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

[Flyinspaghetti]

What am I looking for? A 2 hour livestream is a lot of footage to go through.

Point is at both meetups (this was footage of one) I took part in people weren't dropping connection left,right & centre outside the normal disconnection rate of these expedition meetups. My presence there didn't ruin the meetup, multiplayer is one of the first things I wanted to play with as soon as this was possible and in most instances on Live neither myself or people in my instances have had an issue.

However I'm also curious of everyone else's experiences with multiplayer, have any of you had issues winging or instancing with windows users?

Please do share your own experience.

 

[EUS]

I've been following the thread with interest since inception, a suggestion; don't get sidetracked by silly comments, the work shown here is very impressive.

 

[znôrt]

I will challenge your legal assertion about "blocking Wine usage". There have been historical instances of negative actions taken against Wine based players - I was once banned from WOW for a short period because I used Wine to play ~12 years ago (!). They quickly recinded the ban, but not for legal reasons but for PR reasons - it garnered significant negative attention. Legally, Blizz was fine - they can do what they want with their game. The same goes for Frontier - it's their game, if they want to ban Wine play, that is within their right.

i said 'dubious'. legal frameworks vary and for sure size (of lawyer teams) matters in these matters. oracle sued google on much flimsier grounds and they are still at it years after. of course i can't see a bunch of linux users suing frontier but the idea of software manufacturers being able to arbitrarily limit what you can run on your own machine should raise very serious concerns. i know, it doesn't, which is why we're so doomed

 

[cpw]

i said 'dubious'. legal frameworks vary and for sure size (of lawyer teams) matters in these matters. oracle sued google on much flimsier grounds and they are still at it years after. of course i can't see a bunch of linux users suing frontier but the idea of software manufacturers being able to arbitrarily limit what you can run on your own machine should raise very serious concerns. i know, it doesn't, which is why we're so doomed

Heh. They've been doing that for years. That's one of the main reasons I run linux - it's a lot harder to tell me what I can and cannot run

 

[znôrt]

I've been following the thread with interest since inception, a suggestion; don't get sidetracked by silly comments, the work shown here is very impressive.

indeed, admirable. i myself won't touch wine with a stick but hats off ... keep it up, guys!

 

[cpw]

Point is at both meetups (this was footage of one) I took part in people weren't dropping connection left,right & centre outside the normal disconnection rate of these expedition meetups. My presence there didn't ruin the meetup, multiplayer is one of the first things I wanted to play with as soon as this was possible and in most instances on Live neither myself or people in my instances have had an issue.

However I'm also curious of everyone else's experiences with multiplayer, have any of you had issues winging or instancing with windows users?

Please do share your own experience.

OK, so is this a fresh new scapegoat for FD then?

I haven't had a lot of shared instancing - I play mostly in PG (Mobius) and there's not normally a lot of people doing the silly stuff I like to do. I encountered a CMDR at some guardian ruins and there seemed to be nothing of note - I was definitely first on scene, so they would have been in my instance (I think that's how it works right?), and they achieved the mission without problems afaik.

 

[Darth Ender]

if wine is banned, it wont be because it can sometimes bug out and cause disconnections. It'll be because script kiddies have decided to use it to better cheat. Be it through intentional networking shenanigans or better/more support for easily scripting actions in the game and intercepting data through edited "system" libraries.

Some types of games can be played on anything and nobody cares. Other types of games need controlled environments to minimize cheating. This will come down to if one environment (wine) makes it easier or is basically the same as the accepted one (windows). Fdev never needs to "support" running the game in wine if the cheating issue turns out to be a non-issue. They'd just need to not do anything purposely to make it not continue to work. Then they get their port for free and can just use plausible deniability to refuse supporting it. Win win for them.

 

[cpw]

if wine is banned, it wont be because it can sometimes bug out and cause disconnections. It'll be because script kiddies have decided to use it to better cheat. Be it through intentional networking shenanigans or better/more support for easily scripting actions in the game and intercepting data through edited "system" libraries.

Some types of games can be played on anything and nobody cares. Other types of games need controlled environments to minimize cheating. This will come down to if one environment (wine) makes it easier or is basically the same as the accepted one (windows). Fdev never needs to "support" running the game in wine if the cheating issue turns out to be a non-issue. They'd just need to not do anything purposely to make it not continue to work. Then they get their port for free and can just use plausible deniability to refuse supporting it. Win win for them.

This is basically the strategy Blizzard used with WOW for many years. It's a good strategy, if the server is well written and doesn't trust the clients. Anything you can do in wine can typically be done in vanilla Windows as well, so it's not like Wine adds a unique attack vector.

 

[fuzzylunkinz]

Hey everyone!

We've had reports that the above "experiments" are causing some technical problems in-game. The issues aren't just happening for those playing Elite Dangerous on Linux, but also for players who end up in the same instance while playing on PC.

Just a reminder that Linux is not an officially supported platform, and we are currently investigating these issues. We wanted to let you know so you don't too much time on something that we can not support, and that could potentially change.

Thanks,

Ed

We are happy to help test anything. Look at all the work that's gone into it without support.

And if you can't trust us for business reasons, at least ask Valve.

Thanks

 

[fuzzylunkinz]

However I'm also curious of everyone else's experiences with multiplayer, have any of you had issues winging or instancing with windows users?

Please do share your own experience.

All I know is a fellow commander didn't have a problem kicking my butt in open play for the community goal .

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

if wine is banned, it wont be because it can sometimes bug out and cause disconnections. It'll be because script kiddies have decided to use it to better cheat.

