(Ubuntu) Linux Support Thread

[Electroshokker]

In order to prevent forum clutter and you having to search any and all threads to find answers, I'll try to bundle all important Q&A regarding to playing AGS under (Ubuntu) Linux here.

Running AGS games with WINE

Install WINE. Put the ags game somewhere on the fake C: drive (preferably, not necessary). Run the exe's with WineLoader. (Double-clicking them should also work)

Running AGS games with the native port

Check out these threads: AGS 2.72, AGS 3.12

Running the AGS windows editor with WINE

See this thread if you want to give this a try. I cannot guarantee a fully stable editor.

Porting the AGS Editor to Mono so it will run natively

Mono is now able to run all the C# parts of the editor, but unfortunately because the editor also relies on a Windows C++ DLL (AGS.Native.DLL), it cannot run in Mono at the moment.

At some point in the future I might port all that code over to C#, but it's really not high on the priority list right now.

I'll add that I would love to help Chris in this endeavor, but I'm struggling to find time as it is. If this changes in the future, it's next on my TODO list after maintaining the Linux builds.

I'm experiencing sound stutter in Ubuntu Linux

Kill the pulseaudio server. This solves tons of problems:

Code: ags

ps -aeww | grep pulseaudio

this gets you the pid number example:

Code: ags

3123 ?        00:00:11 pulseaudio

Code: ags

sudo kill -9 3123

Go to system -> preferences -> sound, and change the sound mixer.
Example: from HDA Nvidia (Alsa Mixer) to Realtek ALC888 (OSS Mixer)

(This drove me crazy in some non-AGS games. Haven't experienced it in AGS games yet, but just throught I'd mention it just in case. This might actually resolve some other sound issues as well)

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Any and all comments or suggestions, questions and answers that should be listed here, are appreciated.

[Dixon]

Would it be possible to run this on the arm-derivative of Ubuntu? I'm fairly new to linux and I've pre-orderd a Pandora (http://www.open-pandora.org/) and it would be amazing if it would work on a handheld device.

If I have understand everything correct it would be possible if the libraries that are needed is available for ubuntu-arm. So which libraries do I need?

[xenogia]

It would be wonderful if there was different builds for different platforms. 

[RickJ]

I think people would volunteer to do builds for their favorite platforms but I think there are issues that would require more porting effort specific to each platform which is beyond the scope of our current one person team.   

[Snake]

Hey there.

Hopefully I'm replying/posting in the right place...

AGS games run perfectly for me using WINE (on Ubuntu 9.10), though the MIDI does not. Is there any way to get it working?

[HeirOfNorton]

Some of my experiences (and issues found) trying to get this working on Arch Linux x86_64...

As I stated in a previous post, most of the library dependencies are no problem at all. The lib32 versions of nearly everything are available in the standard repos or AUR, though it is a bit of a pain figuring out what they all are using ldd. One of these days I'll probably to a PKGBUILD to automatically get all of 'em. The only libraries that ARE a problem are Allegro and Dumb. Arch has moved on to Allegro 4.4, and AGS still expect 4.2. However, the copies included with AGS312 seem to work fine, mostly. More on that in a sec. Dumb (specifically libdumb.so and libaldmb.so) are another issue. The Dumb maintainers suggest building Dumb as a static library, and the Arch folks appear to follow that advice. As such there is no .so library to link to. As I stated before, the versions of these libs from Ubuntu appear to work with no trouble. (Perhaps later I shall try to build them for Arch myself.)

Onto the odd issues. I tried both Ags 3.1.2 SP1 and 2.72 RC2, as well as EvilTypeGuy's builds of 2.72 and 2.62 (just 'cause). So far all of these tests are just with a few minutes of 5 Days a Stranger, so I'm not sure how universal they are. 2.72 RC2 appears to work flawlessly. There is no fading screen, but otherwise no problem. 3.1.2 SP1 works fine in fullscreen, except for the known fading issue. I had trouble with it windowed. The intro of the game worked, but as soon as I clicked the 'start' button the program exited with a segfault. The actual error message:

Shutting down Allegro due to signal #11

Any ideas?

The patched version of 3.1.2 would not even start. It gave me this error message:

symbol lookup error: /opt/lib32/usr/lib/liballeg.so.4.2: undefined symbol: _blender_trans24

This is using the copy of liballeg.so.4.2 that is packaged with the AGS runtime. Both of ETG's builds I tried gave the exact same error message. Could this be clue to the origin of the fading bug?

A quick glance around teh internets suggests these two errors may be related, and that they probably have to do with how Allegro was linked. It may simply be incompatibility with Allegro and my system libs, but I don't know how to tell for sure. 

Anyway, that's how it's working so far. Will update with any other interesting tidbits.

HoN

[xenogia]

Hey there.

Hopefully I'm replying/posting in the right place...

AGS games run perfectly for me using WINE (on Ubuntu 9.10), though the MIDI does not. Is there any way to get it working?

You can install an application called Timidity and load a soundfont.  This would resolve that problem.

[Electroshokker]

Haven't had time to work on the Linux build in a while. Kinda got away from me when I got a new pc (along with a widescreen monitor) and my project files got lost somewhere on my hard disks.

I'm setting up a nice, clean dev environment using VM's (atm only Ubuntu 32-bit), on which I'll rebuild AGS 2.72 & 3.1.2 SP1 using static libraries (Allegro, Dumb, ...)
This should resolve some of the problems you're experiencing. (In particular the nasty undefined symbol: _blender_trans24 error, which is due to me compiling against the wrong version of allegro at some point)

I managed to locate my old project files, so it shouldn't take too long to set up. (Just have to dig through the garbage and figure out which are the latest proper files) 

signal #11 means a critical error, possibly (and quite probably) related to AGS trying to play a video file but not finding the required (32-bit) gstreamer libraries and/or plugins. I'll look into clearing up the error messages so they'll be more human readable.

I'll also look into the other requests people have been making.

[strazer]

The threads have been merged, please continue discussion here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=37968