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Comment by Inufu | Hacker News Reader

Could you detail the problems you had? IIRC everything worked for my on Ubuntu 64bit.

No docs at all; some of the games refused to start and after some research playing with ldd and some guessing I found I had to install 32bits libraries (the 64bits version -when available- didn't work either, I don't remember why).

After that, it looked like my graphics card wasn't properly supported and I didn't know it before buying the bundle (again: no docs at all!). I've played some OpenGL games without problems, but I know that kind of thing sometimes happens.

I was happy to contribute, but after all the efforts I couldn't enjoy the games and I got the feeling that Linux support was really bad :(

Yeah, the Linux ports often are written specifically so that the game can participate in the bundle and have not been widely tested prior to release. Most of the developers do not appear intimately familiar with *nix convention and create confusing launch processes, etc. Crayon Physics Deluxe, for instance, had binaries crayon and launcher, and if you tried to launch crayon directly you'd get many more complaints than otherwise (since supposedly launcher tested for various libs and then called crayon with the right options to work with the installed envrionment).

Ryan Gordon is contracted to port several of the games and has bug trackers on his site icculus.org.

Most of the problems with Linux versions get worked out in the first few weeks, though, it just requires a bit of patience, and the HIB is one of the best points of reference Linux gamers have to demonstrate that they're willing to pay for commercial games in order to encourage further development.

> [...] and the HIB is one of the best points of reference Linux gamers have to demonstrate that they're willing to pay for commercial games in order to encourage further development.

And that's why I was happy to contribute, although I didn't have any fun doing it!

> Crayon Physics Deluxe, for instance, had binaries crayon and launcher, and if you tried to launch crayon directly you'd get many more complaints than otherwise

Last I checked, Firefox did the same thing :p

Firefox follows a convention where the actual binary is firefox-bin and launcher is just firefox. Lots of other nix apps do this, especially statically linked apps. If I had seen crayon-bin and crayon, I would have tried crayon first; however, I just read the ls until crayon and launched that directly, only seeing launcher on second examination. I know that you're not supposed to launch x-bin directly, it usually has a launcher script named just x.

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