Penguin Command and Frozen Bubbles - No video

[retired1af]

I suspect this is a driver issue, but I'll be dipped if I can figure it out. The notebook is a Toshiba P305D, ATI x1250 graphic chip set, 4GB Ram, and AMD 2GHz Turion 64 x2. I selected the Radeon driver on installation.

When selecting either game, I get a black screen. Sound works just fine, just no video. Suggestions? Should I have selected the ATI driver instead?

[newt]

It's worth a shot. My understanding is that the 'ati' driver is just a wrapper for other ati drivers and will, on-the-fly, select the appropriate ATI driver (r128, radeon, etc).  Give it a shot and see if it solves your problem - it shouldn't hurt.  You may also want to check the fps in glxgears before and after switching drivers just to see if it changes much.

Good luck!

[retired1af]

Didn't check FPS prior to redoing the driver. All I can say is this. I sure wish I got those kind of framerates in WoW and LOTRO! 

As for the game issue.. No change. I'll do some more digging and see if I can find an error message buried somewhere that gives me a clue as to what's going on.

[GrannyGeek]

I've never tried Penguin Command, but I run Frozen Bubble a lot on my three systems.

If you start Frozen Bubble from a terminal prompt, do you get any messages? The command is
frozen-bubble

Two of my computers use the xorg radeon driver and the laptop uses the intel driver. You may find a bit of help at the Frozen Bubble Web site ( http://www.frozen-bubble.org/home/ ).
--GrannyGeek

[retired1af]

Wierd... I made some big changes, so haven't had a chance to reinstall Frozen Bubbles, but here's the terminal results for Penguin Command.

** Starting SDL init **
** Init video **
** Set video mode **
** Create buffers **
** Finding Joysticks **
** Init joystick **
** Loading Title Screen **
** Opening Audio Mixer **
   8 channels allocated
** Loading Music **
** Loading Sounds **
** Playing Music **
** Ready to enter Menu **
Now playing song #1
** Fade in Music **
** Showing Title Screen **
** Blit Background **
** Background image drawn **
** Loading Font **
** Init Font **
** Loading Images **

And that's where it stays. Suspect I'd see something similar with Frozen Bubbles (I'll double check once it's reinstalled.).

[retired1af]

It's a permission issue somewhere. I opened a terminal and su'd to root, then typed frozen-bubble. Worked like a champ. Doing some more digging.

And while at root, I tried penguin-command and finally got an error.

Warning: I could not open the options file for read:
/root/.penguin-command

Now I have some clues.