Linux Noob looking for help

[Marty McFly]

Hello fellas,
i have recently tried to install a game with an external CD-drive (cause i still have a lot of CD's laying around). i have used q4wine to open the setup.exe from the CD but than "Binary 'file///run/user/1000/doc/f628f622/setup.exe' does not exist" came up. Any ideas?

[Haruspex]

Which game? Lutris[lutris.net] may be what you're looking for, depending.

[tfk]

Yes, highly recommend Lutris as it has many installer scripts for older disc based games.

[Marty McFly]

Thank you for the help so far. Its about Alien vs Predator 2 and i tried now to install it with Lutris via Install Win game from media. When Lutris wants me to browse for the setup file and i select the one on the CD, i get "[Error 30] Read only file system '/run/media/deck/Disk1/setup.exe".

[tfk]

Hm. Tried this with Command and Conquer Red Alert as a mounted iso file and that works...

[retrogunner]

You should try your AvP2 key on Steam.

Did you know some of the old CD games have serial numbers you can enter in to Steam as an Activation Key to get the Steam copy too? for real. It's how I got my Doom3 (OG) and other.

[tfk]

Does this path exist when the CD is mounted?

/run/user/1000/

When I mount a CD or ISO it usually ends up in a path like this:

/run/media/<username>/<cd-label>/
#or
/run/media/deck/<cd-label>/

[Marty McFly]

Sorry for late reply, had some busy weeks.

Originally posted by retrogunner:

You should try your AvP2 key on Steam.

Did you know some of the old CD games have serial numbers you can enter in to Steam as an Activation Key to get the Steam copy too? for real. It's how I got my Doom3 (OG) and other.

I tried but it doesn't work for me, probably because AvP2 is not avaliable on Steam.

Originally posted by tfk:

Does this path exist when the CD is mounted?

/run/user/1000/

When I mount a CD or ISO it usually ends up in a path like this:

/run/media/<username>/<cd-label>/
#or
/run/media/deck/<cd-label>/

Yes, that path exists and i can open it.

[tfk]

I think it is permissions. The fact that it refers to /run/user/1000 instead of /run/media/Disk1 makes me think that. I would use the FlatSeal app to add the /run/media path to the file system permissions.

[Marty McFly]

I downloaded FlatSeal, how do i add the path?

[tfk]

Open FlatSeal, choose your app, scroll down to file system, add the path you need. Its the little folder with the plus sign in it.

[thetargos]

Seems that for that particular game you may be stumbling into a copy protection measure on the optical media. My suggestion would be (it cold be a chore given you have limited input for text on the Steam Deck), drop to Desktop mode, and install the game as per your method by dumping the game to CD image and mountin the image.

Then create a unique prefix for the game with your preferred wine manager, or even proton manually (for example, for simplicity's sake of showing it schematically, I'll use Proton as per its default path):

mkdir -p /home/deck/games/avp2

The above code will create the inteded directory games/avp2, even if "games" does not exist. You can then create the "prefix" using the wine portion of Proton 8, for instance (you can use ANY version of proton as long as you know its installed path):

WINEPREFIX="/home/deck/games/avp2" WINEARCH=win32 ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton\ 8.0/dist/bin/wine winecfg

This will open the Wine Config window, where you can set the Windows version the prefix will be set as (I'd recommend using XP or 7 for this particular game, though it may work just fine with the default 10 setting). The '~/' bit translates in the shell to /home/deck, you cannot use that in the WINEARCH as it requires full paths as its arguments, you can use the variable $HOME, though which has the same effect (evaluates to the home directory of the current user for the shell).

Important The above code will create a 32-bit prefix for this game, while in modern systems a 64-bit environment should not pose a problem, if you DO encounter a problem, you can force the prefix to be 32-bits. In my experience wine gracefully handles win32 applications. Alas some distributions can require this, I trust it is not an issue on the Deck, though. Still I add this for completeness sake, if anyone extrapolates to other Linux systems.

