All work and no play …

Makes Linux very dull indeed.

Well the Humble Indie Bundle has hopes of healing this problem, but there are some problems.

I bought the pack with the intent of using it only on my Win 7 PC with Steam.  But the Linux installers looked too good to be true.  They were, and they weren’t.  I tested just to see if they’d all run on the current LTS Ubuntu, Lucid, and I tried them on Oneiric, too.  Only Vvvvvv worked on Oneiric, and I gave up after just about all the others failed to install, much less work.  Don’t try the Bundle if you’re on the bleeding edge of Ubuntu.  I only checked the games to see if they loaded and played, this is not a review of the games; I only checked to see if they work, and are they playable on Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit.

Test system: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64 bit, i7-950, 6Gb RAM, Radeon 5780

Working,
*And Yet it Moves
*CaveStory+ – This unzips into a folder of your choice, you hunt down the icon and double click it to start (no apps menu icon is created)
*Cogs
*Crayon Physics Deluxe
*Gratuitous Space Battles – Unzips into a folder of your choice, you hunt down the icon and double click it to start (no apps menu icon is created)
*Jamestown – Unzips as a .bin installer
*NightSky – Unzips into a folder of your choice, you hunt down the icon and double click it to start (no apps menu icon is created)
*Shank – Game appeared to be running fine but it suddenly just dumped out to Gnome half way to the first boss. The second try got me to the first boss, though.
*Super Meat Boy – Works but requires and Xbox controller?
*VVVVVV

Not working,
*Bit.Trip.Runner – No icon after install. Running as user from terminal result in, “bit.trip.runner: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15′ not found (required by bit.trip.runner)”
*Hammerfight – There’s a huge amount of mouse calibration, before selecting the first mission. You are then taken to a mission history screen where you get stuck. No amount of clicking will move you forward. Worse, your mouse is captured, so you’ll have to Ctrl-Alt-F1 to a terminal, find the process and Kill -9 it. For me, this took several tries.  By the way, Hammerfight works on Win 7 Steam, but as in Linux, the mouse pointer gets lost, making menus unclickable (Alt-F4 to exit).