How to install ED on Linux using Wine [EXPERIMENTAL, NOT OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED]

[Darth Ender]

Only steam performance is impacted?

Have you tested other gl/vk utilities or games or benchmarks outside of steam?

 

[an93lofdeath]

If you are using a compositor is it safe to assume you are using a window manager instead of one of the two big desktop environments? If so would it not be best to have a keyboard shortcut that can toggle the compositor off/on so you can toggle it before and after you game? When running a WM myself that is what I did as compositors can have a big impact on games.

 

[lowranker]

Only steam performance is impacted?

Have you tested other gl/vk utilities or games or benchmarks outside of steam?

Only Elite is impacted so much by the compositor. Other games, both native and Wine/Proton with DXVK, are affected by it but still playable, even more so if I were to tone graphics down. Elite seems to stutter no matter what. Unaffected titles include Overwatch and Snowrunner in Lutris with lutris wine build; Dark Souls 3 and Rocket League in Steam with latest Proton. These being the most resource-intensive

If you are using a compositor is it safe to assume you are using a window manager instead of one of the two big desktop environments? If so would it not be best to have a keyboard shortcut that can toggle the compositor off/on so you can toggle it before and after you game? When running a WM myself that is what I did as compositors can have a big impact on games.

Yeah, that's my hopefully temporary solution for now. Using i3, got a script that toggles the compositor, linked to it in /usr/bin and just running it from there with dmenu. It's something /shrug

 

[Darth Ender]

are you playing in full screen mode or windowed? If windowed, have you checked if full screen mode suffers the same impact from the compositor?

If it's the same whether you are fullscreen or windowed or if you're already fullscreen, then I'd think the compositor needs to go from your system. Either it's buggy or your graphics driver is but if you want to play games more than you want whatever compositor you're using...then it's time to look into one of the dozen alternative window managers (and with them compositors) to see if any of those behave better.

xfce is my goto ...but i dont use nvidia so I'm not sure what the current state of issues are with their drivers and xorg/wayland systems ...since they tend to use their own api's for things. changing windowing sysems may not completely alleviate issues if it's being caused by the graphics driver.

 

[lowranker]

are you playing in full screen mode or windowed? If windowed, have you checked if full screen mode suffers the same impact from the compositor?

Hm, good point, I have not... will do!

If it's the same whether you are fullscreen or windowed or if you're already fullscreen, then I'd think the compositor needs to go from your system.

...eh? Removing sounds all too drastic when one can just enable or disable it perfectly fine /shrug

EDIT:
So, stable branch of Steam got an update that included Fossilize shader compiler thing. After that finished its work on Elite, I get literally no stuttering at all! Even with the compositor! Awesome, I'm a happy pilot

 

[lonesheep74]

I've been running a dual boat machine for 4 years, just to play ED. Whilst building a new PC today, decided upon tring to get ED working on Fedora 32 and after spending most of the day attempting to get ED working, I've admitted defeat.
A huge shame, as I have to build my new machine as dual boot machine, just to play ED!

Its a pain. I tried standard wine and Lutris (wine seemed to have a loop bug with .Net 472 in there!).
Installed; dotnet472, corefonts, quartz, vcrun2017 dxvk

I got as far as the launcher firing up, but upon entering my email address and pressing enter, I wes thrown out with a COM error.
Unhandled Exception "Exception from HRESULT:0X88980406"

Before I blat my newly installed Fedora OS, anyone got any other ideas.
Note: I don't have ED via Steam, only the Frontier Store

 

[RedMcG]

I've been running a dual boat machine for 4 years, just to play ED. Whilst building a new PC today, decided upon tring to get ED working on Fedora 32 and after spending most of the day attempting to get ED working, I've admitted defeat.
A huge shame, as I have to build my new machine as dual boot machine, just to play ED!

Its a pain. I tried standard wine and Lutris (wine seemed to have a loop bug with .Net 472 in there!).
Installed; dotnet472, corefonts, quartz, vcrun2017 dxvk

I got as far as the launcher firing up, but upon entering my email address and pressing enter, I wes thrown out with a COM error.
Unhandled Exception "Exception from HRESULT:0X88980406"

Before I blat my newly installed Fedora OS, anyone got any other ideas.
Note: I don't have ED via Steam, only the Frontier Store

The Launcher will crash if your cursor enters the password field without corefonts installed. This sounds like what is happening. Maybe try installing corefonts again. Although it's possible there's a new bug in wine that's causing this. Which version are you using?

You could also try wine-staging (which doesn't need corefonts).

Also note you need to make sure to put win7 (or win10) at the end of your winetricks command.

