GOG have finally launched Linux support

[Daerandin]

GOG for Linux

Their initial selection of Linux games is rather small at the moment, but they will be increasing it with time.

There seem to be native Linux games as well as DosBox games in the titles available. You can download an installer that should work on Ubuntu and Mint, but they also offer tarballs for other distros.

I will try out some of the games this weekend and see how they've made it work.

 

[booman]

I can confirm that if your already purchased games will include the Linux version.
I am downloading Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition for Linux right now

 

[Daerandin]

I just tested the Linux version of Legend of Grimrock on GOG. I used the tar archive available, simply untar it and then run the start.sh script to play the game.

In case you experience issues with the game, the listed dependencies on the GOG page is probably a good indication of what packages you may need in order to play the game. However, I've not had any problems with my tests so far, everything running great.

Another cool thing is that I can make custom shortcuts on my panel for all GOG Linux games that simply launch the start script.

 

[booman]

I rarely have problems with native Linux games. Normally you just download the compressed file, extract then double-click an executable. Normally they will be .sh or no extension at all. Just the name of the game.
A few times I've had to

sudo chown

or

sudo chmod 777

an executable.

The one game I've had the most problems with is Overgrowth.
I could never get it installed. I searched their forums over and over
I eventually found that you had to open the file with

bash

Strange because none of the other games required a bash command.

I've had a few strange problems with LinSteam where I had to

sudo chmod 777

The games executable in the SteamApps/Common folder
Otherwise it wouldn't launch.... but I havn't had that problem recently.

 

[Daerandin]

chmod 777 make the file executable for everyone, owner, group and everyone else. chown (usually followed by the name of your user) will make your user the owner of the file in question.

If you open such a start script with a text editor, you will ordinarily find that the first line usually say:

#! /bin/bash

That indicates that this is a bash script, so when it is executed, it is immediately recognized as a bash script. If that line is missing then it is just a bad job of whoever wrote the startup script since this makes it difficult for your system to know what exactly it is supposed to do when executing the file. So running it with bash first means you simply ensure your system execute the file as a bash script.

 

[booman]

Ah, so maybe they made the executable so you have to run it with bash

 

[allenskd]

I'm waiting for The Witcher 2 to become available on GOG for me to download... I do hope they improve their wrapper to be better than WINE because so far it seems they have messed it up.

Interestingly enough:

GOG is including WINE for some of its old game. I mention this because I read booman's comment yesterday in reddit's linux gaming. (I find PortMyApps to be pretty useless... that's my initial take on it) Anyway, going back to GOG topic, if you take a deeper look into their ".shlib" files you'll see that there are functions that load WINE.

Note that this is actually good in a way because it makes it so much easier to install (old) games!

 

[booman]

I didn't know GOG already uses Wine wrappers for some of their games! How awesome is that?
I wonder how the license works with selling a Wine wrapper? I know its open-source, but isn't there something GOG would have to do so they could sell it?

I think PortMyApps is for a specific niche in game development. I'm impressed at the scope of work PlayOnLinux developers are doing to push Linux Gaming. Obviously this is experimental, but if it blows up, I'm sure they will develop it even more.

 

[allenskd]

It also supports DosBox by the way

Here's the ouput

# david at debianbox in ~ [18:05:23]
$ cat "/opt/GOG Games/Long Live The Queen/support/gog_com.shlib" | grep -n -B 1  wine
264-
265:run_wine() {
--
271-  echo "WINEPREFIX="$WINEPREFIX
272:  "${CURRENT_DIR}/wine_standalone/wine" "${game_path}" "${executable}" "${args}"
--
308-
309:wine_export() {
--
311-  echo "LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
312:  export WINEDLLPATH="$CURRENT_DIR/lib/wine"
--
315-  echo "WINEDEBUG="$WINEDEBUG
316:  export WINELOADER="$CURRENT_DIR/bin/wine"

And DosBox

# david at debianbox in ~ [18:05:24]
$ cat "/opt/GOG Games/Long Live The Queen/support/gog_com.shlib" | grep -n -B 1  dosbox
250-
251:run_dosbox() {
--
253-  local conf_2="${2}"
254: ./dosbox/dosbox -conf "${conf_1}" -conf "${conf_2}"  -no-console -c exit

I'll hold my judgement on PoL. I think you and Daerandin knows that my feelings for PoL aren't that good. Especially with its GUI.