⚠: This thread is not kept up-to-date anymore, please go to the following one to get the latest links and instructions, or for any kind of feedback on the scripts:
[./play.it] Install The Witcher on Linux

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Hello fellow Debian users, Ubuntu lovers and Mint freaks!

Here you’ll find scripts allowing you to build a .deb package from your Windows installer for The Witcher. You can install it through DPKG and remove it through any APT front-end (apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, etc.).

Download links and usage instructions can be found on the following page:
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

I hope you’ll enjoy the comfort provided by these scripts as much as I enjoy writing and tweaking them ;)

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Here you go for more supported games!

Probably a silly question, but how do these scripts you write work, and what is the benefit over installing the game via PlayOnLinux or basic wine?

For instance, The Witcher was installed properly when I used a script with Playonlinux, and it seems to work perfectly.

(I'm using Mint 17.1)

That’s a question that comes a lot, I think I should write at some point a full description in English of the purpose of this project ;)

About the way the scripts work, it’s quite simple: the game data is extracted via innoextract (for The Witcher, other tools are used for other games), a bit re-organized, then packaged in a .deb package that you can install afterwards on any distribution that supports .deb packages.

Here goes a list of some of its advantages over a direct installation via WINE/PlayOnLinux:

_Package building works unattended even on a headless system, meaning you can use your machines at work to build the package and then transfer it on your own machine to install it ;)

_Once you built the .deb package you can keep it to have a way to install the game more quickly than via WINE.

_Game data is installed with read-only permissions, you can’t mess with it by accident.

_On multi-users systems, you just need to install the game once and it will work for every user.

_You can at any time reverse the game at its "freshly installed" state in a couple seconds, without the need to re-install it. It is especially useful if you like to tinker with lots of mods (I don’t know if it is pertinent for The Witcher).

_User-specific data is kept in directories in each user $HOME directory, directories you can easily copy between different systems without having to track down saves & settings files "by hand".

_Saves & settings are persistent, even if the original game did nothing to ensure this. This means you can uninstall the game to recover disk space, and if you re-install it later you will keep you saves & settings.

_Save & settings are per-user even if the original game doesn’t take care of this: each user of a same system can use different settings and a different set of saves without this changing anything for the other users.

_For some games (The Witcher included) some tweaks are applied on first run to make sure the game works as intended without the need for the user to worry about anything (PlayOnLinux does this too).

_Your system-wide installation of WINE is used (PlayOnLinux installs a new WINE version for nearly each and every game).

_Integration with your environment is seamless: once the game is installed you have no way to distinguish it from a game installed via the official repositories of your distribution.

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Any question you might have about all of this is welcome ;)

Thanks for that overview, it looks promising :)

One thing I wonder about is where it will be installed, whether it will be in / or /home by default, or whether I can install it elsewhere, including on a NTFS disk (I don't have lots of free space on a separate ext4 harddisk, because I have heaps of files there from the Windows days). I do have a smaller NTFS disk that only contained GOG-Linux installed Wasteland 2 for now, so could potentially convert this to ext4 without too many consequences.

Tried to run the script now, but ran into a problem. The files are located on an NTFS disk, if that matters.

http://pastebin.com/TzdeDzLr

It checked the .bin files but then ran into a snag by the look of things, because the rest took about one second. No file has been created. Is this because the .bin files are located on an NTFS system?

(This was after running sudo apt-get install fakeroot icoutils innoextract btw)

Looks like you need to install the 'realpath' package too. I didn’t list it because on Debian this tool is part of the 'coreutils' package that’s installed by default.

I think NTFS might be another problem, as you can’t set UNIX rights on files that are on a NTFS partition (it’s needed during some part of the package building).

The main error is the innoextract one: But I don’t understand what’s causing it.

I created a similarly named directory on my Debian, and it didn’t cause any problem to innoextract to extract the data from The Witcher installer in it.

If you want to try the script on another partition, you don’t actually need to move around the installers if you give the path to the .exe file to the script: -----

About installation path, it defaults to /usr/local/, but you can set your directory of choice instead like this:

Hi,i just tried to install by the link you gave at the top.Game is successfully installed.

But i have an issue.When i launch the game,at the main menu i got just a blank backgroun with New Game,Continue,Options and Exit types.

When i go in one of these menus the words are start overlap each other.And i can't a start a new game,because it says loading but nothing happens.

I think there is something with witcher1 wine cfg file.

when i start this from terminal it has a output.It says wine: cannot find L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winemenubuilder.exe"

I'm on Linux Mint 18 64 bit btw.

And one word for you GOG.COM,just do an Witcher Enchanced Edition Wine port,like Topware games did on so many old games.

We don't need a native port of OpenGL,just do a Wine port.

It looks like DirectX didn’t get installed on your first run of the game as it should have been.
Try the following command, while being connected to the Internet, then run the game again: ----- I support this ;-)

Here is my output.
WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wine/prefixes/the-witcher winetricks d3dx9_36
Executing w_do_call d3dx9_36
d3dx9_36 already installed, skipping

Hmm, it means that there is another issue, and I don’t see what it could be…

I’ll try to set up a Linux Mint 18 64-bit and install The Witcher on it when I have a bit of free time on my hands, to see if I can reproduce your bug.

Meanwhile you should open a dedicated thread for your issue to give it more visibility, with a title like "black menu background on Linux & new game loading forever". Maybe it will attract more people to help you.
Don’t forget to list as much info as possible about your system in your opening post (Linux version, GPU, graphics driver, WINE version, etc.).

Maybe you can get some help from the following thread too:
The "Judas™ does this run in Wine" thread v1.173

These are my screenshots.

The intro videos and Witcher logo and associated company logos page are normal.But main menu is a mess.

I will do it.Thanks for your help.:)

See https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=26114

It worked.Thanks:D

For anybody who suffers the same situation,just run it from terminal when you're connected to internet

WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wine/prefixes/the-witcher winetricks d3dx9_35

This problem is described in WiineHQ link above in the HOWTO section (Preventing black background / crash).

Thanks, I’ll edit the script to automatically apply this tweak on the first game launch.

hi :) i get this error message -> This script needs to be given the path to the archive downloaded from gog.com. (setup_the_witcher_enhanced_edition_2.0.0.12.exe)
how can I fix it? thank you