I think a couple other people here are using ubuntu, do any of you have any problems with the game engine?  I'm using blender version 2.44 out of the repository and moving things is really slow and laggy, and about half the time pressing escape to exit the game engine closes the program entirely.  Has anyone else run into this?  Any tricks to make it work better?  One of my classes this semester is using the blender game engine, and I don't want to be setting up a whole bunch of stuff and have it crash on me losing my work :(

Just ran it from the shell so I can see the errors.  This is what I got when I started blender, ran the engine, stopped the engine, and ran it again, then stopped it and the program crashed:

Ignoring Xlib error: error code 167 request code 144
Ignoring Xlib error: error code 167 request code 144
Error: libGL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Detected GL_ARB_texture_env_combine
Detected GL_ARB_texture_cube_map
ERROR: GL_ARB_multitexture implementation is broken!
ERROR: GL_ARB_vertex_program implementation is broken!
Detected GL_ARB_depth_texture
Detected GL_EXT_separate_specular_color
Compiled with Python version 2.4.4.
Checking for installed Python... got it!
Error: libGL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
ERROR: GL_ARB_multitexture implementation is broken!
ERROR: GL_ARB_vertex_program implementation is broken!
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I was running Blender from PCLinux for a while.  From what I remember from researching things, graphics drivers for Linux are tough to find and difficult to get working when you have them. 

Finding a card with OpenGL drivers (that work for Linux too) is the problem.  You're error messages seem to be referring to the OpenGL drivers issue. 

I remember mine was very laggy as well  in LInux.  Trying to get the drop down menus to work became slower and slower.. 

I thought I read some "Blender News" where they discussed revamping the whole interface so it is not so dependant on OpenGL in the future.

I remember using a pyhton script I found that would list the status of your video driver and/or the OpenGL drivers you're using.

Good luck.  :)

Scott

Yeah, it does seem to be graphics-driver related.  I tried installing nvidia-glx, which claims to add the graphics acceleration that I seem to be missing, but then blender wouldn't start at all...  I'll keep trying.

A lack of OpenGL support would certainly cause those problems. It should also cross over into the viewport rendering if I'm not mistaken.

The viewport actually works just fine, aside from a slight problem in the pink outline around selected shaded objects, which is why I didn't notice this problem before now.  It doesn't completely lack opengl support, but I don't think it has hardware acceleration, which I guess is maybe where the game engine is going wrong?  Except that it crashes when it goes back to the normal interface....and that only sometimes.  Hm.

It works ok for me, I'm using 2.44 on Feisty, but I have an ATI grfx card (radeon 9700) so I'm running different openGL dirver.

I'm wondering if maybe I shouldn't just get a new card.  It's 5 years old, but it's a good card and it works perfectly fine in XP.  But Vista, which is now dual-booted on here, doesn't like it too much either, and I'm pretty sure the problem there is the driver, too.  That's probably fixable, though.  And I'll keep working on getting the linux driver to work.  It seems a bit silly to get a new card not because I need a better GPU but because I can't get a driver for it.

Quote - I'm wondering if maybe I shouldn't just get a new card.  It's 5 years old, but it's a good card and it works perfectly fine in XP.  But Vista, which is now dual-booted on here, doesn't like it too much either, and I'm pretty sure the problem there is the driver, too.  That's probably fixable, though.  And I'll keep working on getting the linux driver to work.  It seems a bit silly to get a new card not because I need a better GPU but because I can't get a driver for it.

I'm sure I found a list somewhere of tested drivers that worked with Linux.  Sorry, I don't have the link handy.  You may want to look it up before you decide to buy one. 

I think the newer ATI card drivers are on there.  I had an older ATI card that didn't work.  I believe the 9700's (Like cog metioned) were tested to work. 

I think the list may have been on the blender home site somewhere.

"I need a better GPU but because I can't get a driver for it." I have a similar problem with my old wacom pen there isnt a good driver for that on vista too. quite irritating.
probably is a driver problem I had that a some time ago too with blender , what worked for me then was installing an optimized version of blender from graphial.org. that didnt need a new driver. In later versions the normal blender worked fine, so maybe adding a bug helped ;).
What kind of game are you going to make Halo?