KDE eats appreciable amount of resources and games may be laggy even on fast machines. I run my favorite UT 2003 from within it's own X session and it looks better and runs smoother. Here is how.
Warning: Disadvantages of this method is that we need to disable kdm (gdm) at startup. And to shut down KDE (Gnome) when gaming... Good thing is that you get a real performance boost.
Open a terminal emulator and do (Gnome users replace nano with gedit):
Code:
sudo cp /etc/X11/default-display-manager /etc/X11/default-display-manager.orig
sudo nano /etc/X11/default-display-manager
This file contains only one line:
Code:
/usr/bin/kdm (or /usr/bin/gdm in case of Gnome)
Delete this line and save a file.
Find out what is your game's executable and remember it's full path. In my case it's /usr/local/games/ut2003/ut2003, yours may be different.
Now close KDE (Gnome) and reboot (reboot needed just once for the changes to take effect). When the system boots up you will stay in text-only mode with login prompt. Login with your username and pass. To start X do:
Code:
startx &
To start a game do:
Code:
startx -e /path/to/your_game_executable
Enjoy.
BASH will remember this command, so you don't need to type it in each time you want to start a game, just use standard up-arrow to list previous commands.
When the game is closed, you stay in X session. Kill it with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to get to prompt again. Then startx & for KDE or Gnome.
In case you want to rollback, it's simple:
Code:
sudo rm -f /etc/X11/default-display-manager
sudo cp /etc/X11/default-display-manager.orig /etc/X11/default-display-manager
Reboot.