Since it's missing in many distros already, they should have bundled it to begin with.

is it?
it is still being available in gentoo, arch, fedora, opensuse (and as said before the current ubuntu LTS) afaik.
It's unfortunate that debian only finally got around to updating from 1.2 to 1.6 after 5 years and immediately dropped 1.2.
and that happend just shortly after the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release iirc
but that's life in linux land ;)

btw. libpng 1.2 still receives security updates (the last one december 2016), you could make the argument that relying on a distro package is better than bundling the library.

but anyway, since GOG tracks Ubuntu which tracks debian they probably won't get around bundling the library at some point. I just meant to say you can hardly throw any blame at GOG or Frozenbytes for being "out of date" at this point.

Distributing proprietary, binary packages on Linux simply sucks. Has always and probably will continue to do so.
embrace the pain ... :)

Forzenbyte could use libpng 1.6 as well. They even mentioned that they planned to. But they aren't very attentive to updates of their GOG releases to begin with. Some games weren't updated here for a long time, even though they got bug fixes on Steam. So I wouldn't count on such games getting updates several years after release.

Libraries can be a mess, but in cases like this (when some distros have the library, and others don't have it at all), bundling is the only sane way to do it. But they need to monitor this situation, and most Linux releases aren't doing it.

Hi all,

So I've finally taken the plunge into Linux with Mint and so far, I am pleasantly surprised. However, I went to install a GOG game (downloaded Linux version) and double clicked on the icon and it's saying it can't open the file and it's pointing me to a text editor (Gedit maybe?)

What have I done wrong?

Welcome to the penguin club :-)

Right click on your setup file > go to properties > Permissions > Tick the"Allow executing file as program". Game should now install.

In Linux many files can be used as an executable. An "sh" file (for short shell script) for example is normally wrote in a text editor, that's why it opened your text editor.

It's also part of the constellation of features that help to limit the ability to exploit users by social engineering.

(Other examples include never hiding file extensions, not displaying embedded icons in executable files and, in Nautilus, displaying a "please right-click and explicitly pick and application" error dialog if the file's extension doesn't match the type returned by header detection.)

Hi, thanks for replying.

I've checked the box and double clicked on the program again but it comes up with a message saying "Could not open Shadowrun....xed has not been able to detect the character encoding"

I can't believe I'm having this much trouble installing a game :(

Am I missing an application and that's why it's not finding the correct file association?

Any ideas?

What desktop environment are you using, Cinnamon? Looks like instead of executing, your file manager tries to open it with xed?

Try to right click on the file and see if there is an option "execute" or "run" or anything like that.

Hi,

No run or execute option in the right click menu. It says the following:

Open with xxxxx
Open with
Send To
Cut
Copy
Move to Wastebasket
Delete
Rename
Create a Link
Create Archive
Properties

And that's all.

I'm not familiar with Cinnamon's file manager, but try figuring out, why association is messed up (may be in Open with ... selection). Also, may be the file is corrupted? Check if you downloaded it properly.

As a workaround for now, open your terminal, and navigate to the directory where you saved the file:

cd /path_to_your_directory

Then run it like this:

./name_of_the_file.sh

Interesting. Can you please post exact output (both ls and error message when you do cd)? Are you sure it's downloads and not let's say Downloads? File names are case sensitive.

I didn't realise file names are case sensitive, but it hasn't made any difference as far as I can tell.

Thanks for your efforts. I'm going to install Ubuntu and try that instead - see if I can't get more joy. I'd heard that Mint was more user-friendly, but I'm not seeing it.

Really frustrated, because online, they appear to echo what you're saying, yet for some reason, it's not happening on my laptop.

Going to try Ubuntu and see. I haven't lost anything, so I'll give that a go. Thanks again.

Not to scare you or anything but with Ubuntu you're going to have a harder time than Mint. If you want add me as a friend and I'll guide you in chat step by step for the installation :-)

No problem. Since you didn't post your output, it's hard to understand what's going on. I think Mint should be friendly enough. If something is misconfigured, it should be fixable. You shouldn't be scared of that.