I welcome these new installers, since I dislike installing non-FLOSS games on root, and because we finally can install Lucas Arts/Disney games without .deb.
Thanks.

So far, GOG seems to be sticking to their old "Linux install process just copies the game into place and generates a launcher icon" pattern, so using my script with --mojo to unpack them like archives works.

(Not surprising. Before games got big enough to require compression and copy protection got nuts, Windows CD-ROM installers basically just copied a folder from the CD to the hard drive and set a registry key or two so the game knew where to look for the stuff left on the CD.)

...and since my script is pure Python 2.x, depending only on the standard library, it should work on any processor architecture you please. (Though I haven't yet tested the fallback chain for Zip decompression so please let me know if it breaks on systems where a lack of p7zip causes it to fall back to unzip or the Python stdlib zipfile module.)

To be fair, you can open up a .deb file in any Linux GUI archive tool and manually extract a game folder identical to what would have been put in a tarball. file-roller will even hide the fact that .deb files are two archives within a parent archive and just show you the contents of the correct inner archive.

I was aware of this workaround, but I am pretty sure that companies like Disney wouldn't be happy knowing that the EULA inclusion in the installer wouldn't be noticed like that. IIRC, there weren't tarballs for Lucas Arts games here.

I hope that the new installers will increase the rate of Linux ports concerning publishers wanting specifically EULA in installers. Maybe they were relunctants because of tarballs.

And ITOH, such distro-agnostic installers are way more useful for GNU/Linux beginners, using not necessarily Debian based distros (obviously, in some cases they could need some help).

This is awesome.

Biggest issue for windows to linux users is not having an exe equivalent to install games/software. The deb installers worked for this too but is now awesome to have a distro agnostic version.

My big wish is if it could also automagically resolve dependent libraries. Took me 2 hours for my first game till I learnt they were on the games page.

Why Python 2 rather than 3?

Just to be clear, commercial games can still be open source. I.e. the engine is open, and artistic assets are not. Then you could still compile it, but without platform independent assets won't have a working game. It's an ideal case for commercial games, but it's not very common either.

For the reference, it's exactly the case with ScummVM with game assets, or AGS with game assets and so on. There are such games on GOG too ;)

I.e. ScummVM doesn't emulate stuff like DosBox - it reimplements game engines, and uses resources from actual games to run them.

And about AGS - that's why I was able to run the Heronie's Quest on Linux even though they didn't have an official release. You could just build AGS and run it with game resources.

To paraphrase the README file, I developed for Python 2.x first because it was easier, then ran out of time butting heads against "Python 3's shlex requires Unicode input, makeself stores one of the offsets as a line count, and that must be resolved using the assumption that line-endings are a single '\n' and characters are of fixed 8-bit size."

I ran out of time shortly after I realized I needed to look up how to:
1. Write "open a text-mode file handle" code which works in both Python 3 and Python 3
2. Force UNIX-style line endings, regardless of platform for portability (always something I aim for)
3. Parse out the offsets, then reopen the file in binary mode so they can be resolved as bytes rather than characters

I must say that it was nice seeing so many staff members on this thread. I guess they were "on call", to avoid a possible rebellion.

At least it seems that GOG is not totally dismissive of Linux users.

http://www.gog.com/forum/shadowgate/linux_version_doesnt_start

I'm posting this here because there seem to be many Linux users in this thread and support staff as well. I would be very grateful if anyone can help me. Thanks!

Clean install, downloaded a load of other new Linux installers and this was the only game which didn't work. (I have no mouth, Primordial, Legend of Grimrock, Door Kickers, AI war, etc.)