When I first got on the internet in 1992, games were something you did at home on your computer and you shared your scores with you buddies when you went to work the next day. Since then, games have gone a very long way especially with the new kinds of video cards and capabilities of each. Multiplayer games are all the rage though they seem to all have the same basic idea; make a red spot on the wall where your opponet used to be. Ive also been privy to the Linux operating system for about ten years or so when I installed my first copy of Slackware which I now would recommend that anyone thinking about getting into linux ever even think about. I abesolutely love Linux for its simple purity. That is really why I am using it even as I write this article.

As I write this I am on my beloved Red Hat version 9.0 which is being phased out by Fedora. I have been using Red Hat (RH) since 95 and think that it should be the default standard because of its ease of use and user-friendly environment. I have built small firewalls on this operating system and I have written Word Documents on this OS. But the one thing that I miss the most is my games.

Loki entertainment used to port games for Windows over to Linux. In fact, Quake III was ported by them and it was simple to install and play. Nothing to it. But since Loki went out of business, Linux games have more or less been on their own. Funar recently commented to me on irc that I should try out Transgaming's WineX product. So I went and paid for my subscription and installed hoping that I would get the pleasures of running Windows games on my Linux system. This worked for some games such as Quake 2, but then again, Quake 2 runs natively under Linux. So last year when Bioware announced that they would be porting Neverwinter Nights to Linux natively, I jumped for joy at the thought of finally going to a fully functional Linux installation with games. Last week, I finally formatted and gave it a shot. To my disappointment, the system does not run like it did on Windows.

It took me some five hours from start to finish to install the game including the two extra games, Shadows of the Undrentide and Hoardes of the Underdark. The first thing that will get you is that you cannot insert the CD into the CDRom and expect it to install for you. In fact, the Windows installer will not run on Linux at all because it is an EXE. Under WineX it will install but it has problems when it comes to switching out the CD's for each part. So you have to literally install the game on another system and copy the files from system A to system B where you want to play the game. Once that is done for only the base game, the rest can be copied from the CDRom drive to your gaming system. It turns out that the CD's contain a few .zip files that you simply unpack (Linux can unzip packages that were created in Windows .zip format). The bad thing is that each expansion pack requres a new download. The other option is that you can download the data files from an outside server if you choose but I wouldnt wish that on my worst enemy (Minsk) as each file is around 1.5 Gigs.... That will eat your bandwith for a few hours if youre lucky.

Once you have the source files (download or another local installation), you have to get the linux clients from Bioware. Each client is around 30 MB or so which takes a few minutes on my DSL line. No big deal till you figure that there are three clients that you need and one patch which comes out to just around 150MB you have to get off the web. Ouch!

So I spend the time to download everything and I follow the directions carefully. The following morning (I am tired and I am not THAT big of a gamer anymore), I go to fireup the system. The splash screen comes up, the choice screen comes up, I make myself a new character and *POW* its gone. Im back to my shell prompt. What happened?

Well that was last week. I cant find anything on any news groups or the help forums on Bioware. Though I suspect that somewhere I have a corrupted file, I cant be sure. Ill be installing again in a few days from scratch in the hopes that I can get it working. In the mean time all that I can think is... why would I really bother doing this if all it takes on Windows is 30 minutes of setup and I am done.

So yes, games work on Linux. But it takes time and patience to get them there. If youre a serious gamer, I wouldnt try Linux just yet on your gaming system. Even if the game you play runs on Linux, the next game you get addicted to may not.