Snott

Category: Games

Mostly free open source games

  • Running Dawn of War 2 Retribution on Linux

    Running Dawn of War 2 Retribution on Linux

    This post will be updated constantly until there is a way to play Dawn Of War 2: Retribution on the Linux platform via wine.

    Previous titles of this series where unable to run because of the games running Games For Windows Live, which is totally incompatible with wine. With Retribution dropping GFWL and leaving only steam, there is a pretty good chance the game will work flawlessly.

    Currently the game is in beta state, you can get a beta license to play RIGHT NOW and help develop the game by clicking here

    If you have tried this and have any tips to make the game run, send me an email at admin@snott.net and I will gladly add your tip to this post and give you full credit for it (please include your OS and computer specs), the idea is to compile every bit of info the Linux community has to offer to make this great game run on Linux.

    The machine I will test this in has the following specs:

    – Intel core 2 duo @ 1.3GHz

    – 4GB of RAM

    – Nvidia Geforce G210m 512mb

    – Archlinux 64 bit

    – 300 GB Hard Drive

    First Off you have to install steam, you can do that by following my guide here, If you already have a working steam installation, then just start downloading the game (remember you need the beta key, you can get the beta key by going here, it’s totally free!).

    If you are interested in knowing if the game will work with your Linux machine before going retail this a prefect time to test, because It wont cost you anything to test, when the game goes retail (price will be $30), of course beta will be no more and you will have to pay for the game.

    Also, I will test the game in 2 ways:

    1- Wine

    2- Crossover games (wine commercial version that makes things a lot easier by automating lots of tasks)

    In short, If you are lazy and have the money get Crossover Games, if you like/want to make things by yourself or don’t want to buy anything, go with wine.

    I submitted the application to the crossover application database, as of now it appears known not to work but having the application listed there would be a good boost for everyone searching ways to make this game work.

    As a rule of thumb, if the game works with crossover games, It will work with wine, but wine will need you to configure all settings and install all required dependencies to make the game work.

    I will also post here all of those dependencies If you want to make things different or want to test something.

    At this point, known dependencies are:

    1) Steam (duh!) check the guide to get a working installation of steam, else nothing will work, steam also has some dependencies on its own (like ttf-ms-fonts) so check the guide now and avoid wtf! moments.

    I tried to launch the game and store the output on a log file, here is what I found that can cause problems:

    003d:err:module:load_builtin_dll failed to load .so lib for builtin L”winemp3.acm”: libmpg123.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

    Apparently, the DLL can’t be found hence the game is unable to launch, that was the only error I got from the output, but there is a lot of stuff on the log file, you can check the log file.

    I found some info on this error, wine is trying to load support for mp3 and didn’t find the file, I installed the wmp9 on this prefix/bottle, but the system still complains.

    Here is what should be done to get this error to disappear, straight from wine hq:

    6.11.4. MP3s do not play in Windows Media Player or applications that depend on it

    For MP3 sound to play out of the box in apps that use the WMP engine and codecs, you must have 32-bit libmpg123 installed on your system and Wine must have been compiled with MP3 support.

    For the more technical ones, here is a more complete log (+seh, +trace, +ntdll). Dow2r Run log

    And a big one with +seh, +trace, +ntdll when I click on the game icon and steam isn’t running. DOW2 Retribution complete Log

  • Fix Firefox crash running Quake Live on ArchLinux

    Fix Firefox crash running Quake Live on ArchLinux

    Quake Live logo

    If you tried to play Quake Live on Arch Linux, you might get this error if you don’t have libpng version 1.2 (run Firefox via terminal to check this)

    libpng warning: Application was compiled with png.h from libpng-1.2.24
    libpng warning: Application  is  running with png.c from libpng-1.4.3
    libpng warning: Incompatible libpng version in application and library

    Terminal will be spammed with this series of warnings and Quake Live wont start or can even make Firefox crash (Screen images don’t load at all and you only see squares).

    The problem here is, as you can tell from the terminal output, the libpng version to compile the software is older than the one arch has installed.

    So, to fix this you have to do two things:

    1) Install the old libpng on arch (available on the AUR)

    sudo yaourt -S libpng12

    2) Tell Firefox to use it on Quake Live page

    Here is the command:

    LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libpng12.so /usr/bin/firefox

    This will load the library and Firefox will open up, then go to the Quake Live page and try a training session to see if it loads correctly.

    If it worked, then you can make the change permanent and automate the process with this command:

    alias quakelive='LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libpng12.so /usr/bin/firefox http://www.quakelive.com'
    

    This way, when you type "quakelive" on the terminal, it will open up Firefox and everything will work right away, no need to remember the previous command.

    Some more tips so you don’t have to search for them:

    – alt+enter makes Quake Live Fullscreen

    – Quake Live supports Firefox ONLY regarding Linux, so don’t bother trying to get another browser to work with Quake Live, but they are working to get other browsers work too (like chrome-chromium). Nevertheless If I find a way to make the game work on chromium (my primary browser) I will put the HOWTO here.