Hi everyone!

Just want to share experience of running Xenonauts on Ubuntu 18.04. When you install libSDL2

sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0:i386

and then start the game from a terminal (./start.sh) you will get an error message regarding dbus, it will have something like this: "assertion "path != NULL" failed in file dbus-message.c line 1362". It looks like at the time of writing SDL2 package for bionic had a bug. So I decided to reinstall SDL2 from another repo and chose Xenial (16.04 LTS) distribution for that purpose. The steps were the following:

1a. Remove current version

sudo apt remove --purge libsdl2-2.0-0:i386

1b. Clean a bit (not necessary)

sudo apt autoremove

2. Add Xenial repo (I believe you need only "universe", but no harm in adding the other two)

sudo apt-add-repository "deb http://ru.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial main restricted universe"

(ru.archive.ubuntu.com is the closest for me, for you it may be different; just copy that part from bionic repo in file /etc/apt/sources.list)

3. Update

sudo apt update

4. Detect exact version

apt-cache madison libsdl2-2.0-0:i386

In my case the output was:
libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 | 2.0.8+dfsg1-1ubuntu1 | http://ru.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/universe i386 Packages
libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 | 2.0.4+dfsg1-2ubuntu2 | http://ru.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe i386 Packages

5. Install xenial version

sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0:i386=2.0.4+dfsg1-2ubuntu2

And that's it! The game ran smoothly after that. Hope this post was somewhat helpful.

Thank you for your solution, it saved me time :)

An even simpler way to do this is to download the deb directly here :

https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/libsdl2-2.0-0

A deb file is a simple archive, you can extract it somewhere, and extract the data.tar.xz inside it.

Then you go inside usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu and copy-paste the two libraries ( libSDL2-2.0.so.0 and libSDL2-2.0.so.0.4.0 ) to Xenonauts/game folder.

You can thus preserve the 18.04 version of this library installed in your system.

Yeah, I think your solution is better as you don't interfere with the system and localize all the actions to the game directory. And it's really simpler, just download and extract. Good one, thanks for sharing!

Works flawlessly, thank you guys