Hello Community,

I am trying to install a native game on linux, namely Fran Bow, but with not much success.

Usually I install games through lutris, but for Fran Bow (and not only) an error appears and I cannot proceed.

Following some online instructions, I downloaded Fran Bow straight from GOG, made the .sh file executable and apparently installed the game. But although the game icon appears in my desktop and I've given the permissions, when I click on it nothing happens. Literally nothing.

Any advice? I am really frustrated at this point.

If you are using a distribution based on Debian. Arch Linux or Gentoo, I would recommend giving a try to ./play.it, a packages generator for DRM-free games.

If you need more help to use it, feel free for ask for it in the dedicated thread: [./play.it] Install Fran Bow on Linux.

Just a guess, but system requirements say it requires some 32 bit libraries and your system may miss some of them.

The playit scripts vv221 suggested would take care of that, they build a standalone deb file you can just double-click to install a game.

In addition to that, this game requires some obsolete libSSL build.

Yeah Lutris is not that reliable.

The .sh file you launched was the installer. That seems to have run ok.

Find out the game executable the desktop icon is trying to launch, and where it is. You should be able to right click -> Properties or something like that.

You need to launch the game from the terminal, so you can see any error messages that are being produced.

Open the terminal.

cd to the installed directory, by default it's "/home/(username)/GOG Games/(the game name)"

then run the game executable by typing ./(executable-name)

Most linux file systems are case-sensitive, so make sure you have the executable name correct, usually it's easier to use tab completion - type in ./ followed by the first few letters of the executable, then hit the tab key once or a few times to fill in the name.

Once you manage to run the executable from the terminal then you will likely see whatever error is stopping the game from launching.

Oh, and you may need to actually set the file as executable.

Though it could be that GOG never updated the game with new 64 bit libraries. You could try deleting the libraries it came with (or hiding them in another folder) and see if it can run off system libraries.

If the linux installer doesn't work I would probably run the Windows version on Linux instead. Sometimes that's easier.

Hey, thanks a lot for the replies. I did not expect any to be honest!

I am on to work with the solutions proposed (just woke up). To answer a few things, my linux version is ubuntu, one of the latest (22.04 I think).

I made the desktop icon executable.

I do not recall lutris offering a windows version for this game. I have used the windows version instead of linux native in the past, with Witcher 2 if I remember correctly.

UPDATE

I finally downloaded the windows version from GOG and run the exe with an applications called notepad (wine.notepad) and it was installed and then playable.

For future reference, I have tried beforehand to find the executables in the GOG games folder. I found two, one called "start.sh" and one called "runner", but both returned the error "error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory". Also, Lutris indeed did not offer an option to install the windows version.

Thanks everyone for the help! Happy gaming!

GOG doesn't support Linux. The community does, however.

This is an error that you would have avoided by using ./play.it ;)

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GOG sells Linux support, no matter how bad it can be in practice.

Glad we could help in some way.

Appreciate all the work you do with play.it - wish I could use it myself, but it doesn't seem to work so well with Fedora. I messed around with alien trying to convert debs to rpms and had a hell of a time trying to get it to work.

Don't forget about annoying things like Mono wrappers, which are about as native as DOS executables.
Congratulations, you've found one of the outmoded SSL libraries that people were supposed to have stopped using a decade ago. The solution is not to install it, it was discontinued as a massive security flaw.

You could try nudging the publisher, developer, or GOG themselves, but I'm of the understanding that sticking your head in the ocean and yelling at a passing fish might be more effective.

RPM support is actually the oldest feature request still open we have: Add ability to build RPM packages.

I was planning to have it being the second supported package format, after the initial .deb-only releases. But due to a lack of contributions, this has not happened yet and we got support for Arch Linux instead, then Gentoo.

I got positive feedback from people using ./play.it for .deb generation, then converted them using alien, but this was a long time ago and it might not have been on Fedora but some other RPM-based distribution.

I am still wanting to get RPM support into ./play.it, but I am obviously not going to start using an RPM-based distribution myself so without someone willing to help by joining our team it will not go beyond wishful thinking ;)