Sunday, October 25, 2009

Runescape HD on (K)Ubuntu

One of the games I play is Runescape. It is a 3d Java MMORPG, and has both software-rendered(SD) and hardware-rendered(HD) versions. One of the problems I have so far had in switching my main computer to Ubuntu is that I couldn't get HD working - SD takes up way too much CPU and is not nearly so nice graphics wise. I would simply get a "Graphics mode not supported" error.
I did some research, and found that the problem is that I was using a 64-bit version of Ubuntu. Runescape only works on 32-bit Java, at least on Ubuntu.

So, what I did is as follows:
1. Installed the KUbuntu 9.10 RC from Here
2. I used the "Hardware drivers" control panel to install a proprietary graphics driver - NVIDIA in my case
3. I then followed the tutorial for installing 32-bit Firefox and plugins here.

I restarted, then opened up a terminal and typed "firefox32 &". Firefox 32bit started, and I was able to run Runescape.

There are two "issues" at this point:
One, you are probably going to want to create a shortcut to "firefox32 &" if you use it a lot.
Two, there is a minor issue involving the GTK libs - Firefox 32 is looking for the 64 bit libs and failing to load them, so the chrome is a bit blocky. I tried one fix, but haven't gotten anything working yet.

Hope this helps someone!

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