Oblivion Mod talk:Linux

[Note: After leaving up this proposal for about 3 weeks, I've edited it's contents into the main page -- john.moonsugar]

---

I propose a complete rewrite of this page, because there is a much easier and less error prone method for installing mods.

Basically, download any windows unarchiver program. I use 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org/), or peazip (http://peazip.sourceforge.net/) which are both free, install it as you would any normal wine program under the same WINEPREFIX as your oblivion: e.g. something like:

wine 7z458.exe

and the use it, NOT any Linux based unarchiving tool, and any case-sensitive issues go away, as these tools run under wine and perform their duties without respect to case sensitivity.

Some tips:

1) Write a wrapper script for the windows version of 7-zip:

#!/bin/bash
# run windows 7z.exe from where it is installed, the following shows the default
wine $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program\ Files/7-Zip/7z.exe "$@"

Put that in a file, call it "win7z", make it executable with "chmod +x win7z", put win7z in your $PATH, and now you can run the windows version of 7-zip from the command line, very easy.

2) Look in the archive first:

win7z l arc.7z

If the mod has some top level directory like "MyMod 1.0/Data/Meshes/...", then you have 2 options, use symlinks or repack the archive, after which you can just unpack directly in the Oblivsion/Data/ directory. To use symlinks in this case, cd to Oblivion/Data, type:

ln -s . "MyMod 1.0" ; ln -s . Data

Now if you unpack the archive in Oblivion/Data, the files will go in the right place. If that isn't to your liking, then unpack the archive in a temp directory, cd into its Data directory, create a new archive of the files there, and the new repacked archive will unpack in Oblivion/Data flawlessly.

3) If you have used Linux based commands to install files into Oblivion/Data, you may very well have introduced problems, as Linux filesystem is case-sensitive while Windows is not. (This Meshes/ and meshes/ could both exist under Linux, and this would definitely cause problems. To find out if you hae any problems with files that would shadow each other under Windows, use the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash
# Execute this script in the Oblivion/Data directory.
echo "checking for directory conflicts in Data ..."
find . -type d | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | grep -v '^  *1 '
echo "checking for filename conflicts in Data ..."
find . -type f | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | grep -v '^  *1 '
echo "Done"

This will list any files that will conflict due to having more that one instance (e.g. Meshes/ and meshes/).

I'll update this page with this information if no one objects. John.moonsugar 15:22, 13 July 2008 (EDT)

Wine Explorer

It seems that for some time in 1.3 there's a new Wine Explorer (run via wine explorer in terminal). I just copied a few mods (extracted normally under Linux) and it replaced all correctly. Seems like a very easy way, even if the current explorer is very primitive - not even shortcuts are available. 78.102.164.9 13:46, 2 September 2011 (UTC)