Just bought game, first 5min experience

I bought the game on steam to play on my Ubuntu machine.
I turned it on and it opened in Windowed mode, which I did not like.
I found the options to change it to full screen and enable anti aliasing.
When I did this I noticed the game was entirely in black and white so I exited the game and restarted it.
It came back with colour.

I tried to click "New Game" and it asked me for my UBERID username and password.
I had no idea what an UBERID username and password were.
There was no button to click on to get one.
I looked up the game developers website and found this forum and am now posting this message.

It shouldn't be that hard to play. Why do I need a user name and password to play?

Currently you connect to uber servers to play.

And it prevents me sending a pirate copy of the game to a friend, as he would require his own account.

It's issue PA#2709. It's possible not bug of game, but some compiz specifics.

For alpha and beta this game is online-only so you need UberNet account to play. This also will be required for global multiplayer in future.

Reason of problems you met is quite easy: game still using old version of Steamworks SDK which don't have support for 64-bit games on Linux. This is why you don't get proper registration form. When developers update to newer SDK it's will work on Linux like it's working on Windows/Mac.

So for playing on Linux you still have to manually link UberNet and Steam accounts here:
https://uberent.com/user/linksteam

Thanks for the help!

I was able to link my account and have played several hours vs the computer ( haven't won yet so that's great )

I finally quit when the program stuck on the 'generating map' phase of starting a new game.
The pre-game screen was frozen, all except for a tiny 100x100 pixel square in the bottom left, which was the actual 3-D start position selection.

Not sure if it's just my configuration. I'm running Ubuntu, clean install, with the nvidia 319.60 binaries.

Hard to say, weird rendering issues like this crop up for a lot of people. They can very from never even loading, to having a screen full of random colors. PA is still in beta, so all of the performance bugs have obviously not been ironed out yet. As long as you can play 90% of the time, and you're not experiencing any game-ending issues, just sit back and enjoy yourself! Even me with my monster PC running windows has to reboot every once in a while, just hang on for now, and help shape the future of this awesome game! Hope to see you on the battlefield and in the forums! Here's to the future of PA! And a happy new year to all!