Resurrecting Heretic II
Recently I read a few reviews on Heretic II for Linux by Loki Software. These reviews spoke of having difficulty installing the game. So since I own and love that particular game and was bored I decided to figure out an easy way to install and run it.


Prerequisites:
We still on the same page so far? Excellent :-)

Heretic II is from an older era and expects older architecture on your Linux distro, so all we need to do is fool it a little.

  1. Become root (su root)
  2. Insert and mount your Heretic II CD
  3. Copy the entire CD onto a temporary directory (we'll say it's /tmpcd)
  4. Now we need to see what version of Glibc you have on your system. Easily done by typing "locate Glibc". You should see your version there somewhere  (/usr/doc/glibc-2.3.2 or such)
  5. Ok now cd /tmpcd/bin/x86/ you'll see a directory there named "glibc-2.1". What we are going to do now is create a symbolic link. Type "ln -s glibc-2.1 glibc-your_version" For instance if you have glibc-2.3.2 like me you would type "ln -s glibc-2.1 glibc-2.3.2".
  6. Next cd /tmpcd/setup.data/bin/x86 and do exactly the same thing as above. Now we are ready to install.
  7. CD /tmpcd/ and type sh setup.sh and walk through the prompts. Hint: the game runs without a cd if you let it install the movies.
  8. Next we should update the game to the latest version, a good place to do that is at http://www.3ddownloads.com/linuxgames/loki/patches/heretic2/ . The file you will want is "heretic2-1.06a-x86.run". Download it then cd to where you put it. Then "chmod +x heretic2-1.06a-x86.run". Then ./heretic2-1.06a-x86.run to update your game. Note: There are two other updates that I found but both seemed to cause game instability on my system. You can find them at: ftp://sunsite.dk/mirrors/lokigames/updates/heretic2/ use at your own risk :-)
  9. CD /usr/local/games/heretic2/gl_drivers/. Now here are some drivers from days past. First delete everything in this directory. Now we need to find your libGL.so. Type "locate libGL.so". In my case what I'm looking for is /usr/lib/libGL.so. So I make a symlink like so: "ln -s /usr/lib/libGL.so libGL.so".
  10. Unmount the CD (otherwise the game will keep trying to read it and slow down gameplay).
  11. As a non-root user run the game by typing /usr/local/games/heretic2/heretic2
Note: If the game does not run you may need to try this:"cd /tmpcd/bin/x86/glibc-2.1" and then "cp ./heretic2 ../" this brings the actual game executable up one directory. Then repeat step 7 through 11. Thanks to finklestein from Raven-Games forum :-)

That should do it. I'm happy to answer any other questions if I can email me at opensorce69 |at| yahoo.com.

-Shawn Peterman