Indeed I’ve had an interesting time trying to install the EVE Online demo on my Linux computer. I think it’s an interesting story.

The background for this story is that I saw an ad that EVE was doing a demo and somehow knew that Linux was available. Why I wanted to try it, I don’t know really. I’m not an MMO player typically, but I thought I’d give it a try since there was a demo. Plus, I have a friend who’s been interested in the game for quite a while now.

Problem zero, though, turned out to be this. I registered an account with EVE before I talked to that friend about me trying it out. Turns out that if he sends me a special invite, I get a 21 day trial instead of a 14 day trial. That’s really cool and thoughtful of him, but it means I need a new account. And guess what? My username’s taken. Heh. Anyway, no big deal, but I have two accounts now.

Anyway, so the first hurdle was the simple fact that they didn’t make a package for my distro (not that I expected them to), and they also didn’t make a distro-agnostic installer of any kind. They also didn’t explicitly that “downloading this will give you just what you need to make a package” or anything like that. However, they were interestingly thoughtful enough to provide “Slackware/Gentoo” packages, which are just a tar.gz with a folder/file structure like your system so that you know what goes where. So, I unpackage the tar.gz, hackily add the .PKGINFO file that my distro (Arch Linux) requires, and packed it back up with an appropriate filename. It installed fine, and I was off.

So then the next small problem I had was the fact that I’ve got a somewhat peculiar setup with my Python (which a lot of EVE/Cedega’s Linux tools are written in). Anyway, so that’s entirely my fault, but I’m somewhat used to it so I had a pretty good idea how to fix it.

Anyway, so I finally get the package installed and my system set up so that everything is ready to run. The stuff that I installed, though, is not the game itself, it’s simply just some tools that fetch the game (or updates), install it, set it up, etc. So really what I just installed was the installer. Hmm. I run the installer, and it goes and downloads the first big file that it needs (presumably the EVE client core). It finishes the download (which takes 30 minutes at 500kbps). It then pops up an error informing me that it can’t write to a folder in my home directory. This is obviously somewhat worrying to me, and by the looks of it all permissions were set up properly. Also, it was “courteous” enough to delete the client that it downloaded from /tmp when it’s done. Erk. Right, so I know I can’t do much without the client, so I have it download it again, but this time I copy it before it has a chance to delete it. Conveniently, there is a check that it performs that if you have the client in your home folder, then it doesn’t download it again.

Anyway, so the next big problem was that despite the fact that it knew not to download the client twice once you had a copy in your home folder, something seemed to be amiss with the verification of that copy. Technically, what I mean is that when I tried to run the installer again, it failed due to unmatched md5 check sums, and asked me if I wanted to download it again. Obviously, I don’t, since it takes 30 minutes. Eventually, after a bit of digging around in the source code, I find a bit of a Python script that handles the checking. I disable it. I don’t need no stinkin’ check summing, you silly code. I love how I have the code to the install tools though, even if it’s not open source. Sure made my life easier.

Okay, so after I disabled the checksum, it did manage to get a bit further, but now I just started having errors left, right and centre. It can’t find this file, it can’t copy this here, it can’t write to that, it can’t bloody do anything. So being a good hobbyist problem investigator, I tried a big pile of things from trying to arrange the files for it myself to modifying more installer source tools, to checking on the web. In the end, nothing helped. After an hour or so of slowly getting progress, I suddenly have a possible realization. It can’t write to stuff that it should? Oh God. Maybe I’m out of disk space. Turns out… yep. I had exactly 0 bytes of disk space because the installer liked to copy big things around a lot, and I didn’t start with very much disk space available. I delete some stuff, and eventually my problems start to go away. I still had to run it a couple times and to a little bit of copying, but by far, things went much better and it was pretty easy in general.

Okay, so the thing finally is set up. At the end of the installer, the game is automatically run. One thing I notice right away is that my cursor is a lovely square of multicolored pixels. From what I gather, this was not the intended effect. This is still unsolved at the moment, and I’m not in a hurry since it’s non-crucial.

