If you can’t wait to play the newest iteration of Fallout, yet don’t want to boot Windows to do it – with a little effort you can get it running under Wine as well.
It doesn’t seem to work out of the box, even with a very recent release (Failed to initialize renderer. Unknown error creating the GamebryoRenderer.)
But if you don’t mind adding a little patch and compiling Wine yourself, you should be able to get Fallout New Vegas up and running in no time.
WineHQ Bug 24831 describes the problem and someone else came up with a fix just a few hours later. But if you’re running Ubuntu 10.10, sadly the patch doesn’t apply right away. To manually fix it, just get the Wine source package and edit the file ‘dlls/d3d9/directx.c’, go to line 477, remove or comment out this part
*device = NULL;
return D3DERR_DRIVERINTERNALERROR;
and substitute it with this:
return IDirect3D9Ex_CreateDevice(iface, adapter, device_type, focus_window, flags, parameters, (void *)device);
Save the file and run ‘dpkg-buildpackage’ and when finished, install the resulting .deb.
(Or just download my modified directx,c and save it to wine1.2-1.2.1/dlls/d3d9/directx.c before compiling)
That’s it. Enjoy your stay in New Vegas. :)