Downloading games (Solved! THX)

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Bierhundt
Posts: 186
Joined: Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:12 pm

Re: Downloading games

#21 Post by Bierhundt »

asqwerth wrote:If the developers of a games package make them all work and depend on one another in one pack, it may not be possible to extract just a part or a single game from it, and make it run. You''ll need to know enough about the program, programming, and packaging.

https://www.google.com.sg/search?q=linu ... uiX57qqvAJ
Yeah, that's definitely NOT me :rofl:
From what I can see from those search results, even if there are individual programs that run just freecell, be prepared for stuff that looks different or ugly, or which are no longer maintained and so does not work on the current version of Debian.

If you can't find something suitable, I guess you have to ask yourself, is it worth it to "download 200 or 300 Mb of junk I had no interest in, just for the sake of having 2 or 3 games I like to play" or to forego the 2 or 3 games just to save 200 or 300 mb.
That's what I finally figured out .... now it's down to two games ;>).

Bierhundt
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Re: Downloading games

#22 Post by Bierhundt »

asqwerth wrote:
bierhundt wrote:I used the wget command to download a game...
You really do need to read up on making Package Requests, from the manual and this forum.

Because once you found what you thought was a potential standalone freecell linux game, what you could have done was to make a package request in the appropriate subforum, provide the link from which you tried to download said game, and let the packaging team tell you whether the game could be packaged to run with MX17.
Well, I didn't see that when I skimmed the manual. I'm down to two games, (I may just d/l Aisle-riot as Stevo suggests in a post a couple of posts down, becuz I suspect that no one is going to make up a package for just one request, so I'll pass. Thanks

Bierhundt
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Re: Downloading games

#23 Post by Bierhundt »

skidoo wrote:
qupzilla won't download games that use apt
Users coming over from Mint or Ubuntu may have grown accustomed to having https://launchpad.net/apturl installed on their system.
IIRC, it registers a mimetype handler with compatible browsers, so that clicking an apt:// hyperlink results in OpenWith(gDebi, or somesuch)

Here's an example bug report where a user is explaining the expected behavior (er, expected result):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1453576

The availability and use of the apt-url mechanism is a fine example of "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
(likelihood of introducing system instability / breakage due to incompatible libraries, prospect of downloading malware...)
I've never used Mint, and Ubuntu never worked well for me, but that was in the 'old days.' Wget always worked well for me back in those days, so I just used it without trying to research any difficulties that it may have. I've never heard of the apt-url mechanism, so I wouldn't have tried it. I wouldn't think that SourceForge would have any malware in their downloads, but it's been a few years since I d/l'ed anything from them. They used to have a sterling reputation. Thanks

Bierhundt
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Re: Downloading games

#24 Post by Bierhundt »

antiX-Dave wrote:If you have the package installed or downloaded and extracted you could run ldd against the game's bin file. This will tell you what it exactly needs for library files. Everything that the command lists you can copy to a folder to back it up. Then you can delete the pack it came from and either build a deb file to install it or manually copy the files back. You may also need to copy some extra files that would not be in the list. For example the .desktop file from /usr/share/applications so it will show in the menu and maybe some help files. You may desire to run the locate or find command to see if there are any similarly named files that you would like to keep before removing the package.

Edit this is assuming that they are not already separately packaged in the repo and just packaged into one deb because it is easier for the game maintainers.
Thanks Dave, but that stuff sounds like it's way over my head. That's why I failed at Arch Linux - wayyyy over my head! I busted it so many times I finally gave up and went back to a Debian deriv. I'll use your ldd command (If that's what you meant) to see if I can find any of those files and remove them so they don't conflict with anything else - I don't want to break this install. I've almost got things set up the way I like them :happy:

antiX-Dave
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Re: Downloading games

#25 Post by antiX-Dave »

Do not remove anything manually based off ldd, that will almost guarantee breakage. Instead copy the files and apt-get remove the package then copy the files back.

Bierhundt
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Re: Downloading games

#26 Post by Bierhundt »

Stevo wrote:Since any particular game is just a set of rules, which takes up very little disk space when reduced to machine language, the vast percentage of space used by any card game is going to be the graphics plus any sound files, such as the card designs. So all the games in aisleriot are going to share those resources between themselves, and you are only saving a tiny bit of disk space by not using it instead of some hypothetical standalone gnome-freecell. Which is only distributed as part of aisleriot, BTW, since no sane developer would do it any other way.
I'm definitely taking that under consideration Stevo, I'll just apt-get and it will tell me how many Mbs it will add - I've got rid of a lot of them so far, so I guess I could add some back .... I wonder if I can set up Aisle-Riot so that it will open up with Freecell instead of Solitaire? - just a hypothetical thot I just had.... I'll have to read their manual to see if that's possible!

Bierhundt
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Re: Downloading games

#27 Post by Bierhundt »

antiX-Dave wrote:Do not remove anything manually based off ldd, that will almost guarantee breakage. Instead copy the files and apt-get remove the package then copy the files back.
Thanks much for the warning! I just thot that command might tell me the location that they landed in. I'll just apt-get remove the Freecell the old fashioned way, and not use that command, altho, it wouldn't hurt me to take a look at the man page and see what the command is used for ;>).

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rich
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Re: Downloading games

#28 Post by rich »

Bierhundt wrote:I wonder if I can set up Aisle-Riot so that it will open up with Freecell instead of Solitaire? - just a hypothetical thot I just had.... I'll have to read their manual to see if that's possible!
Hello it looks like AisleRiot just opens up with whatever game was open last

Bierhundt
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Re: Downloading games

#29 Post by Bierhundt »

I just looked at the difference in size between Gnome Aisle Riot v. KDE Patience - 24Mb v. 57Mb on this laptop (maybe I've already got some of the Gnome dependencies on the MX install) -so I'm going to go with Aisle Riot.

Thanks to all who helped/advised me on this quest.
Bierhundt

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