I'm always been a modest fan of Debian and i have it installed on two server machines and on a Desktop Computer, till a couple of days ago.. the problem with my desktop and wheezy is about the AMD ATI proprietary driver which fails to run and the lack of fglrx packages from the Debian repository; i also tried backporting packages from sid getting some backtraces from X to the fglrx module and such - so, game over with Debian.
At this point i decided to give Ubuntu a chance, hoping that the situation could be nicer from this point of view - and it has been. I managed to install the Ati Catalyst driver for my HD5550 and 3d rendering is finally ok:
$ glxgears
8169 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1633.785 FPS
Now it's time to test some games with Desura:
at first i tried with Ubuntu 12.04 amd64 and i was able to run Trine, while Frozen Synapse had no audio output (i had to install the ia32-libraries to get Frozen Synapse starting, though).
Following the first links i found on google i wasn't able to solve the audio problem, so i thought to leave the 64bit thingee to it's destiny and try with the 32bit iso.
Now, after some problems, always libraries-related, i have both games working fine: if you happen to have similar issues, try to investigate the output of:
$ ldd /path/to/your/game_bin_file
you may find missing libraries and have to link, move some of them.
- sidenote: to investigate problems with Frozen Synapse, open the debugging console and look for errors from the biginning of the output.
