I'm trying to create a small LAN of 4 Linux laptops so we can play Terraria.
These are really old Dell laptops: Inspirion
I installed Linux Mint 17.2 on all four of them...
Open source drivers too
Two of them played Terraria perfectly, but two of them would display all kinds of scrambled artifacts and graphics.
I started researching and found that they have a Radeon Xpress 200m video chip
I'm not sure why the game didn't work but after reading that the Linux Terraria is just a Wine-Wrapped executable, well I decided to try Wine myself.
I installed PlayOnLinux and downloaded Wine 1.7.50-staging
Installed the Windows version of Terraria and setup the virtual drive/wineprefix
Installed:
- DOT NET Framework 4.0
- XNA 40
- Direct X 9
- Core Fonts
- Tahoma

Now it launches and plays just fine. Kinda slow, so I had to turn down the graphic settings a bit, but it runs!

it is actually a real port, there is no Wine involved. It uses mono for .NET and FNA as a crossplatform replacement of Microsoft's XNA.

don't have any ideas though about what could cause your scrambled graphics...

Oh, I thought it was a WineWrapped port because of this comment:
http://www.gog.com/support/terraria/bgeneral_troubleshooting_faq_linux_ubuntu_mint_gamesb

What is Wine? Why do you label games that use it?
Wine is a compatibility layer that implements a Windows environment on Linux machines.

Wine carries some inherent performance and stability disadvantages. We place great importance on testing and building Wine games to make sure they are up to our standards of quality and performance, and we will support and stand by these releases. At the same time we recognise that this may not be an ideal solution for everyone, and that some of our users approach Wine with a healthy bit of scepticism.

We feel that it's your right, as our customer, to be informed about any traces of the Wine wrapper on Linux.

yeah, that's a bit misleading.
I think it is just a general linux FAQ that they stick to every linux game they have. And since they have a few games using wine, this bit about wine is in there as well.

If a game uses Wine, then it explicitly says on the game page: This is a wine game. (or something like that)
See for example, Planescape Torment

(on the right side under system requirements for linux)

The Linux version of Terraria is a bit more hardware demanding than the Windows one. Not to mention, that despite it's looks, it's not a lightweight game. On a small map it easily takes 1GB of ram, even more on bigger ones.

For better graphics performance be sure to try switching lighting modes and don't use multicore lighting.

Thank you for your suggestions.
Messing with the graphics options and screen resolution helps.
But I ended up going with Windows. The AMD drivers for these old laptops are much much better than the open source AMD drivers for Linux. Too bad, cause I really wanted to use Linux.

I'm sure the problem is not the drivers, but the port. Like I said - Terraria on Linux is way more demanding than on windows. The FLOSS Radeon drivers are very good these days, I use them myself and don't notice any worse performance than from fglrx.