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

There seems a lot of people struggling, why not give Lutris a try:

Installed Lutris last night on debian testing. Lutris runs. I needed to install nvidia drivers from experimental also, due to the Vulkan/DXVK Howto linked from Lutris when you tell it to use dxvk.

No matter how much I followed the dxvk howto though, Lutris - when selecting Use dxvk - pops up the "cannot find dxvk loaders" window. Also, Lutris simply freezes when trying to configure the prefix (i.e. when it's trying to run wine winecfg).

I think I should give up on debian in favour of some other distro - I just can't win(e) on debian testing.
 
Installed Lutris last night on debian testing. Lutris runs. I needed to install nvidia drivers from experimental also, due to the Vulkan/DXVK Howto linked from Lutris when you tell it to use dxvk.

No matter how much I followed the dxvk howto though, Lutris - when selecting Use dxvk - pops up the "cannot find dxvk loaders" window. Also, Lutris simply freezes when trying to configure the prefix (i.e. when it's trying to run wine winecfg).

I think I should give up on debian in favour of some other distro - I just can't win(e) on debian testing.

You absolutely have to use the beta nvidia drivers that have the features added in the latest Vulkan spec.

I don't know what Lutris does with DXVK - is it compiling it from source? If you are able to use the binary DXVK DLLs, you shouldn't need anything extra beyond the libvulkan1 binaries - I got away with 1.0.65.
 
You absolutely have to use the beta nvidia drivers that have the features added in the latest Vulkan spec.

I don't know what Lutris does with DXVK - is it compiling it from source? If you are able to use the binary DXVK DLLs, you shouldn't need anything extra beyond the libvulkan1 binaries - I got away with 1.0.65.

Yeah using the beta nvidia drivers for sure. Something I don't remember being mentioned on this thread until now ;)

And yeah I can manually install dxvk.

Only wanted to try Lutris to see if it made any difference, but Lutris just seems to be a nice UI in front of all the manual stuff (with some nice extras to boot) which caters for a lot more than just wine.

The problem, for me, is that for some reason the ED Launcher simply doesn't want to run on my debian testing system, no matter what I try. Therefore I can only conclude that my debian testing system is b0rked in some manner which prevents the ED Launcher from running in WINE, even though I'm going through the exact same steps as everyone else, using the same winehq-staging etc. Oh well.
 
EDDiscovery almost works:

3E4w4uW.png
 
Mentioned, but ok, only in my own little cubbyhole:

2. (these instructions intentionally left vague to deter the inexperienced from borking their installation) Switch to a text console, stop X, uninstall packaged nvidia drivers, compile and install using the beta proprietary nvidia drivers that support the necessary Vulkan APIs, at time of writing 396.54.09 (NVidia Vulkan driver page, general installation instructions for these non-packaged drivers). Restart X.

What is the error that EDLaunch gives when you try to run it? If it is still the "System.DllNotFoundException: dwrite.dll or wpftxt_v0400.dll " you mentioned a few posts up, my gut feeling is that dotnet432 is incomplete in your wineprefix, so check that the winetricks (updated as necessary) install of dotnet452 etc completed successfully. At least on my system its output is very verbose and you have all those runtime installer dialogs to click through so there is plenty of space for a problem to hide.
 
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So it seems there are some good news and bad news.

It seems keyboard in ED is not working due of some unimplemented functionality of Win32 in Wine. Good news is that it is NormalizeString, which seems relatively easy thing to implement, and there's even bug report with providing potential information how to do that.

Bad news is if this is done even in relatively short time, it most likely won't appear in stable release in this year, unless you are keen on compiling your own wine.

Bug report in question is here https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42734

edit: a bit more good news...there's patches and already work done on this. I will get update when we get all details.
 
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<lurk mode disengaged>

I just want to say how awesome you guys are for your work on this. I've been following it since Eagleboy's OP, and I'm hoping that one day I'll be able to install E: D on my Mint box. :)

<lurk mode engaged>
 
<lurk mode disengaged>

I just want to say how awesome you guys are for your work on this. I've been following it since Eagleboy's OP, and I'm hoping that one day I'll be able to install E: D on my Mint box. :)

<lurk mode engaged>

Wouldn't be possible with all smart people here poking and trying to get it working :) It seems all coming together.
 
