NVIDIA with Nouveau and Wine
I updated my old laptop HP Pavilion dv3 (2238tx) recently, which was bought in year 2010, installed with Arch Linux.
Because of Linux kernel version, the NVIDIA driver is not officially supported by Arch Linux (detail).
There are two options to resolve this: install (i) Nouveau or (ii) NVIDIA driver from AUR. The former is open source, the latter is closed source from NVIDIA official site. Furthermore, using the latter theoretically allows the usage of CUDA, which is important if I am using it to do some neural networks training.
Now, since this old laptop, 说好不好，说坏不坏, I tried to install games. Unluckily, the Windows 7 (it is dual boot) is 32-bit, which I don’t plan to re-install new version of Windows with 64-bit. So, I am trying to figure out Linux Wine whether it can work or not.
Firstly, I tried PlayOnLinux to install 64-bit Wine. But I found that 64-bit Wine in PlayOnLinux can run only 64-bit programs. Then after some study, I found that Arch Linux official Wine package supports both 64-bit and 32-bit.
So, I wrote a Bash script to do something like PlayOnLinux which can be found here, so that I can isolate the WINEPREFIX for different programs, and allows to use different versions of compiled Wine.
After some trial and errors, I make an almost 9 years old laptop to run a 64-bit game released in 2018, though the performance is not very good.
The followings are the setup/configuration:
- Nvidia G98M (GeForce G 105M)
- Nouveau and related packages like “mesa”
- Wine 4.13
- VirtualGL (Not sure whether it is required)
- Winetricks and installed “d3dx9” (Not sure whether this is required)