Myth II on Linux experience

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The Baron
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Joined: Sat Oct 20, 2012 11:34 pm

Myth II on Linux experience

Post by The Baron »

You guys did amazing job with this I'm so psyched to have this on my netbook! Thank you so much!!!

That said, I had a few issues in getting it all set up and so I thought I would share...

I would formerly play the game on Mac, and what I did there was use Disk Utility to create a disk image file (*.img) so I could just mount that on the desktop and Myth II would be happy and not pester me to insert the CD. This was a long time ago.

I figured I could just burn that to a CD-R and then use that to do the Linux install, and you can, but there's a trick... you first have to use Disk Utility to "convert" it. Turns out these *.img files are a really ancient format. Wasted about a half day trying to figure this out... it let's you burn the CD from the older img file format but Linux won't recognize it, at all. Do the "convert" and then it works great on Linux.

In fact, you don't even need to burn the CD if you did it my way, you can just copy the converted image file over to Linux and then mount it using:

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mount MythII.cdr /media/cdrom -o loop
Oh yeah, and it does have to be /media/cdrom that you mount to, that's what the installer is looking for.

After it installs you might have permission problems. I installed it as root and then was so sad to see I couldn't play it cause it was complaining about missing tags. But I just installed the tags! GHOLS!!! Well no, it isn't ghols, it's because the tags only allow the user who did the install to read them you see. So either install as the user who will be playing, or use chown/chmod on them (or even the whole directory) so you can read the tags.

On a 64-bit system you'll probably have issues with getting SDL to work. propagandhi's comment here fixed this for me, to repeat...

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emerge emul-linux-x86-sdl
(that's for Gentoo, do whatever you need for your distro to get that on your box)

A couple of further points, but only applicable for certain installations. I play on a netbook, using the trackpad for selecting units and doing gestures. My trackpad has two buttons that of course work fine for left-click and right-click, but that's a bother (it's a cheap netbook, and they're clunky buttons and not positioned all that well).

You can do it all just using the trackpad alone. Assuming you have the synaptics driver installed and properly configured in your xorg.conf file (or xorg.conf.d directory), you can issue the following command:

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synclient LockedDrags=0 LockedDragTimeout=100 TapAndDragGesture=1
This makes it so that a quick tap and drag on the ground moves a unit and faces him in the direction of the drag, and then longer drags do the selection rectangle as usual. In fact, I'm very happy with how this worked out, cause I would use to have various issues with this on Mac and Windows doing this, but on Linux it works brilliantly.

And of course, these settings aren't good for everything I do on the netbook so I just put together a short script that does the synclient stuff and then executes the game client and it's like I'm one of these computer scientist dudes you read about in the paper.

The other thing is, I'm using ratpoison as my window manager. In ratpoison, everything is full screen (the way it should be! :) ) but I was initially disturbed to find that the usual prefix keys that allow you access to the window manager commands were being filtered by Myth II. What you do in this case is select windowed mode! Since it's ratpoison and forces everything to be fullscreen, you're still playing fullscreen, but now your prefix keys go through to the window manager, which was a great relief to see.

So wow, I'm just ecstatic over this setup... my favorite game ever, you guys did a beautiful job with it and I just couldn't be happier! Who says Linux isn't for gaming? I'm playing Myth II baby...
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Pyro
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Re: Myth II on Linux experience

Post by Pyro »

The Baron wrote:...what I did there was use Disk Utility to create a disk image file (*.img) so I could just mount that on the desktop and Myth II would be happy and not pester me to insert the CD.
If you updated Myth2, you don't need a CD mounted to play the game. That got taken out many years ago.
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Melekor
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Re: Myth II on Linux experience

Post by Melekor »

Thanks for sharing your experience - great to hear people are enjoying the Linux build :)
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