The Flow of Consciousness

Tonight, PJ and I installed Unreal Tournament 2004 on his laptop, which runs Ubuntu Linux 7.04 (Feisty). I put together this little HOWTO detailing what we did to install it.

As you may know, UT2k4 has a native Linux binary. That’s right—no Wine or Cedega needed here, folks. However, the install process isn’t as easy as one would think. There’s a few caveats, so I’ll detail them as I go along.

First, put the UT2k4 disc in your drive. I used the DVD version, so if you’re using the CD version, you might have to combine them into a DVD and reburn it or find another tutorial.

Second, open a terminal and copy linux-installer.sh from the CD with cp /media/cdrom/linux-installer.sh . and chmod it with chmod +w linux-installer.sh.

Third, edit the first line of linux-installer.sh and change it to #!/bin/bash. Feisty doesn’t seem to like /bin/sh.

Fourth, execute the script with ./linux-installer.sh and use the GUI to install it where you want it. I put it in /home/username/.ut2004. When it’s done installing, run it just to see if it works. Don’t get too carried away, though: it needs patched.

Fifth, get the megapack that has all the Editor’s Choice Edition and Community Bonus Pack maps in it. It’s called something like ut2004-megapack.exe. Put it in your home directory. Unzip it with unzip ut2004-megapack.exe and move into the created directory (I can’t remember what it’s called) with cd directoryname. Copy all of the files with cp -ruv * ../path/to/UT2004directory. We put PJ’s installation in ~/.ut2004, so we did cp -ruv * ~/.ut2004. The “u” switch tells cp to only copy over files that were changed.

Sixth, get the latest patch. Unzip it with tar xf ut2004-[version]-.tar.bz2. Do cd UT2004-Patch to move into the directory. Now to copy the files similar to the previous step, but sans the “u” switch because, this time, we want to force updates. Do cp -rv * ~./ut2004 or wherever your installation is.

That should be it. Run the symlink that’s in your home directory and it should work.

We didn’t get around to replacing libSDL and OpenAL with newer ones, mostly because PJ thought the performance was fine on his C2D and Quadro (can’t remember the model numbers, but it’s a Dell Latitude D820).