Abstract
The same questions get asked repeatedly on Linux related mailing lists and news
groups. Many of them arise because people don't know as much as they should about how
things "work" on Linux, at least, as far as games go. Gaming can be a tough pursuit; it
requires knowledge from an incredibly vast range of topics from compilers to libraries to
system administration to networking to XFree86 administration ... you get the picture.
Every aspect of your computer plays a role in gaming. It's a demanding topic, but this fact
is shadowed by the primary goal of gaming: to have fun and blow off some steam.
This document is a stepping stone to get the most common problems resolved and to
give people the knowledge to begin thinking intelligently about what is going on with their
games. Just as with anything else on Linux, you need to know a little more about what's
going on behind the scenes with your system to be able to keep your games healthy or to
diagnose and fix them when they're not.