These early snapshots are important to the Linux gaming community. The reason for this is simple; Newer kernels support newer hardware and the newer the distro, the newer the packages. Gamers are hardware junkies. You'll never hear of a hardcore gamer that's still using a PII and a GeForce 2 MX. This brings about a problem if the kernel you're using isn't going to support your brand new motherboard, soundcard or fancy network card. This is where these reviews will come in handy, here you'll get to see what's new, what's the support like and how easy is it to install, suck down some game packages and frag the night away. On to the review...

Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' Alpha 2

It seems like only last week that Ubuntu 8.04 (and family) was released and already news of the next version is filling Linux sites. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was a great release and will have desktop support for the next 3 years. This sounds like great news, though you're only covered for security updates, you won't be getting the latest version of Nexuiz, OpenArena or your other favourite 'apt-gettable' game when you next apply the patches. Luckily for you these should be available in Ubuntu 8.10, though by the time this ships on the 31st of October they may soon be outdated.

Concerning the Nvidia restricted drivers (read: Nvidia non-opensource drivers), there seems to be an issue with this, so at this stage there's no simple way to enable the proprietary Nvidia drivers. This means my test machine was only able to push 94.6 frames per second in glxgears. Not cool. This means you'll need to download the latest Nvidia driver and install it manually. Not the end of the world, but definitely something that Ubuntu needs to rectify sooner rather than later.

The good news is that once you've done this, you're right to start downloading all the latest games. Nexuiz 2.4.2, OpenArena0.7.7, Warsow 0.42, Glest 3.1.2 and SuperTuxKart 0.5 are all available and are the latest versions.

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