This wiki has a bit more detail:

redmcg/wine

Wine with a bit of extra spice. Contribute to redmcg/wine development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[lonesheep74]

Sorry, I forgot to mention, I also had win7 in there.
the two commands I'm running are;
WINEPREFIX=~/ED_wine winetricks ie8 dotnet472 corefonts quartz vcrun2017 dxvk win7
WINEPREFIX=~/ED_wine wine "ED_wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Frontier/EDLaunch/EDLaunch.exe"

Launcher first up. When loging in to my account, I can type in both text boxes (email / password). However, the dialog will not accept the email address until enter is pressed in the email address field (if enter isn't pressed you just get a "This is a required field." message), and it is at this point the Exception from HRESULT:0X88980406 error is generated.

---------------------

0310:err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"Application: EDLaunch.exe\nFramework Version: v4.0.30319\nDescription: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.\nException Info: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException\n at System.Windows.Media.Composition.DUCE+Channel.SyncFlush()\n at System.Windows.Interop.Hwnd"...
0310:fixme:advapieregisterEventSource (0xcafe4242) stub

Unhandled Exception: 0310:fixme:ver:GetCurrentPackageId (0031B320 00000000): stub
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: Exception from HRESULT: 0x88980406
at System.Windows.Media.Composition.DUCE.Channel.SyncFlush()

---------------------------

For the time being, I'm getting up a dual boot as I've a spare 240gb SSD I can throw Win10 on.

 

[Dummytarget]

Note: I don't have ED via Steam, only the Frontier Store

You can get the Steam key for your current account if you want it. I got it just to make it easier to play ED on Linux.

 

[alejandor]

You can get the Steam key for your current account if you want it. I got it just to make it easier to play ED on Linux.

Wow, thanks for this heads-up. I've always run ED manually, what's the advantage on Linux of Steam?

@lonesheep74 , IME whenever I have had problems it's been due to some update reverting my wine to the platform version, which is too old. What do you get from:
$ wine --version wine-5.10 (Staging)

 

[RedMcG]

Sorry, I forgot to mention, I also had win7 in there.
the two commands I'm running are;
WINEPREFIX=~/ED_wine winetricks ie8 dotnet472 corefonts quartz vcrun2017 dxvk win7
WINEPREFIX=~/ED_wine wine "ED_wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Frontier/EDLaunch/EDLaunch.exe"

Launcher first up. When loging in to my account, I can type in both text boxes (email / password). However, the dialog will not accept the email address until enter is pressed in the email address field (if enter isn't pressed you just get a "This is a required field." message), and it is at this point the Exception from HRESULT:0X88980406 error is generated.

---------------------

0310:err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"Application: EDLaunch.exe\nFramework Version: v4.0.30319\nDescription: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.\nException Info: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException\n at System.Windows.Media.Composition.DUCE+Channel.SyncFlush()\n at System.Windows.Interop.Hwnd"...
0310:fixme:advapieregisterEventSource (0xcafe4242) stub

Unhandled Exception: 0310:fixme:ver:GetCurrentPackageId (0031B320 00000000): stub
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: Exception from HRESULT: 0x88980406
at System.Windows.Media.Composition.DUCE.Channel.SyncFlush()

---------------------------

For the time being, I'm getting up a dual boot as I've a spare 240gb SSD I can throw Win10 on.

Make sure you launch the game with wine64 (not wine). The launcher is a 32-bit dotnet application. Using wine will cause it to access the Wow6432 registry node (which is missing an entry required by the launcher).

So try:
WINEPREFIX=~/ED_wine wine64 "ED_wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Frontier/EDLaunch/EDLaunch.exe"

 

[Dummytarget]

For Steam, I think it only needed dotnet472 to be installed with winetricks, and Proton handles the rest. If I recall correctly, first install ED, then launch ED and let it fail on first run, then install dotnet472 with winetricks (wineprefix for that is <your-steam-path>/steamapps/compatdata/359320/pfx), and now it should be ready to go. Sometimes when launching from Steam the ED launcher (which you still see with Steam too) might throw in a couple of errors or warnings that can be ignored.
Oh, and you need to create the directory for the logs yourself if you want to see those, or use something like EDMarketConnector that reads those logs. The logs are saved to
<your-steam-path>/steamapps/compatdata/359320/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Saved Games/Frontier Developments/Elite Dangerous/ so you need to create this path if it does not exist.

Not sure if it somehow helps VR users to be able to launch the game from Steam.

