I’m putting together a machine for a friend that’s more of a demonstration machine than a permanent addition. It’s an old machine — only 750Mhz and with an 8Mb ATI card in it.
I had wanted to put some lightweight desktop games on it — no 3D acceleration, no fancy graphics, no month-long dungeon crawls. He’s used to playing Solitaire, Minesweeper and something akin to PuyoPuyo or Frozen Bubble. Nothing in-depth, just captivating for a brief time. Nothing hardware-intensive, just deviations for a half an hour or two.
The other criteria is that they avoid a lot of dependencies — especially the mountain of Gnome dependencies — and that they look good. Again, the idea is to sell Linux (and not just Ubuntu), so the old GTK1.x interface is something I’m trying to avoid.
So far, the list includes SuperTux, Gweled (although that drags in a lot of Gnome gunk, so it’ll probably be removed), Frozen Bubble, LBreakout and maybe XMahjongg … although that one is a bit too GTK1-ish.
I would recommend xjump. It’s not graphically advanced or extremely beautiful, but it’s very fun and easy to get hooked.
I’d suggest taking a look at the ABA games stuff. They are 2d wireframe shoot-em-ups that look amazing, yet run on a 300MHz processor. Evil Mr. Henry (www.emhsoft.com) has ported a bunch of them, and I’ve got a compile of the latest one at my website (http://fremwise.googlepages.com)
I believe that rRootage is in the Ubuntu repos.