After I got my ThinkPad T60p running under Linux Mint Mate 18 32 bit I wanted to find out if this machine is capable for light gaming. So I installed Steam via the Synaptics package manager in order to download my Steam library on the machine. But Steam refused to start. I always got this message:

[2015-04-26 20:04:03] Startup - updater built Apr 13 2015 15:17:10 SteamUpdateUI: An X Error occurred X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)

After some researching i found this entry. This code solved the problem:

cd $HOME/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.bak cd $HOME/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.bak

After starting Steam, I saw that 77 games in my Steam library do have Linux support, very nice! Because the ThinkPad T60p is a very old machine I only tested some games that should be light on the hardware. The machine is a T60P 2207 87G with following specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2×2 GHz CPU

3 GB RAM (which is the maximal possible configuration for this machine)

14,1″ SXGA+ Display (1400×1050 resolution)

ATI FireGL V5200 GPU

a Kingdian S200 SSD with 60 GB

Here are the games I tested:

Broken Age runs perfectly fine in fullscreen and windowed mode.This game has very low hardware requirements and graphics and sounds are fine. I played this game with my daughter but we never finished it.

TIS 100 runs fine but only windowed

Half Life 1 runs fine with max details in 1024×768. Either windowed or fullscreen. Sound works fine, no problems here. It is a very old game but still fun to play.

FTL runs perfectly, but this game has extremely low hardware requirements. I really like it.

Sheltered runs perfectly. I started playing it but then paused it because I really sucked on this game. But I really love this setting and will try to continue with the game and figure it out, I found it to be quite frustrating some months ago.

System Shock runs fine in 800×600 fullscreen, I sadly could not make a screenshot. But the audio gave me some problems, I experienced some crackling and stuttering in audio but the game is very playable.

OpenTTD 1.5.3 is also very easy on the hardware and runs without problems with the full 1400×1050 resolution. It is not distributed via Steam, I downloaded it through the Synaptics package manager.

These games did not work:

Limbo starts the game but then freezes 😦

Civilization V did not start

So overall I am surprised that Steam offers such a big amount of Linux games, I did not expect that. And I was very happy to see that you can play some games on the T60p if you wish so. Not that I am willing to do that, it is just out of curiosity.

At the moment I am really thinking about taking the T60p with me when I go on vacation in the time around Christmas instead of my P50 or my X220 and only use the T60p for everything, just for fun 🙂