That would be weird considering that everything you can do in wine you can do in Windows, considering cheating. Also Wine can't be truly banned, as it masks itself as Win32/Win64 dlls. What can be banned or detected client not doing what it should...which is something would be nice to get info on, so we can fix.

If someone will use Wine for exploits, FD will detect that and catch them.

 

[Darth Ender]

That would be weird considering that everything you can do in wine you can do in Windows, considering cheating. Also Wine can't be truly banned, as it masks itself as Win32/Win64 dlls. What can be banned or detected client not doing what it should...which is something would be nice to get info on, so we can fix.

If someone will use Wine for exploits, FD will detect that and catch them.

In general, wine implements it's own version of many system libraries, built from source potentially by anyone. If any of these libraries are used by the game, they may leak information not exposed by any other means. Anti-cheat tech that the game uses may not be able to detect such cheating, as it wouldn't look like cheating.

That's the kind of stuff you can do in an environment where the game is linking to things outside of it's control and outside of any trusted partner's.


edit: I'd imagine the game could crc check any linked libraries it's using and refuse to run or ban your account if it detects non-whitelisted versions of those files. If i was making a persistent online game, locking down as much of the environment the game runs on would be a fairly important first step in anti-cheat processes.

 

[wstephenson]

I've been following the thread with interest since inception, a suggestion; don't get sidetracked by silly comments, the work shown here is very impressive.

Exactly. We've had a very productive technical thread here to solve the problems. While we await clarification from FD (I think Ed was busy tonight, was he washing his hair?) could everyone please take the discussion to the Elite Dangerous for Linux thread, which has been a hotbed of operating system docking probe-waving, desktop partisanship, dubious statistics and general hot air for over 6 years now. It's over there.

May I suggest in the mean time that those of us who are using ED on Linux stick to Solo or an agreed private group (not Mobius) to minimise unwitting disruption to others' games?

 

[fuzzylunkinz]

May I suggest in the mean time that those of us who are using ED on Linux stick to Solo or an agreed private group (not Mobius) to minimise unwitting disruption to others' games?

I will be sticking to solo play for now. Not that I have anyone to play with . I just wanted to test to see if open play worked for me.

 

[cpw]

Exactly. We've had a very productive technical thread here to solve the problems. While we await clarification from FD (I think Ed was busy tonight, was he washing his hair?) could everyone please take the discussion to the Elite Dangerous for Linux thread, which has been a hotbed of operating system docking probe-waving, desktop partisanship, dubious statistics and general hot air for over 6 years now. It's over there.

May I suggest in the mean time that those of us who are using ED on Linux stick to Solo or an agreed private group (not Mobius) to minimise unwitting disruption to others' games?

I've been playing Mobius exclusively, as that's how I've always played. As noted earlier, I don't think I've caused problems to others, but I'm derpin around in odd corners of the galaxy, so I don't anticipate being a nuisance anyway.

 

[wootonius]

For Fedora 29 users out there, way to handle current gnutls issue is this:

1) Download gnutls previous release for Fedora 28 (http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fed.../os/Packages/g/gnutls-3.6.2-1.fc28.x86_64.rpm)
2) DO NOT INSTALL IT. Instead, use File Roller to open RPM and find libgnutls.so.30.20.2, and extract only this file in easy to access place;
3) Append this to command line when running EDLaunch
LD_PRELOAD=/location/of/libgnutls.so.30.20.2 WINEPREFIX=/edwineprefix wine64 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Frontier\EDLaunch\EDLaunch.exe"

I think this same issue is preventing me from opening the launcher on Ubuntu 18.04/18.10 does anyone know how to replicate this for a Debian/Ubuntu environment?

Thank you!

 

[cpw]

I think this same issue is preventing me from opening the launcher on Ubuntu 18.04/18.10 does anyone know how to replicate this for a Debian/Ubuntu environment?

Thank you!

Bionic has 3.5.18 of libgnutls30. Cosmic has 3.6.4. If you're on cosmic, you can probably force downgrade to the version in bionic. Alternatively, grab the version from bionic, unpack the deb and do the same LD_PRELOAD trick as above.

 

[Juniper]

Hey everyone!

We've had reports that the above "experiments" are causing some technical problems in-game. The issues aren't just happening for those playing Elite Dangerous on Linux, but also for players who end up in the same instance while playing on PC.

Just a reminder that Linux is not an officially supported platform, and we are currently investigating these issues. We wanted to let you know so you don't too much time on something that we can not support, and that could potentially change.

Thanks,

Ed

I feel a great disturbance in the force... as if a million voices suddenly cried out in terror, then were silenced.

 

[Flyinspaghetti]

I feel a great disturbance in the force... as if a million voices suddenly cried out in terror, then were silenced.

Let's see if we can turn Ed away from the dark side...

I've been playing Mobius exclusively, as that's how I've always played. As noted earlier, I don't think I've caused problems to others, but I'm derpin around in odd corners of the galaxy, so I don't anticipate being a nuisance anyway.

We still don't know any info, is this a result of a complaint a large number of people are having or is this something FD are seeing server side?

There's even a chance this is neither, could be a lone Windows user themselves having an issue with their own internet, the server itself having it own issues or even a malicious complaint from someone who doesn't like this success but FD have to check whether it's a thing.

Linux makes the obvious scapegoat though, but wouldn't we be seeing this sort of thing in every multiplayer game that uses peer to peer connections on Steam Play?

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I think we will just wait and see what FD will do. Hopefully they can share details if they really think there's issue at wine side. For now I will just continue to play ED under wine when appropriate.