Quake 4 on Ubuntu Linux

I don’t play games much but I wanted to see how Quake 4 would perform now that I have an SMP kernel, decent video card, and Quake’s SMP support. The results are pretty astounding. Even running at 1600×1200 with high quality and all the effects turned on the game plays at or near its 60 FPS cap. You can see my hardware specs here.

Installation is easy. You just download a free file, buy the Windows version, copy some files from the CDs onto your harddrive, and then run the downloaded file. The process is detailed here.

The most common issue seems to be garbled sound. It’s easily corrected by launching the game with “./quake4.x86 +set s_driver oss” or, if you don’t want to type that each time you start the game, modifying the last line of Quake4 file that launches the application:

Old

#!/bin/sh
# Needed to make symlinks/shortcuts work.
# the binaries must run with correct working directory
cd “/your/path/to/quake4/”
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=”$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:.”
exec ./quake4.x86 “$@”

New

#!/bin/sh
# Needed to make symlinks/shortcuts work.
# the binaries must run with correct working directory
cd “/your/path/to/quake4/”
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=”$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:.”
exec ./quake4.x86 +set s_driver oss $@”

You may also get the same results by setting the sound driver to oss in the Quake config file but it didn’t work for me when I installed the Quake 4 demo.

Related:
Installing Quake 4 (Windows version) on Ubuntu AMD-64 5.10 (Breezy)
Ubuntu Forum Threads: 1 | 2 | 3
Ubuntu Forum’s Gaming Central
The Linux Gamer’s FAQ

Performance:
Quake 4 Tweak Guide

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