Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General What sort of linux installer can we expect?

I'm currently usign Arch Linux, and I'm worried about what sort of installer each of the ditrobutions methods will be using. Steam will be using their typical installer, but what about the Laurian Vault and GOG.com. My preference is to get this game through GOG.com since I already have every single one of the Divinity games there and kind of would like to complete the collection. However if they are using debs, which I would suspect, that would be troubelsome for me.

The alternative is the Laurian Vault, which I suspect Larian will have a lot of control over. Will there be a shell installer?

[edit] Of course the Source code would be nice (so we aren't Hunting for it).

I'm sorry to bump this, but I figure its kind of important that I know before I commit to one of the three.

Maybe email support@larian.com, though they may not know what type of installer they will be using yet. If you backed on kickstarter, you can ask what the deadline is for choosing the distribution method (assuming you were planning on waiting for the Linux version).

Thank you, I'll do just as you suggested and contact Larian support. I did back the kickstarter, and figure I need to make a decision before June 30th.

Installers aren't typically used on GNU/Linux (only by companies that don't understand what they're doing on that platform, actually). A simple tarball should do fine (and would make it easy for distro's to roll their own packages)

Well java has an installer

Euhm, it doesn't? Not on Linux anyway (I see a choice of a tarball and a rpm-file on the Java site). Netbeans has one though and the only thing it does is make you accept an EULA and then extract the thing to the specified folder, easier and faster with just "tar"...

Also Oracle is a pretty good example of a company that doesn't get it (see the Open/LibreOffice split, the Hudson/Jenkins split,...)

There is absolutely no way its going to be a tarbar. That would imply that we will be given the source code. Larian won't be giving out the source code. As amazing as that might be, there is a greater chance of being invited to a My Little Pony birthday party by Damien where you get bitch-slapped by the Divine himself for not bringing the cake.

Linux has installers: .run, .deb, .rpm, .sh. Ring any bells. Deb and rpm are distro specific, and I'm hoping they won't be the only option.

Wrong and tbh it sounds like you're new to GNU/Linux. Tarballs don't necessarily contain sourcecode (a tarball is just a tar archive after all, it can contain *anything*). Java, for example is distributed as a tarball.

Linux isn't like Windows where you have to dump stuff in the registry and place dll's in system folders and all that crap, just providing an compressed version of the installed application should be enough assuming it's sanely built.



Most of those are *packages* not installers and they generally use something like a tarball internally anyway. It's pretty easy to reverse engineer an rpm into a tarball (and generate an rpm from a tarball. Well, depending on how well the application is packaged in the first place)

".sh" doesn't even belong in that list as it's an extension generally reserved for shell scripts (though it is sometimes abused for binary installers, IBM likes to do this iirc)

EDIT: typos.

I've been using Linux for 9 years. I'm using a minimalistic ditro (the live CD is just a very basic command line, and doesn't even have an installer; aside from copying the OS from the server to HDD, everything is done manually from command line). I don't have Windows installed. I am quite familiar with Linux. Also, I know what "sh" is. I've written shell scripts before. I also know that they are often used for distro-agnostic installers, and its not just IBM that uses them.

I think you are are using the term "install" a bit narrowly. Simply copying programs into place is an installation process. Package files are installers. They contain the files to run the program, and instructions for the package manager to follow in order to make sure everything ends up in the right place, and all configuration are set. If that isn't what an installer does, then please, tell me what an installer really is.

I know you can go from deb --> tarbar, and I've read guides to do so thinking I would need to (luckily I did not need to), though I would like to avoid that if possible. I'm much fonder of the idea of running sh DOS.sh as opposed to tearing apart a deb.

Also, I have only twice encountered a tarball that didn't follow the extract --> config --> make --> make install paradigm. The two were Rochard from a Humble Bundle and par2-tbb (the later of which was surprising as I would have expected that to be compiled for each machine).

Newbie (I kid I kid :P)



My first "real" Linux distribution was Red Hat 6.0, released in 1999 (and I held off on buying 5.2 for the release of 6.0). I've been (mainly) using Gentoo since 2002 (though running and dealing with various other flavors over the years).



Probably not, but I do remember them from IBM, their main use was forcing users to agree to an EULA, other than that they served no real purpose as they generally (in like 80% of the cases) just extract everything to whatever directory you point them to (or just to the pwd).



No, an installer is a standalone program, a package requires a package manager to be of use. There's a very clear distinction, the former is almost never useful on Linux, the latter is used everywhere.



You are failing to make the distinction between a source tarball and a regular tarball, a tarball is just a fancy name for a tar-file. When dealing with open source software you'll indeed generally get a source tarball nowadays, but back in the day *cough* most projects provided binary tarballs as well, keep in mind that back then there was basically just RPM (which sucked back then) and apt, both only used in their own distros, nowadays most distros provide their own builds for open source projects. But a lot of commercial software or "big" open source projects are still available as binary tarballs, Java is an example I already gave and the same goes for IntelliJ and Eclipse as well as, for example, Emacs.

The problem here is that for something like a game extracting the game is about as much installing as you have to do. There shouldn't be any shared libraries or anything that need to be accessible from the rest of the system (in fact, there better not be). The only "complex" things a game installer might want to do are:
1) extracting compressed resources
2) compiling a wrapper executable that adapts to the installed system.
3) possibly create shortcuts in various desktop environments

But the main reason to avoid making packages is that they're distro dependant and on top of that they're usually dependent on the version of the distro as well. If you provide a tarball then the community will generally take care of creating the packages for various flavors of Linux and keep them up-to-date in the future, if you provide some installer then you sometimes have to be lucky that it doesn't just break a few years down the line (happend to me to some commercial IDEs installer, it was a real pain to work around) and if you only provide distro specific packages you'll annoy users of other distros that now have write scripts to pick apart the package for some other distro to be able to generate one for theirs.

My main point is that a tarball is a neutral starting ground from which you can generate all other things: packages and installers. So providing your software as a simple tar file is convenient for everyone down the line.

Is the linux version delayed? It doesn't appear under the SteamOS + Linux tab on steam.

And that is something I won't argue with.



They intend on waiting to polish up the Windows and Mac versions first, which really makes a lot of sense. I don't know about you, but I'm one of the few gamers that doesn't duel-boot or have some sort of fancy hardware pass through. i doubt there are too many of us, so really a Linux version is just a nice thing Larian is doing. Well, that and it gets the game of SteamOS, which probably isn't going anywhere.

[edit] Luckily it seems to work pretty well in Wine, though when I tried playing Co-op with my brother it did crash. We haven't had a chance to trouble shoot the issue, and only tried once.

I see. Thank you.
I do keep a windows partition on my HD. Wine has always been more trouble than it's worth for me.

Wine has come a long way, and CodeWeaver's CrossOver Linux is quite good, and when it works, it works with minimal fuss. I'd give it a try.

I don't know if it is a case of specifically wanting to patch the Mac version first, but it is the same group of people doing the Mac version that will be doing the Linux version.

Is there a release date for the linux version?

I pretend to buy the game after the linux release.

No, there has been no estimate given for the Linux release.