apt-get install

Well, there goes my free-time. I decided to finally get around to purchasing Neverwinter Nights. I’m always at least a year or two behind the Big Game (unless Erin is nice enough to buy one for me as a present). I’m also not a big RPG fan. Add those together, and you’ll understand why it took me so long to get around to NWN.

But that was then, this is now. I bought a used copy off eBay, then set off to find the Linux client installation package. Turns out that the install wasn’t quite as simple as I thought it would be. Fortunately, Bioware provides excellent instructions on how to install NWN in Linux. Interestingly enough, the Windows CDs are not used at all. Unlike, say, any of iD’s Linux clients, where the client installs, then ganks the resource files off the CDs, Bioware gives three choices to install in Linux. The first is a working Windows installation, the second is using the Gold edition of NWN (which includes the Linux resource files), and the third, interestingly enough, is to download all of the resource files from Bioware. That was a 1.2gb download, plus another few hundred megs to download the actual client and the patch to upgrade to the latest version. All told, I probably downloaded a gig and a half of NWN stuff.

After playing with the startup script and searching for an icon, I finally had everything installed. One click, and there was NWN in all its glory. And it runs damned well, too. That might be because I’m running a game written in 2003/2004 on hardware made in late 2005.
Anyway, I foresee NWN taking up a whole lot of my free time for the next few weeks. Who said you can’t game in Linux?