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Unreal Tournament for Linux

This is one of my favourite games of all time.  It was one of the few reasons it took me so long to migrate to Linux, and dual-booted for quite some time just so that I could play UT.  Imagine my joy when I discovered that I can actually play this splendid game within the operating system I love!

You can [download Open-UT] from [Loki] but you WILL need the Unreal Tournament game CD.

Issues

Generally speaking the whole thing is quite easy to install and use.  Simply mount the CD and run the relevant binary as root.  Then there's a simple user interface which will guide you through the install.  Once it is installed simply type "ut" and press enter, and the game will load.

If you're lucky that's all you will have to do.  If you're not lucky then there will be other hurdles to jump:

SIGIOT

If you install the Game Of The Year (GOTY) edition then there is a possibility that you will see this error.  Why?  Simply because the maps on the CD are compressed using Epic's Unreal Compression.  The installer's job is to decompress these files so that the game can then read them when you come to play it.

But generally it doesn't.  Generally it will decompress a small number of the maps and leave the rest in their compressed form.  Why?  Dunno.  Beats me.  This is generally characterised by a crash that ends with a "SIGIOT".

The way to fix this is to do:

...for every map in the game.  Ow.  Well that's a pain in the arse to be quite frank, so I wrote a script called [UT Decompress] to do it for me.

[More information about UT Decompress]

SIGSEG

Segmentation Fault.  The least helpful error message ever.  All it really means is that a program tried to use memory that doesn't belong to it, and the Operating System intervened.  I got a LOT of these when I first installed UT on Linux.  No number of re-installs would fix it, and eventually (as a last-ditch attempt) I tried scanning my computer's memory using [Memtest-86]

Because the computer was still quite young I wasn't expecting any errors, but there were a hell of a lot on test #5.  Research led me to believe that my memory was being pushed too hard by the motherboard, so I went and checked the settings in the BIOS.  It turned out the "SDRAM cycle length" was wrong and that was causing problems, so if you get segmentation faults when running UT it may be worth testing your memory.

Last updated 6th of June 2004 at 15:56

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