Was Gods Will Be Watching on the top sellers list ( it's on the 9th place atm ) before they added the Linux version ?

Fantastic news, cheers GOG :)

GoG, I f*cking love you guys

By the way, note that Civilization V Linux developers (Aspyr) said they can be open for adding GOG sales in the future:

http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/interview-with-aspyr-media-about-civilization-v-linux-gaming.4071 I hope GOG is aware of that and will have some talk with them.

Here are some other games that work for linux as well, just install using wine and that's it. That's the only time they will use Wine.

f117a nighthawk stealth fighter 2.0 http://www.gog.com/game/f117a_nighthawk_stealth_fighter_20

Strike Commander http://www.gog.com/game/strike_commander

Apache Longbow http://www.gog.com/game/apache_longbow

Apache vs Havok http://www.gog.com/game/apache_vs_havoc

Comanche vs Hokum http://www.gog.com/game/comanche_vs_hokum

all tested on Linux Mint 17

This is the most excellent news! Thanks, GOG! You're awesome people! :D

AWESOME! I can't wait to see what come out in the coming months!

That's not a Windows game - no need to use Wine. You can play it straight in DosBox. Some others you mentioned probably too.

IMO GOG should strive to provide Linux ports that work out of the box.

Nice one. Been looking forward to this day for a long time. :)

I do have some constructive criticism of the way the debs are put together. I hope in no way this deters you (GOG) from your great efforts into support for GNU/Linux systems – we all really appreciate it.

The debs are giving off some warnings. From the games I've tried so far:

chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-anomaly-warzone-earth*.desktop': Not a directory

chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-blake-stone-aliens-of-gold*.desktop': Not a directory

chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-dragonsphere*.desktop': Not a directory

cp: target `/home/lost+found/Desktop' is not a directory
chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-duke-nukem-3d*.desktop': Not a directory

chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-gemini-rue*.desktop': Not a directory

cp: target `/home/lost+found/Desktop' is not a directory
chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-rise-of-the-triad-dark-war*.desktop': Not a directory

It seems that the deb installer is trying to modify /home/*/Desktop/gamename.desktop, which is basically a no-no in GNU/Linux-land. You already have launchers under /usr/share/applications/ which puts icons on the menu. Packages should never touch the user's desktop on a GNU/Linux system. See http://askubuntu.com/questions/52800/adding-icons-to-desktop-after-package-installation for more details. In any case, "getent passwd | grep home | egrep -v 'nologin|false' | cut -d ':' -f 6" is a far more reliable way than "ls /home" which the support/gog_com.shlib script currently uses.

Blake stone also gave off warnings which probably relate to mishandling of whitespace (it probably shouldn't be using a * in a package anyway since the package should know what files it is managing):

chmod: cannot access `/opt/GOG Games/Blake Stone Aliens of Gold/docs/*': No such file or directory

I'm not sure if it's a bug or deliberate, but almost all of the permissions of installed contents under /opt/GOG Games are really insecure. Most directories are 0777 and most files are either 0777 (such as the dosbox binary and shell scripts) or 0666, which is a bit of a worry. Ideally directories would be 0755 and files 0644. The root:root ownership is correct. User preferences and configuration would then be stored in ~/.local/share/GOG/ which is unique to the user account.

I understand DOS games that expect R/W support everywhere might present some challenges, but unionfs-fuse is one way you could nicely solve that problem. eg.

$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/GOG\ Games/Blake\ Stone\ Aliens\ of\ Gold/data ~/GOG\ Games/Blake\ Stone\ Aliens\ of\ Gold/
$ unionfs-fuse -o cow "${HOME}/.local/share/GOG Games/Blake Stone Aliens of Gold/data"=RW:"/opt/GOG Games/Blake Stone Aliens of Gold/data"=RO ${HOME}/GOG\ Games/Blake\ Stone\ Aliens\ of\ Gold/

Then just use the data directory in ~/GOG\ Games/Blake\ Stone\ Aliens\ of\ Gold and since it's copy-on-write (and games will usually just be adding saves and config file changes) this should prove quite efficient. Fuse also nicely avoids the permission problems with normal mount commands.

A problem I encountered (on my Debian Wheezy system – not supported, I know) was that absolutely nothing happened when I clicked on the icon. This is because many of the binaries (such as DosBox) have been built using a much newer libc, so older distributions sadly won't work. However, it would be nice if this type of error was detected via the wrapper scripts and the error message printed in a pop-up. As it stands, one must run the program from the command line to have any idea what went wrong, which is not terribly user-friendly.

