One project I have had recently is to compile a live CD with the open source flight simulation game FlightGear. Since Windows has licensing issues, the obvious choice for me was to go Linux. Linux also lends itself nicely to Live CD’s as people have been doing the development for about 10 years now (Remember the first edition of Knoppix!!!). Morphix was a commonly used platform a couple of years ago, but it seems not much has been done in the way of maintenance of the actual program or documentation since the end of 2006. This seriously inhibited my ability to get a LiveCD working the way I wanted it to with Morphix. Specifically, it annoyed me having to split main modules and mini modules as they never seemed to operate the way they were supposed to on the actual live CD.

I have used Slax in the past to build rescue CD’s, but I really would prefer something that is based on the Debian style of package management (Morphix is based on Knoppix which is based on Debian (phew!)). In my research I stimbled upon the Debian Live movement, an official movement by Debian to make Debian LiveCD’s. The tools that they make available seemed unwieldly at first, but that’s just because the man pages are kind of bad. With the help of lots of hard disk space and a free license for VMWare Server, I was able to figure out how things worked. And work it does, very well.

Ok let’s bring this back to the topic heading. Great, I can make a maintable live CD based on Debian and port FlightGear into it. The problem is, getting proper 3D acceleration. I don’t use 5 year old hardware. The oldest hardware I’ll be running this on is 18 months. That means nVidia 6xxx hardware at the oldest, and Radeon 5xx hardware. There isn’t very good support for that in Debian Stable (Etch – 4.0). My next project was thus to import the ATI and nVidia proprietary drivers into the CD. The way I found to do this was to copy the driver setup package onto the live CD, boot into the LiveCD, compile the libraries, then copy the libraries off the disc and remaster the disc with the actual compiled libraries. This actually worked and I was able to insert the kernel module. However, the X11 module for ATI did not seem to want to talk to the Kernel module even though it inserted correctly, which meant that 3D acceleration was still missing. Also, the nVidia GLX module in X11 kept inserting automatically when it was present, stopping the Mesa or FGLRX module from inserting. Sigh. In other words, it seems that it was going to be a pain to get working and a pain to maintain.

Ok here’s where the gaming gets interesting. Because I was searching for Linux LiveCD information and getting proprietary 3D drivers to work, I discovered 2 live CD distrobutions that are built explicitly for this purpose. live.linuX-gamers.net and the Supergamer live CD. live.linuX-gamers.net is built around open source games, but really does showcase some good native Linux games that have been built. Supergamer is built around a showcase of games that were available commercially for Windows and have been made free for Linux in one form or another, and so really showcases what a LiveCD can do. And it does appear to use the proprietary drivers. If I had the master build files, I’d strip the games out of it and put FlightGear in, but as it is it’s just the ISO that’s distributed and I don’t want to spend time in email conversations to get information…if they don’t want to make it publically documented at this point then I’ll just wait. It’s still a great effort though (see this great review with screenshots)!