And in another episode of “We won't stop until we run Doom on the air conditioner”, the novelty of playing Doom in the BIOS is behind us, giving way to something simpler… which is a distro. Playing Doom on Linux is nothing new, but creating a minimal environment with the sole goal of loading all the game's elements definitely deserves our attention. The project is called DoomLinux, its code is available on GitHub, and it includes an ISO image that anyone can try with the right hardware.
Some projects try to bring Doom to older platforms, a real challenge considering that many 486 processors already had trouble running it at a decent framerate. Fortunately, there are variants like FastDoom that modify it for better performance on 386/486 processors, and that's probably our best option if we want to see the doomguy blasting demons on vintage hardware.
However, today we want to mention another alternative for playing Doom, which is turning it into a distro. With so many specialized Linux variants that work as routers, firewalls, disk managers, software-defined radios, security auditing platforms, and media players, the only thing missing from the list is… DoomLinux
Doom as a Linux Distro
The project is a creation of GitHub user Shadly Salahuddin, and it's only been online for a few days. The official page describes a script called DoomLinux.sh, which downloads and compiles the 5.4.3 version of the Linux kernel with a minimal configuration, downloads and compiles Busybox 1.35.0, downloads and compiles FBDoom, creates a rootfs for the kernel, generates the GRUB configuration, and finally saves a live ISO image that boots the game.
Linux enthusiasts will surely find ways to optimize and/or simplify this process, but if you don't want to deal with any of that, DoomLinux has a precompiled ISO image that doesn't exceed 18 MB. Personally, I didn't have good luck running it: the image doesn't load correctly in VMware, and then I tried copying it to a USB drive for a bare-metal test, but Rufus seems to have broken something along the way. Obviously, my failure could be your success, and I recommend downloading the ISO anyway. Link below!
Official site and download: Click here