It's also worth noting that, since I already have dosbox installed from my distribution, I was simply able to replace the dosbox wrapper script with a symlink to /usr/bin/dropbox, and the DOS games worked just fine. It's an issue the other wrapper scripts could easily detect and solve automatically.

One final (minor) concern I noticed with the debs was that the package names differed from the file names. eg. anomaly_warzone_earth_1.0.0.1.deb installs the page gog-anomaly-warzone-earth, blake_stone_aliens_of_gold_1.0.0.4.deb installs the package gog-blake-stone-aliens-of-gold. This inconsistency could cause confusion, as "apt-get remove anomaly_warzone_earth" and similar won't work. If the "gog-" prefix is to exist on all package names, the files should also be named that way - it's convention.

I also have a suggestion – it would be nice if packages were signed, or at least had a SHA1SUM file available to download (preferably both actually). Since installing a deb generally allows the package full root privileges to the system, it would be nice to be confident that it had not been tampered with before running it.

Sorry for the long post. Thanks for providing GNU/Linux binaries. It's really nice to finally have a DRM-free native gaming option from a major publisher. Keep up the good work.

Do you really want to start that? I can go into detail on multiple reasons why it'll never be called "GNU/Linux" by anyone who matters, each capable of carrying the argument on its own. Here's just the short version:

1. Nobody who matters is going to use a name as unwieldy as "GNU/Linux". It's hard enough getting the average person to call it "Linux" rather than "Ubuntu".

2. It's not the correct expansion of "Runs on Linux". The detailed analogue to "Runs on Windows" or "Runs on MacOS X" is "Runs on X11/glibc/Linux" or "Runs on X11/Linux" and, sure enough, if you look in Firefox's User-Agent string, it says "X11; Linux".

(That's the reason Android and "Linux" binaries don't get along. Android uses a non-glibc standard C library named Bionic... but glibc, while important and provided by GNU, is a tiny part of a desktop operating system.)

3. Even if you include GCC (the compiler), which is a huge part of GNU's contribution to "Linux", most desktop distros don't, GNU still isn't the largest "userspace component". That's X.org (The X11 system) and GNU stuff is becoming more and more irrelevant to the average Linux desktop even among people who aren't actively trying to remove it to shut up GNU/Linux pedants.

If anything, it'd be more accurate to call the OS "FreeDesktop/Linux" since so many of the desktop standards are under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella... as are components like D-Bus.

Here are just a few examples of things that either are or will soon be on every desktop Linux distro and aren't GNU components:
- X11 (The graphical system. Sort of like a second kernel.)
- D-Bus (How desktop applications pass messages between each other and access many system services)
- The cron daemon (task scheduler)
- SystemD (The master process which coordinates startup and shutdown)
- All the stuff like PolicyKit that RedHat contributed to the modern Linux desktop
- Any desktop environment pieces not taken from GNOME

...and here are some things that are popular alternatives to GNU components while still producing a compatible system:
- BusyBox (Popular compact alternative to GNU coreutils. Stuff like bash, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, rmdir, etc.)
- llvm-clang (Popular alternative to the GNU C compiler since it catches more problems)

...not to mention that the Musl C library is working toward drop-in compatibility with glibc.

"GNU/Linux" is just Richard Stallman trying to claim undue credit for the free software ecosystem by lawyering the definition of "OS" as "What you need to build and run Emacs in a terminal (compiler included) and nothing more".

People don't say "Ubuntu/Linux" or "Android/Linux", nor do they say "MacOS X/Darwin". Saying "Linux" is sort of like saying "*BSD" or "The BSDs" but with more compatibility implied.

If Stallman wants people to call it GNU, he can put his money where his mouth is, rename the gNewSense distro to GNU, and attract enough of a user base to make it relevant. (Difficult to do when his hard-line stance against binary firmware blobs leaves so much hardware broken in gNewSense.)

Mint and Ubuntu are good choice for casual Linuxers. :) I am a mod of a general Linux forum and I usually recommend one of the two. Big communities, a lot of online reference and pretty good support. Also easy to start with and pretty straight-forward.

For more technical types or "do it yourselvers" I would recommend something else. :) I personaly use Slackware. I use Linux since 2001. Not as long as some people I know, but stil long enough so I can feel old. :)

Too old to rock'n'roll, too young to die. :D

@shmerl
http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/use_tux_icon_for_identify_gnulinux_available_games
http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/avoid_toolslibraries_duplication

Here are the wishlist items I created; and while i think that contact support can make them more aware of our wishes I think that is also thru community confrontation that great ides come out.