So, not many advantages if any at all, but I don't think you lose anything by getting the Steam key. You can still use the regular install you already have even if you do get the Steam key. Maybe even run your current account on Steam, and another account at the same time with the regular launcher, if you have multiple accounts. And if you find some use for this. (Have not tried this myself, just thinking it should work)

It's been long since the last time I had to install ED, so if someone sees something obvious missing or wrong, let us know.

 

[supernovajm]

To those of you using VR, I could use some help. I can't seem to get the game to launch in my HMD. I tried launching from steamVR, and also from the launch option "Launch ED in SteamVR Mode", but the most I've gotten in my HMD is the "Next Up" splash page. I'm not currently using steamvr beta but maybe I should? This is the only VR game I've tried that doesn't work. I'm on Kubuntu 20.04 with a Radeon 5700.

Edit: I just got it working. I was using a custom proton version (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom), switching back to a standard version fixed the problem.

 

[EdVaessen]

This is the first time I cannot get Elite Horizons started from Kubuntu 20.04. I can still start it from OpenSuSE Leap 15.1 on the same machine. Both have different places where the 20Gb game code is stored.
The startup window pops up and shows the blue Play button.
When pressing it, this error appears: 'Unhandled exception: Attempt to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.'
It goes on to say the EDLaunch.exe has encountered a serious problem.
I used Steam to uninstall Elite and then reinstalled it. The problem remained. I used the both following command lines, without succes:

wine64 EDLaunch.exe /novr
wine64 EDLaunch.exe /novr /steam

I include the error log.
System information:
Wine build: wine-5.12 (Staging)
Platform: x86_64
Version: Windows 7
Host system: Linux
Host version: 5.4.0-28-generic

Perhaps someone can tell what is going on here.

 

[Darth Ender]

I suggest using proton (after installing .net4 in it). It's super easy and should be an identical setup regardless of which distro you're using assuming you're using steam's. Import the game into steam or use a different game launcher if you like

 

[Evis]

Is the wine version exactly the same for Kubuntu? 9/10 times this type of thing is a regression bug that has popped up in the newest wine and is fixed by reverting to the previous wine version. In some cases switching from wine staging to vanilla will work but I usually have more luck with staging. I'm still on wine staging 5.6. If neither previous wine or proton work perhaps some type of pax security features were added to OpenSuse that aren't playing nice (such as memory randomization / non executable memory protections). If that's the case you might have to add boot options to the grub bootloader that disable these (or just try a different distro).

 

[RedMcG]

This is the first time I cannot get Elite Horizons started from Kubuntu 20.04. I can still start it from OpenSuSE Leap 15.1 on the same machine. Both have different places where the 20Gb game code is stored.
The startup window pops up and shows the blue Play button.
When pressing it, this error appears: 'Unhandled exception: Attempt to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.'
It goes on to say the EDLaunch.exe has encountered a serious problem.
I used Steam to uninstall Elite and then reinstalled it. The problem remained. I used the both following command lines, without succes:

wine64 EDLaunch.exe /novr
wine64 EDLaunch.exe /novr /steam

I include the error log.
System information:
Wine build: wine-5.12 (Staging)
Platform: x86_64
Version: Windows 7
Host system: Linux
Host version: 5.4.0-28-generic

Perhaps someone can tell what is going on here.

I got this too, with the 5.0 stable version that's in the Ubuntu repo. I'm pretty sure they have a bug (but I've not really investigated).

So I use Proton now. But if you add the WineHQ repo, their stable version might work (it did when I tested on 19.10).

 

[an93lofdeath]

I would always use proton in a Linux native version of Steam. If you didn't install with steam then use Lutris these tools make gaming on Linux very easy.

 

[EdVaessen]

I suggest using proton (after installing .net4 in it). It's super easy and should be an identical setup regardless of which distro you're using assuming you're using steam's. Import the game into steam or use a different game launcher if you like

In the Steam Play Settings Proton 5.0-9 is enabled. How does installing '.net4 in it' go?

 

[EdVaessen]

Is the wine version exactly the same for Kubuntu? 9/10 times this type of thing is a regression bug that has popped up in the newest wine and is fixed by reverting to the previous wine version. In some cases switching from wine staging to vanilla will work but I usually have more luck with staging. I'm still on wine staging 5.6. If neither previous wine or proton work perhaps some type of pax security features were added to OpenSuse that aren't playing nice (such as memory randomization / non executable memory protections). If that's the case you might have to add boot options to the grub bootloader that disable these (or just try a different distro).

What do you mean by pax security features added to OpenSuse that aren't playing nice? The problem is with Kubuntu, not with OpenSuSE.
However, the following repo is present:

openSUSE Download

The openSUSE Download repositories providing all of the software in the openSUSE distributions and openSUSE Build Service repositories

download.opensuse.org