rtwx

Installing Lutris

I had heard Lutris was the latest hotness for gaming on Linux, so proceeded to the website to find out how to install it.

I am trying out Kubuntu 18.04, because I hadn't tried KDE before and the screenshots looked okay. I admit I'm a bit DE agnostic; oh well.

I copied the first line into my terminal... and got an error. Well of course I did. Did I really expect it to just work?

I'm no expert coder*, but it appears that ver=$(lsb_release -sr); if [ $ver != "18.04" -a $ver != "17.10" -a $ver != "17.04" -a $ver != "16.04" ]; then ver=18.04; fi is simply saying that 14.04/etc should all use 18.04 where $ver is in the following commands.

So the next line, I copied into my terminal, but where it said $ver I put 18.04 instead. Yay, that step now worked!

The third step to add the key worked as advertised. So that was nice.

Then apt update and apt install lutris, and now I have Lutris in the launcher to click on and... oh, I have to install a game I suppose.

Installing Guild Wars 2

I opened Lutris, created an account (this annoys me a little, as that should not be necessary), and selected “Browsing Lutris.net for games to install”. This did nothing, so I went back to the Lutris website and searched for Guild Wars 2, clicked the link that loaded which opened the page for the game. I scrolled down the page to “WINE 64 bit” and clicked install. Easy!

Wrong.

The address wasn’t understood Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because one of the following protocols (lutris) isn’t associated with any program or is not allowed in this context. You might need to install other software to open this address.

But of course.

Did some quick DuckDuckGo-ing and found this forum thread which contained this useful post:

What worked for me was adding a boolean to about:config (right click and select New > Boolean) named network.protocol-handler.expose.lutris setting it to false. Then when I tried to install a game Firefox asked me what application to use and I set it to lutris.

So I return to the Lutris Guild Wars 2 page, and click install again. Yay! It prompts me for which program to use!

Oh wait – I don't know where Lutris is installed...

So I open the Application Launcher, start typing Lutris to bring it up, the right click Lutris and select Edit Application. A window opens, which shows the application location to be /usr/share/applications. Alright, so now in the Firefox pop-up to select which program to run, I navigate to /usr/bin and select lutris (because I'm an idiot and that's where I found it first – unsure if the application path above is better or the same?).

Now I OK Lutris option in the Firefox popup, and at last Lutris prompts for install version and location! I OK the defaults (64bit, ~/Games/guild-wars-2) and let it do it's thing. Downloading https://lutris.net/files/runners/wine-esync-3.13-x86_64.tar.gz Well okay then. I wait.

After downloading, WINE pops up and says it can't find a couple of things. I let it install them.

Once that is done, it prompts to ask if you want to set up an application launcher shortcut and a desktop shortcut. Select as you wish (you can launch from inside Lutris also), and launch Guild Wars 2! The Launcher will update and launch, then will start downloading the game. I cheated as I dualboot, and copied from my Windows partition to the GW2 directory in ~/Games.

It runs surprisingly well, I tested on my laptop which is an i5-6200U with integrated intel gfx, and it is very marginal. I drop approx 5-10fps over running on windows with the same machine, which unfortunately as it's borderline in Windows makes it a bit frustrating for myself. On a remotely gaming spec rig it'll run amazingly I'd say, so give it a go!

~rtwx~

*I'm not a coder at all actually, just in case you didn't pick that up.