, I decided not to rely on the unreliable RealTimeIsUniversal registry workaround and instead kept the default behavior where Windows expects the RTC to be in local time. I then configured proper NTP synchronization and forced a resync so Windows always corrects its time after boot if needed. As a result, both Windows and Linux now interpret the hardware clock consistently as local time, and the system time remains correct across reboots without any 1-hour offset. It seems... 

[datiswous]

It's GRUB btw

[revelator]

Yep grep is a search tool .

No worries the naming scheme also befuddled me for some time you will get there

[revelator]

https://softhints.com/windows-cmd-vs-linux-shell-commands/

might be helpfull 

[revelator]

before powershell the windows command line tools were sorely lacking unfortunatly.

example the closest to say GREP was FINDSTR and sadly it did not support a whole lot of what GREP can do with pattern matching.

some commands are strangely similar like echo and mkdir but the unix counterparts support more stuff.

powershell got windows users some of that but the syntax is rather convoluted.

[revelator]

some history of unix, bsd and linux here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux

originally neither had any desktop environment which came much much later and used and still uses the same idea as win 3.11 where the DE is not an integral part but is bolted on top of the underlying posix system. gnu hurd and bsd are actually older than linux but due to problems ranging from lawsuits and design hurdles linux ultimately won the free unix race.

fun fact im 2 years older than linus thorwald  i dabbled in coding as well at the time but i was nowhere near being able to write a kernel.

[SeriousToni]

To be fair, if I have a linux problem and need to open the command window, I also open a random ai service like gemini or chat gpt to help me along the way. I had to install steam via command tool instead of the Linux software shop because it didn't recognize my controller. I wouldn't have managed to do that on my own haha

[revelator]

thats also an option .

you use a controller on a pc ? ewww get away from me satan!... 

nah its just not what i would expect , most people use a pc to get away from controllers hehe.

[SeriousToni]

6 hours ago, revelator said:

thats also an option .

you use a controller on a pc ? ewww get away from me satan!... 

nah its just not what i would expect , most people use a pc to get away from controllers hehe.

I know, and I understand, but for some racing games or party games it is better than keyboard and mouse. 

 

[revelator]

i pretty much stopped using controllers after my ps3 got retired, getting arthrtis also did not help.

starting to have problems with keyboards as well so its only a matter of time where i will have to stop using my pc entirely.

getting old sucks !!! 

[SeriousToni]

On 3/24/2026 at 4:32 PM, revelator said:

i pretty much stopped using controllers after my ps3 got retired, getting arthrtis also did not help.

starting to have problems with keyboards as well so its only a matter of time where i will have to stop using my pc entirely.

getting old sucks !!! 

That sounds like a nightmare really to me - I hope you will be able to at least use your keyboard and mouse for a long time still without too much obstacles! I'm sorry to hear that !