Okay, so the game’s welcome screen is rather pretty aside from that, and things seem well. I get a notification saying that my client is out of date and needs a patch. That seems kind of sloppy to me, considering I just downloaded it, but it’s reasonable that they got lazy and didn’t patch the one I downloaded. I click to the next screen. It tells me that the new patch that I’m downloading is going to be… 0 bytes. Huh. Now that’s efficient. I click something affirmative. It kindly tells me that the file blahblah-eve-blahblah-patch-blah.0.0981337 is not found on the server. That’s an interesting turn of events, eh? It asks me if I want to go to the support page. At first I was reluctunt seeing as it’s a “support page” and to me that sounds like “forum or useless info page” but it turned out that it was a download of the patch that I was trying to install. Maybe? It said that my platform was Windows. I was a bit conflicted on this. I realize that I’m running the game through Cedega, so technically it’s pretty much Windows. But it’s not actually Windows, and the patch applying tools is a Windows binary. Still, it didn’t seem out of the question. Upon examining the URL of the page, it had some information that said stuff along the lines of “TargetSystem=win”, “RealSystem=linux”. Okay, fair enough.

So I download the patch exe. I figure I’m supposed to run this and make it patch my client. Sounds good to me. After searching around on my system for a while, I was unable to find a working copy of cedega to use with it – EVE seemed really tightly tied into the stuff I found, and it seemed like a lot of work to separate it, so I decided to try wine instead. Wine seemed to handle it rather well, and I had a proper window and whatnot. It asks me to enter the folder of EVE, so that it can get to the patching bit. I try a few different folders since I’m not sure what it means. The one that made the most sense to me is the one under Program Files in my fake C drive that cedega (and wine) use. Uhm, so it turns out that that’s not cool with the patch installer, and it says that it’s not the EVE folder. (Except, well, that the bitch’s wrong. That totally is the folder.) So I tried copying the patch exe into the EVE folder on my C drive there. I ran it again, this time put “./” for the path. It seemed to like that just fine, except that when it tried to actually patch the game, it failed and told me that a blank filename was at fault. This tells me that the thing knows that this is the EVE folder, but is unable to actually know the filenames or something. Kind of retarded, no? Anyway, so as a guess, I move the patch up a folder from EVE, and try again, this time putting just “EVE” for the folder path, hoping it assumes relative to current place. Turns out that’s exactly what it liked, and it started patching. Not too long from there, then, it tells me that a certain file can’t be patched, and that means that everything is corrupted and ruined forever. Lovely. I figure maybe this is my doing because of the disk issues before. Maybe some file didn’t quite finish writing and something something. So I delete my .cedega folder, my client, and tell it to try installing again. 30-40 minutes later it’s done (with no problems this time, wow). I try again, but everything is in the same state. EVE’s cursor is still the work of Picaso, the patch still can’t be found on the server, and the patch exe behaves identically. What can I say? Pure quality. Still, the welcome screen is really nice, and I’m not even just being an asshole.

Anyway, so despite not having EVE running yet, I’ve realized some interesting things along the way. For one, I really enjoyed trying to beat it into working. For some twisted reason, after years of using Linux, I’ve begun to enjoy debugging and fixing problems. So far, my motivation for installing EVE has not been so much interest in it, but rather interest in getting it working on my system. I think I’ve also started to develop a knack for things, because I several times just guessed right at what could be wrong. Another thing, relatedly, is that I really have improved. I remember a few years ago, when I first started, everything was horrible. I was using Fedora Core 3 and stuff would just break. It’d take me forever to fix things, and it was hard to do. When I was a mega noob back then, if I didn’t see a package for my distro, I’d probably have stopped there. “I don’t know what to do without a package!” Now when I don’t see a package, I have the ability to make one or hack one together. This is helped by the fact that Arch has a ridiculously simple package format and build system, but anyway. I probably would have also stopped when it refused to run at all at first. I probably would have stopped when it refused to properly download and unpack the client. It seems to me that I’ve really come a long way as a Linux user, and I think that once you reach a certain Linuxy threshold, you start to really be into stuff like tweaking and fixing your computer system. Anyway, so to all those people out there that I’ve met on IRC that are sometimes overwhelmed by how much there is to learn on Linux to be any good at it, don’t worry. Just stick to it and give yourselves a couple years and it’ll get much easier for you. Really.

And as a note, I’m not done fighting with EVE just yet. I’m pretty sure I can get it working, though I should probably defer to the wisdom of my EVE-playing friend about the patch thing…