proxymoron: Great stuff, guys. Very much appreciated.

I do wish Shadowrun Returns had been on the list though: I really do want to play it on my Linux laptop. (Is that the first, Y NO [GAME]? whinge? Sorry...)

Magnitus: PS: Seriously, you should talk with 2K about getting the old X-Com games here and "making them" Linux compatible. That would be awesome for all the retro fans.

Edelstoffl: Great news, but.....This means, I'll be able to download Linux vers of my purchased games from now on (like on Steam)- or do I have to purchase an extra Linux vers fpr my windows games?

Matruchus: One question - since OlliOlli was released yesterday why isn't there a linux version released yet ? As much as I know the game is available also in linux native version from the developer.

jalister: The GOG downloader is disabled for Linux. I do most of my downloading at work, which is on Windows. Any chance it can be enabled since the OSX version is still enabled for Windows users?

TheJoe: You're giving out tar archives so people can play GOGs on unsupported OSs. When are you going to put Windows games in zipfiles so people can play them on unsupported OSs?

TheJoe: What if I don't know what that is?

TheJoe: I have no prior concept whatsoever that gives me the slightest inkling of an idea that a GOG installer can be extracted in any other way than just being double clicked, therefore I cannot formulate an appropriate Google query.

What then, El Presidente?

shmerl: I guess the glaring lack of the Witcher 2 means that you are waiting for performance fixes from Virtual Programming as the usual GOG quality filter?-)

shmerl: See also some suggestions here: https://secure.gog.com/forum/general/gogcom_now_supports_linux/post281

I'm glad that you provide tarballs for those who don't want to use the package manager. Other than that, Ubuntu icon for "Linux" is a bit surprising as a preferential treatment when you already support Mint :) Adding Wine / DosBox / ScummVM etc. indicator would be quite useful as well.

Anyway, this is very exciting and I hope more native games are coming too. For example Torchlight isn't here and quite a number of other games which have native versions.

TheJoe: Google is blocked in my oppressive one-shrubbery state because its El Presidente is very particular about such things.

ET3D: Great! I've been meaning to start a new Linux experiment at some point (trying to use Linux for gaming), so that would certainly help. And now I no longer have an excuse to pick Steam for Linux support.

niky45: I love you guys. seriously.

but.... PLEASE. *try* to avoid those wine builds. they are better than nothing (of course), but... that is not real linux support. (I know that somethiimes is the only thing that can be done... and that wine is better than nothing... but no real linux user/fan would consider that actual linux support).

or at least, state clearly that it runs through wine. I mean, the first time I saw that a linux port worked under wine, I felt... cheated. Now I only feel sad.

boltronics: Nice one. Been looking forward to this day for a long time. :)

I do have some constructive criticism of the way the debs are put together. I hope in no way this deters you (GOG) from your great efforts into support for GNU/Linux systems – we all really appreciate it.

The debs are giving off some warnings. From the games I've tried so far:

chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-anomaly-warzone-earth*.desktop': Not a directory

chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-blake-stone-aliens-of-gold*.desktop': Not a directory

chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-dragonsphere*.desktop': Not a directory

cp: target `/home/lost+found/Desktop' is not a directory
chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-duke-nukem-3d*.desktop': Not a directory

chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-gemini-rue*.desktop': Not a directory

cp: target `/home/lost+found/Desktop' is not a directory
chmod: cannot access `/home/lost+found/Desktop/gog-rise-of-the-triad-dark-war*.desktop': Not a directory

It seems that the deb installer is trying to modify /home/*/Desktop/gamename.desktop, which is basically a no-no in GNU/Linux-land. You already have launchers under /usr/share/applications/ which puts icons on the menu. Packages should never touch the user's desktop on a GNU/Linux system. See http://askubuntu.com/questions/52800/adding-icons-to-desktop-after-package-installation for more details. In any case, "getent passwd | grep home | egrep -v 'nologin|false' | cut -d ':' -f 6" is a far more reliable way than "ls /home" which the support/gog_com.shlib script currently uses.

Blake stone also gave off warnings which probably relate to mishandling of whitespace (it probably shouldn't be using a * in a package anyway since the package should know what files it is managing):

chmod: cannot access `/opt/GOG Games/Blake Stone Aliens of Gold/docs/*': No such file or directory

I'm not sure if it's a bug or deliberate, but almost all of the permissions of installed contents under /opt/GOG Games are really insecure. Most directories are 0777 and most files are either 0777 (such as the dosbox binary and shell scripts) or 0666, which is a bit of a worry. Ideally directories would be 0755 and files 0644. The root:root ownership is correct. User preferences and configuration would then be stored in ~/.local/share/GOG/ which is unique to the user account.

I understand DOS games that expect R/W support everywhere might present some challenges, but unionfs-fuse is one way you could nicely solve that problem. eg.

$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/GOG\ Games/Blake\ Stone\ Aliens\ of\ Gold/data ~/GOG\ Games/Blake\ Stone\ Aliens\ of\ Gold/
$ unionfs-fuse -o cow "${HOME}/.local/share/GOG Games/Blake Stone Aliens of Gold/data"=RW:"/opt/GOG Games/Blake Stone Aliens of Gold/data"=RO ${HOME}/GOG\ Games/Blake\ Stone\ Aliens\ of\ Gold/

Then just use the data directory in ~/GOG\ Games/Blake\ Stone\ Aliens\ of\ Gold and since it's copy-on-write (and games will usually just be adding saves and config file changes) this should prove quite efficient. Fuse also nicely avoids the permission problems with normal mount commands.

A problem I encountered (on my Debian Wheezy system – not supported, I know) was that absolutely nothing happened when I clicked on the icon. This is because many of the binaries (such as DosBox) have been built using a much newer libc, so older distributions sadly won't work. However, it would be nice if this type of error was detected via the wrapper scripts and the error message printed in a pop-up. As it stands, one must run the program from the command line to have any idea what went wrong, which is not terribly user-friendly.

It's also worth noting that, since I already have dosbox installed from my distribution, I was simply able to replace the dosbox wrapper script with a symlink to /usr/bin/dropbox, and the DOS games worked just fine. It's an issue the other wrapper scripts could easily detect and solve automatically.

One final (minor) concern I noticed with the debs was that the package names differed from the file names. eg. anomaly_warzone_earth_1.0.0.1.deb installs the page gog-anomaly-warzone-earth, blake_stone_aliens_of_gold_1.0.0.4.deb installs the package gog-blake-stone-aliens-of-gold. This inconsistency could cause confusion, as "apt-get remove anomaly_warzone_earth" and similar won't work. If the "gog-" prefix is to exist on all package names, the files should also be named that way - it's convention.

I also have a suggestion – it would be nice if packages were signed, or at least had a SHA1SUM file available to download (preferably both actually). Since installing a deb generally allows the package full root privileges to the system, it would be nice to be confident that it had not been tampered with before running it.

Sorry for the long post. Thanks for providing GNU/Linux binaries. It's really nice to finally have a DRM-free native gaming option from a major publisher. Keep up the good work.