Singing Potatoes
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Saturday, 12 January 2008
An Unexpected Surprise
Condescending Linux user

A couple of nights ago, I bought The Orange Box - primarily to play Portal, because I love puzzle-solving games (and the 2D Flash version piqued my interest). Just for the heck of it, I installed Portal (and, out of necessity, Steam) onto my Linux box to see how badly it would fail. To my utter shock...

Click for full size

It's actually playable. I had to turn down many of the graphics graphics options to make it playable — but my Linux box wasn't built for gaming (unlike my Windows machine). And there are occasional graphics glitches (the main one I noticed was that the frosted/reticulated windows separating the testing areas from the observation booths are solid, opaque colors). Nevertheless, I hadn't even expected it to run on Linux.

The first time I ran Portal on Linux, the observation booth windows were solid, opaque colors. The next time I ran it, they looked like they were supposed to:

That looks much better...

As a side effect of playing Portal for the last couple of nights, having replayed it a couple of times to get the achievements, I now really want some cake.


Posted by godfrey (link)
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