Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Mandriva

Playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Mandriva is a lot of fun. Linux detractors will often point out that Linux lacks games, and point to that as one of the main reasons to stay away from Linux for home use. In fact, there are many games available that will run under Linux natively and tons more that will run under Cedega from TransGaming.

Installing RTCW is pretty easy. You have to have a Windows partition with the game installed, or access to one. You have to hunt around online to find the Id Games installer (wolf-linux-1.4-full.x86.run). If you absolutely can't find it email me and I can find you a copy. Once you find it simply download it and run the installer as root:

$ ./wolf-linux-1.4-full.x86.run

This will unpack everything. INext you have to copy quite a few files from the Windows install. You can't get these files directly off the CD, they're extracted when the game is installed. Copy the following files into /usr/local/games/wolfenstein/main

mp_pak0.pk3
mp_pak1.pk3
mp_pak2.pk3
pak0.pk3
sp_pak1.pk3
sp_pak2.pk3

Once you've done this you're (almost) ready to play. Mandriva has several problems with the sound driver so you're going to have to fiddle with things a little bit. First you'll probably need to start the esd (it's a sound daemon) with:

$ sudo esdctl stop

Next you have to run some wonky commands to enable the sound card:

$ cd /usr/local/games/wolfenstein
$ su
Password:
# echo "wolf.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss
# echo "wolf.x86 0 0 disable" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss

Once you've done that you should be able to play the game using:

$ wolfmp