Thank goodness gog is now supporting linux! I got spacechem running natively from the tarball with only minimal difficulty. I'm running fedora20, 64bit. I had the 32 bit libraries installed, but when tried to execute the "start.sh" script, a screen flashed up and immediately crashed. There was an error message

The game experienced an error. A report has been saved:
"$HOME/.local/share/Zachtronics Industries/SpaceChem/crashes/000.zicrash"

.zicrash are just zipfiles that can be unzipped.

the unpacked exception.txt reported

Exception:
System.DllNotFoundException: libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0
and then a bunch else.

So it couldn't find my 32bit libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0, even though it was in the "standard" place. resetting LD_LIBRARY_PATH on the command line allowed everything to run beautifully.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/ start.sh

and I was off to the races. Perhaps rpm support will come from gog, but for now, this is better than wine!

Wow! Cool, thank you for your time and effort. :) I have had the version offered by Humble Bundle for a while and it works on Ubuntu 12.04 (which gog isn't supporting). This is the version without Corvi DLC.

Later when I bought the version off of gog (that was before they officially offered Linux support) I tried getting the Corvi version to work under Linux. I did this because I noticed that there is in fact no native Linux version of SpaceChem.

If you open a terminal window, go to the folder where the game is actually stored in (wherever that is on your installation, I'm not certain) and type file SpaceChem.exe the system will return something like that:
SpaceChem.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386 Mono/.Net assembly, for MS Windows

It may not require Wine to run; it certainly requires Mono. It's not great performance-wise, but it's still better than nothing.

One other thing I noticed with the Debian-package offered by gog is that the control file within the package does not say anything about dependencies. That's not great, especially since it obviously is dependent on Mono, which in turn is not necessarily part of a standard installation.

We'll see ... but so far I'm not really impressed by Linux support by gog. The way they build packages for Windows wasn't encouraging to begin with and the Linux packages continue that picture. :( Still, better than nothing.

Might be worth sending in a support ticket about this.

Yes, you're probably right. Will do ... :)

I had a similar issue, on Arch Linux, but unfortunately the 32bit version of sdl mixer is not officially supportted (though available through AUR). Luckily, I do have mono and the 64bit dependencies, so I can just launch with:

'mono SpaceChem.exe'.

This may be an alternative to others in a similar scenario.

(Much thanks to the developers and GOG for supporting Linux btw!)

Thanks for posting this solution. I was struggling getting it to run on Debian Wheezy 32bit. The first problem was no glibc 2.15. I 'fixed' that by providing the binary version from an ubuntu .deb, then I ran into the crash due to the missing SDLmixer and after I installed it the game was still crashing elswhere in mono, indicating that something else is wrong with my libs.

That's when I found your post and after an
aptitude install mono-complete
I used 'mono SpaceChem.exe' and tadaaaa, works like a charm without all that library fiddling!