Installing Neverwinter Nights on Linux

This guide will take you through the steps involved in installing the roleplaying game Neverwinter Nights on Linux. It is loosely based on the Linux World site on the same topic but my guide is a bit more prescriptive. This guide will also introduce some simple system-administrator tasks along the way.

I installed Neverwinter Nights on RedHat 9, but this guide should be applicable to other Linux distributions. You will to have a 3D graphics card.

Before You Begin

Before you can install Neverwinter Nights, you will need:

The Neverwinter Nights Discs for Windows (all three),
The CD Key for the above discs,
The Ravage installer,
The latest Linux Client from Bioware, and
If they are not installed, you will need to install the SDL libraries that come with RedHat 9.

I will assume you have stored the Ravage installer and the Linux Client in the /tmp folder for easy access.

Prepare the System

You have to check that you have 1GB of free space in /tmp, otherwise the Ravage installer will not run. To do this, run df from the command-line, as follows.

bash$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5             35847560   4169420  29857176  13% /
/dev/hda1               101089     30072     65798  32% /boot
none                    256628         0    256628   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda2              1510060    172896   1260456  13% /var

If /tmp is not listed, you can assume that it is part of the root directory (/). The above example has over 29GB of free space in the root filesystem.

Finally, you have to make sure the user that is installing Neverwinter Nights has read and write permissions to the directory that will hold the installation. The easiest way to do this is to run the installer as the root user. To do this, type the following into a command-line.

bash$ su

Start the Ravage Installer

As we do not have Windows to copy the install off, we have to use the Ravage installer. The Ravage installer was compiled against a different version of the standard Linux libraries, but we can tell the installer the library to use by setting the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL environment variable as follows.

bash# export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5

Now start the Ravage installer, and change discs when prompted.

bash# cd /tmp
bash# sh nwn_129_linux_installer.run

After the Ravage installer has finished, you then can unpack the latest Linux Client from Bioware.

bash# cd /usr/local/games/nwn
bash# tar xfvz /tmp/nwclient129beta6.tar.gz

Fix the Install

Bioware supplies a handy little program to fix the install, and make sure everything is OK. Run this program next.

bash# ./fixinstall

I find that is helps to change the ownership of the files so the user who will most frequently use the program has ownership. The following changes the ownership of the install to the user mpj17; change the name as appropriate.

bash# chown -R mpj17 .

Run Neverwinter Nights

Now you can run Neverwinter Nights, after exiting as root.

bash# exit
bash$ ./nwn