Illarion on Linux

[paraskan]

Hello everyone. I was seeing too many messages about illarion that "should work on linux" cause it's based in java. So i tested myself and here are the results:

used hardware:
p3 tualantin 1300mhz
256MB ram
gforce 2 mx 400

used software:
xorg 6.8.2-r6
nvidia driver version 8756
java 1.5.0_06-b05 (sun's virtual machine implementation)

illarion installation:

to run any java program on linux you should really rid off the gnu java implementation and get the sun's implementation. after we get the appropriate version of java we go to illarion website, download the .jnlp file and fire it up like this:

$ javaws illarion_client.jnlp

this will start downloading the client. after that you get some questions on where to install it and then you get an entry on java web start to fire up the illarion client. just choose illarion and press either online or offline launch.

then you get the illarion login screen. we go to options and fill the options values. i have used
fullscreen/reduced graphics quality/24 bit but you can try other combinations of course.
after that you just press the play button. there is a possibility that you get a message after pressing the play button that the game can't find the appropriate display mode. that's what had happened to me. and how we solve it?
what's going on is that in sun's linux implementation you need the Xinerama extension enabled so the virtual machine be able to get a list of available screen modes and switch to them. so we go to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add a line like this on the "ServerLayout" section:

Option "Xinerama" "true"

fire up X11 again and try

$ javaws
(that's the command that you should allways use to start Illarion)

Illarion should run now normally.

If you have XFree it should be the same thing. Enabling Xinerama support at XFree should fix the problem too.

Xinerama is the way java 1.5 uses to get the list of available modes. If you have java 1.4 i came up to a bug report at sun which was saying that the mode switching doesn't work at all. So you should upgrade your java.

If after following these instructions you have some problem don't hesitate to ask, i maybe could help.

[martin]

Thanks for your detailed instructions!

Martin