Daggerfall Installer for Linux

Taemos · **Posted:** Tue Jan 31, 2017 6:40 am

Hi all,

I've been working on a DaggerfallSetup equivalent for GNU/Linux on and off for a few weeks. Depending on the user's selection, it will check for a DOSBox installation, install DOSBox from your distributions repository if it's not found (assuming you're using either apt, yum, or zypper package managers), create a custom DOSBox config and a desktop shortcut. A few people have helpfully tested but I figure I'd open it up to a wider audience in case others may find it useful. It's not perfect but it's in working order, and if it turns out that people use it I can try to add more to it (Andyfall, Daedrafall, translations, etc.). Mods, I've read the rules and didn't see anything that would prohibit a thread of this nature but please correct me if I'm wrong.

With all that being said...

Features (taken from the DaggerfallSetup page and modified as necessary):

Additional features:

The original thread is over at the Daggerfall Workshop forums. You can find the link to the installer there, since it doesn't appear that I can post links here. If you use it, please let me know what you think or if you run into any problems.

MetaCthulhu · **Posted:** Tue Jan 31, 2017 5:19 pm

(Here's the link to the original workshop thread: http://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=409)

I'll install it in a virtual machine and see how it goes. Just run it normally right, no need for sudo?

Taemos · **Posted:** Tue Jan 31, 2017 7:53 pm

Right. It should actually fail if you try to run it with sudo/root privileges. "sh ~/Downloads/filename" should do the trick, assuming it's in your Downloads directory.

MetaCthulhu · **Posted:** Wed Feb 01, 2017 9:27 pm

Worked really well for me in a virtual machine (Mint KDE). Thank you for doing this.

Taemos · **Posted:** Sun Feb 05, 2017 7:43 pm

Cool, thanks for testing.

I took another look at Daedrafall, and it looks like the installer needs a Win32 environment for whatever reason. I'll probably have to do an install, grab the modified files and add them to the archive. This is on the backburner for now. I'll also be adding an option to keep your saved games during an uninstall. Translations are probably going to be going in next assuming it isn't a huge hassle to add them.

The script is also easily adapted to Arena; I've just been too lazy to package and upload it.

Anyway, I'm glad it seems to be working for you. If anyone has any constructive feedback I'm open to it, but other than what I've outlined in this post I'll probably quit working on this soon.

Crawldragon · **Posted:** Mon Feb 06, 2017 4:13 am

mmkay, I gave it a go. Normally I'm the kind of person who prefers to kind of slap things together myself, so when initially I tried to get Daggerfall running on my Debian virtual box I just installed DOSBox myself and imported Daggerfall over to it, but for reasons entirely unknown to me I couldn't get it working.

Fortunately your script worked, and not to toot my own horn or anything but I consider that kind of an acid test because it worked pretty well despite the fact that I threw my virtual machine together with Openbox rather than installing an actual desktop environment like LXDE or Gnome. It's a pretty minimalist system. I do have a desktop, which I use PCManFM for, and it did successfully create a desktop shortcut. The shortcut doesn't work, however, probably because I haven't yet taught PCManFM how to do anything. Not a big deal, though, because I'm used to just doing everything through the command line anyway.

But yeah, despite the fact that I couldn't get it working myself your script did the job beautifully. I haven't tested it very extensively, but it works really smoothly actually and I was able to get other games working with the resulting DOSBox installation, so I'd consider that a success.

The only thing is, did you write the readme files yourself? I presume that you didn't, because they're in different formats, but if you did then I would advise you to limit each line in the files to 79 or 80 characters long. This is because people like me are using vi or something to read them, and when those kinds of programs do line-wrapping they make it a pain in the arse to read the paragraphs. But so far that's my only complaint.

I'mma see if I can get an actual Linux installation working on one of my hard drives in the real world and get back to you on how this script does with that, but I like it so far. Kudos.

Taemos · **Posted:** Mon Feb 20, 2017 3:45 pm

Thanks for testing it! I'm glad it's been pretty robust, as it did not start out that way (none of these types of things do, I suppose).

I'm not trying to cover compatibility with every distribution/desktop environment/window manager/etc as that would be entirely too much effort for too little payoff (and perhaps impossible, anyway). I figure anyone who can install and customize something like Arch/Gentoo/Slackware can figure this out on their own. The installer would still work for a patched Daggerfall install, it's just that the desktop shortcut may not work. Even that may be a quick fix that I just haven't had the time to look into. Long story short, this was mostly aimed at the Ubuntu crowd. Of course, I wanted good compatibility and I'm happy it's working for other distributions as well.

I didn't write the readme files myself, and I actually need to go over that part of the script again to make sure I'm not missing any. If you're viewing the files in vi(m), you should be able to input ":set columns=80" to squish the text into something more readable, or put that in your .vimrc to make it more permanent (obviously will affect other files, as well).

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