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: [code language=“bash”] md5sum shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz_2.0.9.zip [/code] 2. Unzip the downloaded file: [code language=“bash”] unzip shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz_2.0.9.zip [/code] 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: [code language=“bash”] mv ~/Downloads/shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz ~/Games/ [/code] 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. [code language=“bash”] tar xf shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz [/code] 5. Run the game. This probably won’t work the first time; see the appropriate section below to install required packages on your system. [code language=“bash”] ~/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 [/code] 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: [code language=“bash”] sudo apt-get install libxcursor1:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386 [/code] 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.
Running Unity games via Steam in Linux
There seems to be a lot of confusion about how to run games built on the Unity engine distributed by Steam on a Linux system. I recently solved this problem after backing the promising survival sandbox game Planet Nomads on Kickstarter. Here is how to configure an Ubuntu Linux system and launch Planet Nomads successfully.
Prerequisites
If you have an Nvidia card, you must download and install the official proprietary drivers provided by Nvidia. I could not get Unity to launch with the open-source drivers. Once I installed the proprietary (closed source) drivers, I was able to launch Planet Nomads from the Steam application.