Category Archives: Gaming

Re-Volt, even easier with rvgl launcher

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The RVGL launcher project has made it even easier to install and play the good old racing game ReVolt.

To play on ubuntu, there are some prereqs you need to have in place, and not all of them are mentioned on the official RVGL launcher. To help you, I have gathered everything in a one liner, just here:

[copy]sudo apt install python3-wxgtk4.0 python3-requests python3-packaging p7zip-full xdg-utils libsdl2-2.0-0 libsdl2-image-2.0-0 libopenal1 libenet7 libunistring2 libjpeg8 libpng16-16 libtiff5 libwebp7 libvorbisfile3 libflac8 libmpg123-0 [/copy]

If you get an error on libwebp7, please try libwebp6

When the above is installed, download, extract and launch RVGL from here: https://re-volt.gitlab.io/rvgl-launcher/

When lauched, you may get an error about a lock file, dont worry, it’s only the first time you run it. Press “Download and Install” in th bottom, and you are ready to play. Remember to explore additional options in the rvgl launcher, it’s packed with cool features šŸ™‚

Get ready, set, race!

Nvidia MX150 mobile GPU on Ubuntu with secure boot

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I just got a replacement laptop, as my previous Thinkpad T580 started to freeze after > 10 minutes of usage. Luckily my company just replaced the thing, so I didn’t have to think about anything else than reinstalling (since i don’t use coorporate Windows image) and copy in my backup.

The T580 has a Nvidia MX150 GPU alongside with the Intel. I had some issues getting this to work on my old laptop, when I initially installed it with Ubuntu 18.04. Working with the Nvidia driver, pre-summer 2019’ish on Linux, reminded me of trying to get the xserver to work some decades ago. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, pleaae watch Bisqwit trying with SlackWare 3.0 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EanGvOBhr9s

Well, lets forget about the past and watch ahead. Since Ubuntu 19.10 was released, all this Nvidia stuff should be much easier, as Nvidia drivers are now build into Linux and Ubuntu is working to make everything easier.

During installation I selected install third party drivers, and that should more or less be it – it should work. But of course it did not, otherwise I would not have been writing this. Somehow it seemed like Ubuntu was not recognizing the GPU. The prime profile application gave me an option to choose what GPU to use, but it kept using the Intel even though I told it to use Nvidia. After some time of debugging, I learned, that in order to use the Nvidia GPU you have to disable secure boot. I rebooted to BIOS, disabled secure boot, and everything is now working as expected.

LGSM CS:GO not starting

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I’m running a small CS:GO server for the local E-Gaming club. It’s based on https://linuxgsm.com/, which makes managing game servers easy.

Today I got a call from the trainer, telling that the server was not running. I have some tasks running every night to check for updates, and my first thought was that something had gone wrong during the update.

when trying to start the server with: “./csgoserver st” it tried to start but immediately stopped again. I inspected the console log file and found hundreds of files, with very few lines in them:

#AppFramework : Unable to load module bin/engine.so!
#Unable to load interface VCvarQuery001 from bin/engine.so, requested from EXE.
Wed Dec 11 16:55:14 CET 2019: Server Quit

Searching google for this did not give me anything related to my issue. Trying to communicate with someone in the LGSM discord channel did not give me any success as well. I tried installing the server again with “./csgoserver i” and I tried the variuos options for updating the server – no luck.

Finally i tried the validate command “./csgoserver v” and even though it seemed to be running forever without anything happening, it finally showed progress, and after 5-7 minutes it finished.

I was now able to start the servers (I have more than one instance, running of the same source) and everything seems to be running just fine.

My assumption is that some kind of download got aborted during an update, and therefore missed or corrupted some files.

Re-Volt, Wine, Multiplayer

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My kids are beginning to play on their computers, and when one of them where invited to a socalled LAN-Party it woke up memories in my mind. I remembered how I used to play at LAN parties my self, and I remembered how simple it was to set up a game and play against each others. Todays gaming is all about joining public servers, creating accounts, and answering questions about this and that.

That made me think back on one of my favourite games from around 2000, Re-Volt. I searched the web and found that Re-Volt isn’t dead at all, fan communities are still alive, and theres even a small patch for the latest version that will support modern wide screens, easier multiplayer, etc. Check it out here: http://www.revoltrace.net/ where you will also be able to download the latest version and patch.

The kids are running Windows 7 and Windows 10 and we had no issues installing it, the installer will ask for the directplay module and download it when needed. In order to play multiplayer we had to allow some firewall ports to be used even though the firewall is disabled on the local network. When hosting a game I noticed that it’s using my public IP and not my private, thats probably why I had to allow additional ports to be used – šŸ™

Now, lets get back to the actual point for my post. I am running Ubuntu Linux 14.04 on my laptop, and I thought I would be able to play Re-Volt using Wine. No problem at all, it installed just fine and worked like a charm, until I wanted to play multiplayer over the LAN. I got different erros depending if I wanted to host or join a game, but quickly I found out that on Linux I also needed the so-called directplay module, which is easily installed with winetricks that comes with the Wine installation on my system. After some googling I found out that all I needed to do was:

winetricks directplay

This command will install the directplay module and now the game is running smoothly with or without multiplayer. Wine documentation states to run “sh winetricks directplay” which will not work for the package-manager installed version.

Team Fortress 2 on Steam in 64 bit systems

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Hi all.

I just tried to install Team Fortress 2 in Steam on my Ubuntu 15.04 64bit system, and I got this error message:

You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run: libc.so.6

I asked google, and I found an article suggesting to do this: apt-get install lib6* – this will install a hell of a lot of software that you probably don’t need.

So instead of just following the suggestion I did an apt-search libc6, and found this package: libc6-i386, I installed it, and now I was able to install Team Fortress 2 in steam.

/Kasper