In Which I Try Installing DS on Arch Linux

This will be interesting. I'm not a linux newbie anymore, but I still probably have substantially less linux experience than the average person installing Arch Linux. It was a long enough process just getting Arch set up to begin with and it's still not... where I want it to be (my login manager still isn't working), but after finally having a working PC for the first time in months since a terrifying a power supply failure, I feel like if I don't get a working Creatures install soon I Will Wither Away.

So, time to take a shot at it:

Nazushvel/dstation-2020

A simple installer script for Docking Station (DS), a freeware entry in the Creatures series. If you don't care about features or compatibility and just want the game to run, this may help. It installs hard to find library versions and creates a set of folders for the game.

https://github.com/Nazushvel/dstation-2020

The dstation-2020 script has updated since I last used it, now with support for C3, it appears. I already had my ways of getting C3 working with it, but I may as well try it out and see if it's more painless.

Downloading my Exodus installer from GOG was a hassle in and of itself to find. They're really pushing the galaxy launcher. But I eventually found it going to https://www.gog.com/account, selecting Exodus, and going down to "Download Offline Backup Installers." Yeesh.

The install page claims that "Some distros (Arch 64) have been reported to run the script without any sort of setup beforehand." I feel like this can't possibly be less setup on an Arch install. That would be completely counter to my entire experience with Arch so far. But you know what, just for fun, let's run the script as it is and see what happens.

This requires wget to be installed, please install it for your system

lol, of course.

This requires cpio to be installed, please install it for your system

did that.... and ... well, the install appeared to go smoothly! So I started it:

./dstation-2020: line 235: ./lc2e: No such file or directory

Alright, so the pre-run steps listed in the readme are still required.

The problem is, by my research, is that multiarch doesn't appear to work the same way on Arch that it does on Debian distros, so all the normal pre-run steps are .. not the same.

I found this on the Arch wiki, and followed the steps:

To enable multilib repository, uncomment the [multilib] section in /etc/pacman.conf... Then upgrade the system and install the desired multilib packages. Tip: Run pacman -Sl multilib to list all packages in the multilib repository. 32-bit library package names begin with lib32-.

Uncommenting the multilib section was simple enough, at least. Upgrading was a matter of entering sudo pacman -Syu after reading many, many warnings about all the things that could possibly go wrong when upgrading. Since this is a pretty fresh install, I'm not exceptionally concerned.

Then came the challenge of figuring out what packages I actually needed, since it certainly wasn't the libstdc++6:i386 libgcc1:i386 zlib1g:i386 libncurses5:i386 libxi6:i386 mentioned in the guide.

Installing lib32-gcc-libs changed my error message: ./lc2e: error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

But this is an error I'm used to, at least. I'm not sure why libgtk is a common problem, but luckily I have a libgtk from another install to drop into my dstation folder. In fact, for good measure I just moved all the libs from my old dstation-2020 install over. This is probably not a great thing to do considering I'd like to use this documentation as a guide in the future. But I'm tired. Sorry.

Next error mesage: ./lc2e: error while loading shared libraries: libz.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Research pointed me to install lib32-zlib , so I did, and then libXi.so.6 was missing, found in lib32-libxi and then... it worked!

...Silently, of course.

The terminal was complaining about libcanberra so I installed lib32-libcanberra and then it still complained about libcanberra but it also complained about libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so . Some research told me lib32-alsa-lib contained libasound, but installing that did not change the error. I also installed lib32-canberra-pulse . Nothing changed.

Installed lib32-alsa-plugins annnnd! There's sound! It's extremely loud! And I don't have a GUI soundmixer installed!

(And it's still complaining about libcanberra, so maybe that canberra stuff didn't do anything at all, I dunno)

But wow, that actually took way less time than expected!

Now I just have to set up jedit and my entire development flow again... but I'm excited. I missed this!

Oh, though, this script doesn't look like it did anything with C3 at all. Whoops, I might have missed an error during the install process, assuming it tried at all. No worries, I can copy my old setup over easily enough.