Linux

Ugh. Hard drive crash. Everything gone...

Ok, time to come up with a minimal Arch Linux install for EVE. Have a spare boot disk lying around?

(warning: Arch is a command-line centric distro, no GUI installer, not even a TUI installer, and you will be formatting your disk manually, but the Arch Wiki - https://wiki.archlinux.org- is (imo) better than nearly every other distros support site, so maybe it won't be so bad? Prepare for an adventure, start here, and don't skip stuff! :) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/installation_guide)

Once you have a running system, continue with these commands:

Setup ALSA audio:
# pacman -S pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa volumeicon pavucontrol

Rebooting is the best way to activate the audio system, so let's do a complete system update as well to make sure all packages are up to date:
# pacman -Syu
# reboot

Non-root user setup:
# useradd -m -g users -s /bin/bash everat
# usermod -a -Gaudio,disk,network,optical,power,storage,video everat

X11:
# pacman -S xorg-server xorg-server-utils xorg-utils xorg-xinit xbindkeys dbus

I run Radeon cards, Nvidia is also supported (but my instructions here may be lacking).. No need for proprietary video drivers, the open source 'radeonsi' runs fine. But to see what you have use:

# lspci | grep VGA

then match it to one of the ones listed here:
# pacman -Ss xf86-video | less

I choose this for Radeon cards:
# pacman -S xf86-video-ati (nvidia has several to choose from: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA)
# pacman -S mesa-libgl

And I needed this:
# pacman -S xf86-input-evdev

X11 fonts:
# pacman -S xorg-fonts-75dpi xorg-fonts-100dpi xorg-fonts-misc cantarell-fonts
# pacman -S opendesktop-fonts (if you want chinese characters)

And some extras we'll need:
# pacman -S wget
# pacman -S chromium (Chromium runs real well on Arch, but use what you want)

I use Openbox and Tint2 (minimalist that I am :)
# pacman -S openbox obconf tint2 xterm

my ~/.xinitrc

xterm -geometry 80x77+10+10 &
tint2 &
xmodmap .xmodmap
volumeicon &
openbox

Right click the volume icon, choose 'Status Icon', and set External mixer to 'pavucontrol' go get a nice graphical mixer panel)

my ~/.xmodmap (disables the caps lock key, makes it an extra ctrl key)

keycode 66 = Control_L
clear Lock
add Control = Control_L

So now the desktop works, login non-root and type:
$ startx



Ok, EVE specific setup:

First we need to turn on 32bit library support - no worries, Arch seems to play well with both 64 and 32 bit libs.
Edit /etc/pacman.conf and uncomment the two lines around '[multilib]' (not the 'testing' version). Then let pacman get the new repo:

# pacman -Sy

Next install these:
# pacman -S lib32-glibc lib32-libxext lib32-libldap lib32-zlib lib32-mpg123 lib32-openal lib32-libpulse llibxslt

And for Radeon/ATI:
# pacman -S lib32-mesa-libgl (nvidia I believe uses: lib32-nvidia-libgl)


Next we need to get the libpng12 libs (both 64 and 32 bit) which are not in the main repo. Since we need to compile these we'll need the 32bit version of gcc as well:

# pacman -S gcc-multilib (will ask you to replace gcc and gcc-libs)

I've been able to continue building 64bit apps with no problem after installing gcc-multilib, I believe swapping out gcc for gcc-multilib simply lets the -m32 compiler flag work along with the default -m64 flag.

AUR is the Arch User Repository that hosts packages maintained by users. Using AUR is easy: as your non-root user, visit the web pages for the packages you want (here they are https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libpng12 and
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lib32-libpng12) and click the "Download Snapshot" link on the right hand side. tar.gz files will appear in your ~/Downloads directory:

$ mkdir ~/aur
$ cd ~/aur
$ tar xzf ~/Downloads/libpng12.tar.gz
$ cd libpng12
$ makepkg

makepkg downloads the necessary source and compiles and builds the package. Then install it with pacman:

# pacman -U ~everat/aur/libpng12/libpng12-1.2.56-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz (or whatever name it has)

Then do the same for the lib32 version:

$ cd ~/aur
$ tar xzf ~/Downloads/lib32-libpng12.tar.gz
$ cd lib32-libpng12
$ makepkg

# pacman -U ~everat/aur/lib32-libpng12/lib32-libpng12-1.2.56-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz


Now grab the evelauncher:

$ cd ~/Downloads
$ wget https://binaries.eveonline.com/evelauncher-1043593.tar.gz
$ cd ~
$ tar xzf evelauncher-1043593.tar.gz

and run it:
$ evelauncher/evelauncher.sh

If I haven't forgoten anything, everything should work except text in the Market Browser History tab... to get text to appear there we need to run winetricks on the .eve/wineenv directory. We can install winetricks without the Arch wine system with:

# pacman -Sdd winetricks

but it also needs:
# pacman -S cabextract
# pacman -S lib32-freetype2 lib32-libxft

Then exit the evelauncher and:
$ WINESERVER=.eve/wine/bin WINE=.eve/wine/bin/wine WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.eve/wineenv winetricks corefonts

Restart evelauncher, login again, all should be good.


The Arch guys are constantly updating stuff so this guide will likely become obsolete in a few months - but hopefully it places a stake in the sand to document some of the specific install issues with EVE. And remember to run 'pacman -Syu' before you shutdown the machine every few days/weeks to keep up to date on security fixes.

Very nice instructions! Thanks!

You can use packer to install the lbpng12 stuff, so you don't have to bother with the compiling.

Also gnu-multilib doesn't exist, but wasn't needed neither.