How I got it working in Fedora 13

[WeatherGod]

It was a bit troublesome, but I finally got Penumbra: Overture running on Fedora 13. I am on the low-end of the specs: 512 MB of memory and NVidia GeForce Ti 4. So, I have decided to post my adventures here in the hopes that it helps others. Note that I am still wading through exactly what I did so I may post revisions to my notes.

First, the default nouveau drivers for my GeForce Ti 4 are not sufficient for this game, so you will need the proprietary drivers from NVidia. For me, this would be version 96.43.16 (which is a legacy driver, but still supported by NVidia). In order to install this driver, you will need to make sure you have the packages kernel-PAE-devel and kernel-headers. Note that kernel-devel is not the same as kernel-PAE-devel. If you are using the PAE kernel, you will need kernel-PAE-devel (this took me a while to realize).

Next, you will need to turn off modesetting as the driver does not support it. Edit /etc/grub.conf and add 'nomodeset' to the end of your kernel line. Then edit /etc/inittab to boot into runlevel 3. Reboot. Log in as root and run the nvidia installer. This should complete all that is needed for the graphics card on fedora 13.

Now, the Penumbra installer includes a lib/ directory that includes several shared objects that Overture depends on. However, I have found that to make Penumbra: Overture run properly, you need to "let Linux be Linux". Most of these library files are available through Fedora 13 and should be used. So, move that lib/ directory elsewhere (I renamed it to orig_libs/).

Then, you will need to install several packages if they are not installed already:
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
openal-soft
freealut
SDL
SDL_ttf
SDL_image

In addition, you will need the nonfree package called "Cg" from RPMFusion.

I hope this is helpful, and I will update this thread as I get new information.