Other trouble-shooting resources can be found at:
Jörgen's GLQuake Site,
the
old version of this how-to, and
Linux Gamers FAQ.
Often, using an alternative game engine such as
TyrQuake,
FuhQuake and
Darkplaces will fix mouse and sound related problems.
"bash: ./glquake.glx: Permission denied"
"bash: glquake.glx: command not found"
This is not good, but some simple options to try are:
Files not lowercased or Data files missing.
Linux Quake requires (most) filenames to be in lowercase. If you get an error similar to "Error: W_LoadWadFile: couldn't load gfx.wad" it means the game can't find the data files, possibly because they are not all lowercase.
"Memory overwrite in Sys_Printf"
For more information about Linux sound see the drivers section.
An error such as: "/dev/dsp: Device or resource busy" indicates some program is already using your sound card, and you will have to halt this program to get Quake sound effects.
"Quake engine games exit, and I see an error about mmap!"
Sound stutters or is not very good.
If changing the brightness setting in the options menu doesn't work, you can use the xgamma program to brighten the whole display.
"This game won't let me look around properly. %$!$@"
Try the following -
If you are running Quake as a normal user and experiencing these problems it's probably due to having insufficient privileges to write to the game directories. Solutions include:
Quake uses a confusing method of saving and restoring game options, especially when playing add-ons, and game options sometimes have to be reinitialised even though file permissions are not an issue. In such cases, the author can offer no simple advice %-/.
Some mission-packs/mods for Quake can cause existing player/monster models to be drawn with lines all over the place. To fix this, delete the directory "quake/id1/glquake". When you next run the game, it will remake this directory and everything should be fine.
A common problem with 3dfx cards is a shower of flickering lines on the screen.
Some Quake engines use an OpenGL speed-up known as multitexturing. This normally works fine, but if you are experiencing glitches you can disable this feature with the -nomtex option.
Older video cards may occasionally draw models in all white. See the PlanetQuake command list for in-game GL variables to fine tune performance.
Setting up hardware GL acceleration under Linux used to be a big deal, but modern distros should now handle this automatically. Of course there are exceptions...
Nvidia's drivers for all of their modern video cards are not open source. Because of this many distributions do not include them. If your Nvidia card is running slowly this is probably the cause and you should visit http://www.nvidia.com to download the Linux installer. In the author's experience these drivers are great, but not all versions work 100% with all cards. If you have a misbehaving Nvidia video card, try a different driver.
While new versions of XFree and Xorg have great support for Voodoo 3, 4 and 5, early 3dfx hardware such as Voodoo1, Voodoo2 and Rush are no longer hardware accelerated. To get OpenGL working for these cards, you'll need to download, install and/or compile the software libraries called Glide and Mesa. Here is a detailed README on old 3dfx cards.
There are two major Linux sound systems - Open Sound System and ALSA. If you are experiencing sound problems and the trouble-shooting section hasn't helped, you may consider changing the sound driver. This can be hard work, and is only for experienced users.
To ascertain which driver you are currently using, type lsmod to list currently loaded kernel modules. The ALSA sound modules have verbose names starting with "snd_", while the OSS modules have more terse names. For example, the ALSA Sound Blaster Live module is "snd_emu10k1", while the OSS module is "emu10k1". Since Linux kernel 2.6, ALSA has been the standard sound system, while 2.4 and earlier were more likely to come with OSS sound.
Information about ALSA can be found at the Alsa Homepage and Linux Journal's Guide to ALSA.
For those already with ALSA wishing to try the OSS modules, a kernel recompile is probably necessary.