Table des matières

Loki Software - HOWTO install & patch the games

This is a complement to https://twolife.be/loki/

Common workarounds

You are most likely running a Linux distribution on a shiny 64 bits CPU, that architecture is know as x86_64 or amd64 in the Debian world. The binaries you are trying to run are build for the i386 architecture (the classic 32 bits PC architecture). While the Linux kernel can handle 32 bits code, we need to install library packages for proper userspace support:

# dpkg --add-architecture i386
# apt-get update
# apt-get install libc6:i386 libsdl1.2debian:i386

Architecture detection

Most of the Loki installer/updater programs performs a check to see if your system is compatible with the game, ie: if you are not using an outdated system based on libc5 (the migration to glibc2/libc6 happened 25 years ago now).

But now your system is completely different, chances are the checked file doesn't even exist. Ex: on Debian/Ubuntu, /lib/libc.so.6 doesn't exist and we fail the test, so we need to create this file with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
# GLIBC_2.1
# GLIBC_2.2
cat <<EOF
GNU C Library stable release version 2.2.5, by Roland McGrath et al.

Report bugs using the glibcbug' script to <bugs@gnu.org>.
EOF

And don't forget to make it executable:

# chmod 755 /lib/libc.so.6

GTK+ 1.2

You probably know that GTK+ is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Loki's installer programs use GTK+ version 1.2. That version is very old and very much unmaintained (GTK+2 was released in 2002, GTK+3 in 2011 & GTK 4 in 2020).

If you can still find binaries of i386 GTK+1.2 libraries for your Linux distribution, you can install them, it's a nice bonus. The fallback is a simple CLI interface that have reasonable chances to works in all cases.

I maintain Git repository with functional/buildable-in-2024 GTK+1.2 (and GLib 1.2, one of it's dependency), if you really want to use the graphical installer.

The games

Other games from the same era

In 2000-2001 Hyperion Entertainment did port & release 2 more games of interest:

In 2000 Xatrix Entertainment released Linux binaries for their game