So, after heroic battles with several distros, I now have Oolite-linux running under Kubuntu under Virtual PC, at almost 0.5 FPS. A glitch of some sort has caused me to question the tesselation of planets:
Unfortunately, I don’t have sound. Any sound; KDE complains, correctly, about /dev/dsp not being there. Sound twiddling was my primary reason to want to get Oolite running, but there’s also the texturing code.
Probably someone has managed to get alsa and VPC to get along, but I think I’ll save finding out about that for some other weekend.
It is indeed software rendering; OpenGL emulation was scheduled from Virtual PC 7 but, as I recall, cut due to the time spent on G5 compatibility. Even if it was there, there almost certainly wouldn’t be Linux drivers. :-/
Still, the software rendering reveals a pattern in the tesselation of the planet that looks a bit weird.
Well, I’ve got sound thanks to the simple yet entirely non-obvious incantation “modprobe snd-sb16”. Unfortunately Oolite can only manage sporadic bursts of sound, so it’s no use for debugging. I’m now considering installing Linux on my bondi iMac, which should be marginally less glacial. But not today.
