Gaming Linux live DVD

This is an interesting article I found on Digg today. It was written by Jeremy LaCroix on July 01, 2008. You'll find the original article (complete) here: http://www.linux.com/feature/139589

LinuX-Gamers Live is a live DVD from Germany based on Arch Linux that includes nothing but games. Version 0.9.3 was released in June and provides an excellent means of sampling Linux games or setting up a home arcade, although a few of the games wouldn't run on my machine.

There are no productivity tools, Web browsers, or package managers here; this disc is all play and no work. Because it's a live DVD, no hard drive is required to run the games. Once you burn the downloaded image to a DVD, you have a portable arcade that will run on any x86 system with 512MB or more of RAM. A 3-D accelerated video card is also required for most of the games. Proprietary drivers for Nvidia and ATI-based video cards are included, so you can enable acceleration for those types of cards by simply answering a few dialogs during the boot process.

Games included here are Boswars, Nexuiz, Bzflag, Sauerbraten, Savage, Treeworlds, Thunder & Lightning, Tremulous, Vegastrike, Warsow, Openarena, World of Padman and Warzone 2100. All of the games in this collection are top-notch open source treasures that should prove fun for even the casual gamer.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no shortage of games on the Linux platform. While the LinuX-Gamers compilation includes some real gems, there's no way all of the noteworthy games in the Linux library could fit on one DVD. For that reason, I hope that compilations of Linux games on live DVDs becomes a trend that will continue, and additional volumes will be released with different game sets.

LinuX-Gamers is perfect for those who want to build a portable arcade or try out Linux games without repartitioning a hard drive. There isn't any desktop functionality here, but that's OK -- this is a gamer-specific distribution that isn't intended to help you get your work done.

Jeremy LaCroix is an IT technician who writes in his free time.