FOSSwire

That’s a scary headline. Chances are, after seeing that, you might not care about the rest of this article. But hang on for a second: Have an Intel graphics chipset, or use an ATI graphics card (open-source drivers or not)? Then this image might be familiar to you:

If you don’t notice it right away, the glxgears window is below the other two. Ugly. This is a problem with the current X.Org stack using a rendering mode known as DRI1. I won’t go in to technical details of why this happens, but it all boils down to this: Using DRI1, 3D applications are given a space of the screen to draw into, and this is then sent directly to the display. That sounds somewhat logical, but when you throw in more fancy operations, such as Compiz and desktop effects, things get tricky. Keith Packard of Intel does a good job explaining this and other problems with X acceleration.

Keith mentions a golden combination that can be used right now. Fedora 11, arriving in one week, will include everything needed for a pleasant X experience. Ubuntu 9.04 does ship UXA, but it is not on by default due to stability issues at the time it was released. Instead, EXA is used, the same mode included with 8.10.

If you’re using Ubuntu 9.04 or another distribution with UXA support that is almost ready, there is a one-liner you can add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. In the Device section, add Option “AccelMethod” “uxa” as it is below:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Option	"AccelMethod"	"uxa"
EndSection

Be prepared to revert the change later: without a newer kernel or X server, UXA mode has proven to be a little crashy. I’ve had good experiences while using at a 2.6.30 kernel, though I still do not use it for day-to-day computing. Even if you can’t get it to work for extended amounts of time yet, it still is nice to see this:

The glxgears test is positioned neatly in the background; you can see it through the semi-transparent terminal. And if that’s not enough proof that this works:

ManiaDrive describes itself as "an arcade car game on acrobatic tracks, with a quick and nervous gameplay (tracks almost never exceed one minute)" and also as a clone of Trackmania.

What I can tell you is that ManiaDrive is a lot of fun, and extremely addictive at that.

Download the game from the site and on Linux, simply extract the archive and run ./mania_drive.sh. You will need 3D support enabled in your Linux distribution, or the game will run with terrible performance.

Once you're up and running, you can get started straight away with the Beginner's tracks. You drive a clapped-out Renault Clio around a simple track. The aim is to get your car through all the checkpoints and to the finish in the quickest time possible (beating the 'Gold Time' on each track unlocks the next, and is how you can progress through).

Once you've been taught the basics of the checkpoint system, how to run, jumps and more, you can progress into the real levels (under the Pro heading).

Each level is challenging, but not so much to make it frustrating. I found that progressing through the first few levels, after doing the Beginner series, was difficult enough to be rewarding (and addictive, for that matter), but was also easy to just pick up and play.

The game also features a soundtrack of Creative Commons-licensed (mostly punk rock) music (see the bottom of this page for the listings). The tracks work well as a backdrop to the game, but might get annoying after a while. Thankfully, you can easily mute the music in Options by turning its volume to the lowest setting.

Unfortunately, the website's News section hasn't been updated in a very long time, but you can find some additional downloadable tracks from there as well if you finish the set that the game comes with. Heck, if you're really ambitious, there's even a track editor (./mania2.sh in the download directory) so you can build your own.

If you're looking for realism in ManiaDrive, forget it. This game is all arcade, and doesn't pretend to be anything more or less. For what it is though, it is very entertaining. A word of warning though - if you need to get stuff done, you might want to stay away.