Installing Unreal Tournament on Linux

Note: This information refers to UT version 402b, and is reportedly outdated (versions >=425 apparently are quite different). You may find some more up-to-date information on the OpenUT Docs pages.

This is an account of how I managed to get Unreal Tournament 402b to run on Suse Linux 6.3 (and some of the things that don't work). There is also a description by CiAsA Boark on how to do it.

You need:

a 3dfx card (a Voodo3 in my case; don't know if cards older than the Banshee work).
about 550MB of hard disk space.
libgtk-1.2, and probably glibc 2.1 (therefore I couldn't use Red Hat 5.1, my workhorse distribution at the moment). Actually, once installed, UT runs on my glibc-2.0/Red Hat 5.1 system, so it just needs all those libraries for the installation program (how about writing a simple command-line program to do the installation?).
the 3dfx kernel module and Glide_V3_2.60 (I recommend the version from 3dfx, the version I got from elsewhere (Suse?) did not contain the test program and may have more serious shortcomings).
the Unreal Tournament PC CD-ROM.
the UT Linux executable package (also available elsewhere).
the 402b patch (optional, also available elsewhere); if you want to install the patch, you also need xdelta-1.1.1.

Follow the instructions for the UT installation; the setup.sh script does not work with bash-2.03, but bash-1.14.7 (available as bash1 in Suse-6.3) works. Note that you need to have the CDROM mounted as /dev/cdrom, otherwise the installation program does not install the stuff from the CDROM (even if you tell it the stuff is elsewhere).

Optionally install the patch (I did).

Make sure there is a mode in your XF86Config for 640x480.

Install the kernel module and the glide library by following these instructions; I also did an insmod .../3dfx.o (may happen automatically, but if not, try it manually).

Switch to fvwm95 (UT appears to be quite choosy about WMs (e.g., twm, my favourite, doesn't work), so let's do a safe choice first); fvwm2 works for me, too.

A recommendation I have read is to run the X-Server at 16bpp (I did, so I cannot verify this).

Another resommendation I have read and followed is to chmod UnrealTournament/System/*.so.

Finally, do

cd .../UnrealTournament/System
./UnrealTournament -nosound

Once you have it running, you can try it without -nosound. On my 2.2.1 and 2.2.14 kernels with SB Pro support it does not work without -nosound; the Suse kernel apparently does not include sound, there it works without -nosound, but is mute anyway, of course.

Some no-nos: doing anything with the window manager while UT is starting up; switching to some other virtual console (after switching back I got some psychedelic colours in the game, but I have locked up the console this way once or twice).

If you have trouble, also take a look at the file UnrealTournament.log, which may give hints at what's wrong.

For best gameplay, you should avoid heavyweight cron jobs that Suse 6.3 seems quite fond of (it did some heavy-duty disk activity (probably updatedb) for 10 minutes on my first test run, which was quite bad for the otherwise nice frame rate).

What I did not like:

Sound doesn't work.
The docs don't document all that's needed.
The messages displayed are not very useful (and those in the log are not, either).
The installation was much harder than for linuxxdoom almost 6 years ago. Do we really see progress?

Anton Ertl