Quake 3 Arena on Fedora 12 (x86_64)

I like OpenArena. It's a pretty fun game, but I still prefer the good old Quake 3. Taking in consideration that the game is 10 years old, and I haven't tried to play it in years, I took some time this afternoon to see if I could get the old original Loki Game/ID Software version working on the newest Linux distro possible: Fedora 12 (which comes out this week).

At first, I got all sorts of errors, I couldn't install it from the original CD, nor by downloading the most recent binaries from ID Software, which believe it or not, is already 6 years old.



Anyway, I was able to get Quake 3 running on my Lenovo Thinkpad T500 (Intel Graphics Card) running Fedora 12, and here's what I had to do:

Installation:

1. Grab the two latest updates from ID Software's FTP: Q3A Point Release 1.32b and Q3A Point Release 1.32c
2. Make 1.32b executable, run it, follow the directions, and you might have to set a couple of /usr/local/ directories to 777, if you want to run the game as a non-root user and install it on its default location. Also, on a 64-bit machine precede the executable with 'linux32' otherwise it will say it doesn't support 64-bit arch.
3. Unzip 1.32c, and copy over the binaries under the 'linux' directory to: /usr/local/games/quake3
4. Grab your Windows or Linux Quake3 CD, and copy over the base3q files to /usr/local/games/quake3/base3q/

Fixing Sound:

Before, you even try to start up the game, I can tell you right now the sound will be broken, so, here's how to fix it:

1. As root: /sbin/modprobe snd_pcm_oss # this is non-persistent, through this module /dev/dsp is created
2. chmod 777 /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss

Starting the game:

We need to do 2 things before executing the binary. The first is set some parameters for sound to work, and the second is tell quake3* binaries to run under a 32-bit arch.

echo "quake3-smp.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss && linux32 /usr/local/games/quake3/quake3-smp

Note, that I am running the SMP binary, since my laptop has 2 cores. If you run on a single processor, you will need to run:

echo "quake3.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss && linux32 /usr/local/games/quake3/quake3

Note: If your game freezes seconds after starting a match, use '+set s_musicvolume -1' when starting the game.

Note 2: If the sound still not working open your 'Sound Preferences' and under the Hardware tab, change the profile from Analog to Digital... it did the trick for me.