Got this to work natively on Linux. Serious kudos to cpw; he did most of the work. Anyway, here's what you need to do.
- Unpack Aurora somewhere. I'm going to refer to it as the basedir from here on out, but I don't care where it is.
- Make sure you have a functional Mono implementation. Explanation of that is outside the scope of this post.
- Unpack the provided AuroraLinuxLibs.zip in your basedir. This will place libSQLite.Interop.so, SQLite.Interop.dll, System.Windows.Forms.dll and System.Drawing.dll files into your basedir. The first three are critical, System.Drawing.dll contains custom handling to deal with how Steve has concatenated certain strings having to do with graphics files.
- Run Aurora with the command MONO_IOMAP=all mono Aurora.exe from the basedir. Trying to run from somewhere else causes it not to be able to connect to the DB.
If you have trouble with long date formatting, e.g. in the research window, you can add
LC_ALL=C to the command to use a different date format.
Because Linux does not have access to Microsoft Fonts and something Steve does in drawing windows is very sensitive to exact dimensions, some people have experienced strange wrapping issues or cutoff issues in places like the system view sideframe, the research panel (being unable to select between Complete and Availble projects), the Class Design view (inaccessibility of some tick boxes like the one to mark a design as obsolete), and possibly a few other areas. To address this, we've added new environment variables for Mono to read to set new fonts and scaling parameters: FONT_NAME, FONT_SIZE, SCALEHACKX and SCALEHACKY. Since there are many different display possibilities that exist, you will need to find specifications for these variables that work for you. However, here are a couple of examples that have been reported to work well for some users to get you started:
FONT_NAME="Cantarell" FONT_SIZE=7.5 SCALEHACKX=1.0225 SCALEHACKY=1.01
FONT_NAME="Roboto Condensed" FONT_SIZE=9 SCALEHACKX=1.05 SCALEHACKY=1.05You will of course need to have your selected font installed, but installing fonts on Linux is also outside the scope of this post.
So, putting it all together, running Aurora might look like:
FONT_NAME="Cantarell" FONT_SIZE=7.5 SCALEHACKX=1.0225 SCALEHACKY=1.01 LC_ALL=C MONO_IOMAP=all mono Aurora.exe(I recommend creating an alias once you've found parameters with which you are comfortable.)
Note: DO NOT attempt to change your race picture, ship picture, spacestation picture or flag from inside the game. It either simply won't work, or may cause errors. Either accept the random chosen pictures you get when you create a new race, or, since Steve has been magnanimous in leaving the database unlocked, you can manually change the relevant entries in the
FCT_Race table in
AuroraDB.db. Instructions on how to manage an SQLite database are also outside the scope of this post.
For me this appears to work better than WINE, in fact.
Edit: Fixed the Selection Listbox issue and a critical font-scaling issue that was cutting off parts of the UI. (Note for posterity: this all involves changes to Mono and does not touch anything of Steve's.)
