Serious Sam The First Encounter on Ubuntu 10.10

Whilst having a hunt through some things that I had placed in storage a couple of years ago (and then forgot about) I happened across my original CD of Serious Sam - The First Encounter.

As this is one of the games where Loki games provided a proper Linux installer for it I thought I'd give it a bit of a blast.

Problem 1 - Tracking down the installer.

This should have been easy - ie. go to the Croteam website and download the installer, right?

Nope. They had some archived patches for a Linux installation, but not the damn installer - or if the do have it they've hidden it well.

I eventually tracked down the installer here:

Loki Installers for Linux Games

Problem 2 - Installation

So far, so good. Apart from the fact that the installer doesn't work (at least, not without some effort).

So here is a quick rundown on how to get the installer working.

First, move the installer into its own directory:

mkdir ssam
mv serious.sam.tfe_1.05beta3-english-2.run ssam
cd ssam
chmod +x serious.sam.tfe_1.05beta3-english-2.run


Make sure the original Windows CD is in your drive. And if you want you can try and run the installer.

./serious.sam.tfe_1.05beta3-english-2.run


If you are lucky it might work. If so then go, play, enjoy. See you later.

However, you may well find that you see the following:

Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Serious Sam: The First Encounter 1.05beta3-english-2 Installer.............................

after which you are back at the terminal prompt.

If this is the case, then you can try the following, which worked for me.

./serious.sam.tfe_1.05beta3-english-2.run --tar xvf
sudo ./setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/setup


And that should be it. The installer should run and you can choose where to install it and finally play the game!