I managed to log into my ship from Steam Proton for 3 minutes before freezing, one issue is Proton automatically adds default overrides each time you start the game and some of these don't bode well although it's not the root cause of it's freezing.

Also I've discovered quartz isn't actually needed for Wine 3.18 anymore although proton still needs it.

Anyone using Proton specifically make sure you post a report here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/150


Another thing I'm noticing is people with Mesa/AMD with a lack of success, I've noticed this post which states freezing issues: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/36#issuecomment-431955732

If anyone with an AMD card can confirm otherwise? It might be the case that this is only working with the latest nvidia drivers.
 
So, what is normal naming convention in this game. I thought it was automatically the same as your forum account?

I almost thought the crypto thing wasn't going to work because one of the info things kept sending back a different value when doing the inquiry. But after manually changing all 4 of them it worked. It kept making it look like every time I switched one of the base ones it was changing the other value automatically. But ultimately it wasn't.

And this is what my grahpics look like without dxvk. Just normal wine and 3.17:
QM0yPui.jpg

Did anyone else get normal graphics or is it because I'm in the training mission? Edit: Nope! Normal graphics in the cockpit in solo. I'm pretty sure I don't have dxvk installed either. I do have the 410.66 drivers though. I think it did succesfully install dotnet452. Although I'm assuming that has no way of effecting the graphics.

And in the setting there is a 3d option. It has a setting where it just does a red/blue shift so you can use those old movie glasses. 8)

I am getting funny faces with the same images when using wsda. I used shift and ctrl and those didn't produce odd values. So, some keys are normal. As long as you set them all at the same time it seems to work for a short time.

The keyboard issue is reminding me a bit of the windowd/fullscreen reset that was happening when I was playing in the demo.
 
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Enabled DXVK yesterday and got normal colors. Tested also multicrew and after first unsuccesful connection attempt I was able to get a connection between my primary and secondary accounts. Played some 2 hrs without any problems.

I had primary account on Windows and secondary account on Fedora/Wine. I only mapped those keys needed to accept multicrew request.

Despite the known keyboard problem everything seem to be working just fine.

Game looks pretty good with DXVK.
 
Nice work, guys. Gonna rebuild my machine at some point (probably over the weekend), so I may well give this a go. Only slight problem I'm going to have is that I need wine-rt on my machine to run some audio plugins, not sure if I'll be able to get them to co-exist.

What's performance like?
 
Nice work, guys. Gonna rebuild my machine at some point (probably over the weekend), so I may well give this a go. Only slight problem I'm going to have is that I need wine-rt on my machine to run some audio plugins, not sure if I'll be able to get them to co-exist.

What's performance like?

You can do completely separate wine prefix / wine binaries setup for ED, avoiding to touch your wine setup. In fact, it seems till NormalizeString patches are included in mainstream, self-compiled wine will be suggested way to do things anyway.

Performance is about the same. I will say there are some performance penalties, but that's due down to optimization at different levels of wine.
 
I can also confirm that patches are working for keyboard. It also seems Wine 3.18 doesn't require quartz anymore and also video at the beginning played correctly. It seems there are issues with OpenGL translator though.

cAbrgtf.png
 
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So after some canny sleuthing by CMDR Eagleboy, and a long night of patching and graunching (nobody does it better, Pecisk), we have added the missing unicode locale keyboard handling to Wine, and keyboard keys work in ED:

Packages of wine-staging 3.18 including the patch, for openSUSE 15.0,are (or will be, shortly as soon as CDNs etc catch up) here: https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/wstephenson:/branches:/Emulators/openSUSE_Leap_15.0

That seems to have fixed it, I literally just extracted wine staging from those 32 & 64bit .rpm and run it from lutris as a custom executable:

hGKlIWm.png


Still needs to have a proper patch in wine though... and proton.
 
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