How to run Shadowrun: Dragonfall on Ubuntu Linux

I’m very happy that Harebrained Schemes chose to release its Shadowrun game series (Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and Shadowrun: Hong Kong) for Linux. It can be a little difficult to get this stuff running on Linux. In this post, I will explain the errors you may see when trying to run Shadowrun on Linux.

Installation Procedure

I purchased and downloaded Shadowrun:Dragonfall on sale from Humble Bundle.
1. Verify file integrity. The md5 checksum is provided on Humble’s download page-check the output from this command against what Humble provides. This is how you make sure that you aren’t installing a corrupted or infected application on your system:

md5sum shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz_2.0.9.zip

2. Unzip the downloaded file:

unzip shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz_2.0.9.zip


3. Move the unzipped file (shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz) to wherever you want to install it. I put it in a subdirectory called “Games” in my home directory:

mv ~/Downloads/shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz ~/Games/

4. Unpack the TAR archive. Note that there is a minor error on the part of the developers or Humble; the file you get after unzipping has the wrong file extension, so you have to use a different command than you normally would. The file should be called “shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar” because it’s not compressed with gzip.

tar xf shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz

5. Run the game. This probably won’t work the first time; see the appropriate section below to install required packages on your system.

~/Games/Shadowrun\ Dragonfall/Dragonfall
Dragonfall: error while loading shared libraries: libGLU.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
It seems Shadowrun Dragonfall has exited unsuccessfully (error = 127).
Please verify that you have the latest drivers installed before filing a bug report here:
   http://harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/bug-reports

6. Install required packages on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) 64-bit (x86_64). Shadowrun is a 32-bit game, but it runs on 64-bit Ubuntu because of Ubuntu/Debian’s multilib feature. You just need to install two specific 32-bit libraries that probably aren’t on your system by default:

sudo apt-get install libxcursor1:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386

You also need the appropriate graphics card drivers for your hardware. I have an Nvidia card and I use the proprietary drivers available directly from Nvidia (not the open-source version, which has caused problems for me with other games).
If you had to do something differently on another version of Ubuntu, please leave a comment below.

4 thoughts on “How to run Shadowrun: Dragonfall on Ubuntu Linux”

  1. [ Smiles ] Even though I am a hardcore Linux user, I have never played any sort of games on Linux (And, that is mainly because I am not a gamer).
    Your tutorial on how to run Shadowrun on Linux is going to be most helpful to those people whose desire it is to play that game on Ubuntu Linux.
    I am curious, have you tried running it on Steam or Play On Linux?

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