Having installed hardy heron on my little EEE-pc I was very pleased to have a complete version of Ubuntu running on my little white companion. Gone are the native Xandros days where I would have to poke and pry to find a snippet of useful ( or interesting ) software in the EEE-repositories they had put online, With Ubuntu running on ‘ the little one ‘ I have the same luxury I have when using my heavier linux machines : Complete access to the Ubuntu software repositories. One of the packages I found there a while ago is called ‘ open arena ‘ This one source clone ( our should i just say ‘copy) of the immensely popular QUQKE 3 game is one of the things I tend to select when poking around in the Synaptic package manager.
Not that I’m an avid gamer anymore, but quake 3 was just one of these games I grew up with. I mean that in the sense that it was one of the first multi player fps shooters I came in contact with. There was of course Duke nuke’m 3d which we played to smithereens on the first pentium 1 systems we owned but Q3 was the first networked multi player shooter that deprived me of a lot of sleep around the turn of the century. At the time i was working a a junior sys engineer at a multimeda company that had a GAMES TESTING department. Mostly these guys would be testing boring games but, when quitting time came around the large testing room, filled with computers, would turn into a corporately sponsored lan party. The guys who thought me the game where, even then, already competing in online tournaments. So little me got to ‘play along’ being mostly cannon fodder in the beginning. I must go fragged more time then i could breathe in those first games , but gradually ( playing with the big boys ) I got better. After some time the action packed Q3 made room for the more tactical counter strike that I enjoyed to play into the wee hours as well.
The funny part of the story is that , back then we needed ‘ high speed, fine tuned gaming machines ‘ to run the Q3. Good graphics cards, enough ram and so on. When I was playing around with my EEE-pc I decided to install ‘open-arena’ on it, and guess what ? it works like a charm on what is considered a ‘low end’ laptop these days 🙂 So when the opportunity i will give ‘sarge, bones and all the other bots a serious run for their money on the smallest computer I own.