Assuming the game image is mounted in /run/media/deck/ all there is to it now is:

WINEPREFIX="/home/deck/games/avp2" ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/proton\ 8.0/dist/bin/wine /run/media/deck/<cd_label>/SETUP.EXE

The above should start the installer program, assuming (with a good margin of confidence) that the installer program for this game is SETUP.EXE, most likely from Install Shield.

Once the setup has finished, you should install the latest patch (which apparently adds a no-cd patch to the game), or grab a no-cd patch and substitute accordingly. I should mention that you should be able to navigate to the prefix just like any other directory on your drive, or like Proton prefixes. Once installed, you can create a little script to launch the game and add that to Steam as a non-steam game or add the executable directly as a non-steam game (some folks have been able to install programs in this fashion, directly from gaming mode, but I cannot comment on that). I do know that you can add some games installed in this fashion and Proton will figure out the prefix, though I usually create a launcher script to handle that myself. It is up to you.

Also most Wine managers will perform this on their own just fine, allowing you to even leverage Proton. I wanted to illustrate what is happening behind the scenes, as better understanding of what is involved translates into better being able to handle issues should they present.

Hope this helps, and happy gaming.

[Marty McFly]

Originally posted by tfk:

Open FlatSeal, choose your app, scroll down to file system, add the path you need. Its the little folder with the plus sign in it.

Thank you! It works now!

Originally posted by thetargos:

Seems that for that particular game you may be stumbling into a copy protection measure on the optical media. My suggestion would be (it cold be a chore given you have limited input for text on the Steam Deck), drop to Desktop mode, and install the game as per your method by dumping the game to CD image and mountin the image.

Then create a unique prefix for the game with your preferred wine manager, or even proton manually (for example, for simplicity's sake of showing it schematically, I'll use Proton as per its default path):

mkdir -p /home/deck/games/avp2

The above code will create the inteded directory games/avp2, even if "games" does not exist. You can then create the "prefix" using the wine portion of Proton 8, for instance (you can use ANY version of proton as long as you know its installed path):

WINEPREFIX="/home/deck/games/avp2" WINEARCH=win32 ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton\ 8.0/dist/bin/wine winecfg

This will open the Wine Config window, where you can set the Windows version the prefix will be set as (I'd recommend using XP or 7 for this particular game, though it may work just fine with the default 10 setting). The '~/' bit translates in the shell to /home/deck, you cannot use that in the WINEARCH as it requires full paths as its arguments, you can use the variable $HOME, though which has the same effect (evaluates to the home directory of the current user for the shell).

Important The above code will create a 32-bit prefix for this game, while in modern systems a 64-bit environment should not pose a problem, if you DO encounter a problem, you can force the prefix to be 32-bits. In my experience wine gracefully handles win32 applications. Alas some distributions can require this, I trust it is not an issue on the Deck, though. Still I add this for completeness sake, if anyone extrapolates to other Linux systems.

Assuming the game image is mounted in /run/media/deck/ all there is to it now is:

WINEPREFIX="/home/deck/games/avp2" ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/proton\ 8.0/dist/bin/wine /run/media/deck/<cd_label>/SETUP.EXE

The above should start the installer program, assuming (with a good margin of confidence) that the installer program for this game is SETUP.EXE, most likely from Install Shield.

Once the setup has finished, you should install the latest patch (which apparently adds a no-cd patch to the game), or grab a no-cd patch and substitute accordingly. I should mention that you should be able to navigate to the prefix just like any other directory on your drive, or like Proton prefixes. Once installed, you can create a little script to launch the game and add that to Steam as a non-steam game or add the executable directly as a non-steam game (some folks have been able to install programs in this fashion, directly from gaming mode, but I cannot comment on that). I do know that you can add some games installed in this fashion and Proton will figure out the prefix, though I usually create a launcher script to handle that myself. It is up to you.

Also most Wine managers will perform this on their own just fine, allowing you to even leverage Proton. I wanted to illustrate what is happening behind the scenes, as better understanding of what is involved translates into better being able to handle issues should they present.

Hope this helps, and happy gaming.

Thanks for your effort!