Josh Saddler

Last night I installed UT2004 on my laptop, after not playing it since June. The laptop in question is an older ThinkPad R61i, with an Intel X3100 graphics chip. I know -- not the best for gaming. However, most online reports I found indicate that it's acceptable for such an old game as UT2004, so I figured it'd be worth a shot. The Intel graphics drivers have made a lot of progress in the last two years, especially on the 3D front, right? Right?

Kinda. After reducing all settings to "low" and dialing back the resolution to 1024x768 (native is 1280x800), the game is playable, but with very uneven framerates. Looking toward the middle of a map, or anyplace with a lot of action, introduces a good stutterfest; frames are down to between 8 and 18FPS. I enabled a few extra options such as pixel shaders and VBOs in UT2004.ini to add a bit more performance, but it's still marginal.

I'm rather disappointed. I'm not having nearly as great an experience as other Linux users, and certainly not as good as the Windows gamers who've benchmarked Unreal on this hardware. However, I did also catch the huge xorg-server 1.7 update as well, so maybe there have been some performance regressions since 1.6. It makes it a little hard to determine the areas that could use tweaking. I don't have anything special in my xorg.conf, just a default resolution. It's possible there's a setting I'm missing.

I'd like to try UT2004 on my desktop workstation, which has a RadeonHD 4550 card, but all reports indicate that even the latest git checkouts of the open-source drivers still don't work with Unreal. Apparently the game can't even launch, much less run at playable speeds. But as rapidly as the drivers are maturing, I'm hoping this'll be fixed in a month or so. Call me optimistic.

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It looks like Abiword 2.8.0 was released today, so I wrote an ebuild and made it available in my devspace. I've been hand-writing these things for awhile. It took quite a bit of research to determine what went into the 2.7 betas, and now I'll have to do another overhaul of the 2.8 ebuild to account for the new plugin system. There's no longer a separate abiword-plugins package; they're all distributed in the base 2.8.0 archive. This means there will be a lot more tricky configure checks and USE flags, which sucks from a flexibility standpoint. Keeping the plugins in an external package was much simpler, so I'm a bit disappointed by this upstream decision.

Still, right now you can download and install Abiword 2.8.0 using my ebuild. While it needs a few cleanups, it will get you set up with a fully functioning basic Abiword install, though the only available plugin (as shown in the "Plugins" dialog) is .odt support.

This new version launches much quicker than 2.7.10, and it seems to have fixed all the rendering errors and even the crashes that happened with basic operations. Basically, you can click stuff now without worrying.

Cleaning up my ebuild is a long task, thanks to those darned plugins. Patches welcome, or I suppose you could always just wait and see what ends up in Bugzilla.