I must have been working too much this week, because today suddenly turned into Linux game day. Actually, it started last night... Here's what I've learned which may be of some use on the cafe computer at as220, where games are an important part of the user experience:

I got cgoban working with gnugo to play go. It is a bit unintuitive because you have to set it up like a modem game, except pointing to gnugo. Maybe it is possible to do that from the command line and hard wire it into the menu. I'll find out eventually.

There is a sound option for xboing, but the menus don't launch it by default. The possible drawback is that it says "oh shit" when you lose a ball. Don't know if that can be changed. (well it can, I'm sure, question is how hard is it.) Anyhow, you can change the menu item config to get the sound on automatically.

I spent most of my time working on 3d stuff. I wasn't sure if OpenGL (that is, Mesa) was working with my video card, because the 3d screensavers won't run in GL mode, but that seems to be an issue specific to xscreensaver as far as I can tell. There is something called SDL which is the main ratsnest of problems. There are many modules or libraries that go with it, too.

I compiled tux racer first, once I got the sdl stuff straightened out. Looks great with my 32mg nividia card. The sound doesn't work because of sdl problems. Mostly things don't detect the libraries at configure time, even though they are there. Don't know why. I don't think I tried a tuxracer rpm... I'll download one now. It doesn't need anything exotic, so you should be able to get it running on oscorb, if Mesa works.

Didn't get gltron to rpm or compile. Needed glut, which I couldn't get to work. Looks like a good game, 3-d split-screen tron-cycle action.

Just got bzflag running. It is a networked battlezone. Only seems to have a networked mode, no ai. I may actually try to play this over the net. It has been around a while so the graphics aren't too demanding. Probably not of use in the cafe, however.

My big success is cannonsmash or csmash (cannonsmash.sourceforge.net) I couldn't get it to compile due to sdl issues, but the mandrake rpm on rprfind works ok. It crashes occasionally, but it isn't too bad. It is an awesome 3d ping pong game.