MX Linux Forum

Since qupzilla won't download games that use apt, I used the wget command to download a game. Now that it's downloaded, how do I put it into the 'Games' heading in the menu? and how do I get it to work - there's no README that I can find. Any advice/help would be appreciated.

This makes no sense to me:

--What does "qupzilla won't download games that use apt" mean? I'm sorry, but do you understand at all how packages are handled?
--Why do you show a list of images? What does that have to do with the question I don't understand?

My advice: read the Users Manual Section 5! You generally get and install packages with MX Package Installer or Synaptic. Once installed, they show up in the menu.

Please, when you ask for help, help us help you by providing more details of what you did, such as providing links. I suspect you are still using the Windows model of getting software from websites, and Linux versions there are very often just the source code, not compiled, ready-to-run programs.

But in the case of gnome-freecell, that's one in a collection of GNOME solitaire games already in the repo as the aisleriot package. I know the name is not intuitive, but you can search for "freecell" in the Synaptic package manager and it will show you that.

That game is installed by default, buddy!

Beginner myself, but maybe I can help.

To run that card game that is already installed on your system, go to MX menu (whisker menu) and type in "aisle" and you will see "AisleRiotSolitaire" card game, that you can play.

But, there is one really cool card game you may want to check out, it comes with over 1000 different card games. Go again to MX whisker menu (or whatever is it's name) and type in it "mx pack" and run MX Package Manager. Then click on "Full App Catalog" tab and then select "Stable Repo" once it is loaded, type in search box on the right side "pysol" and install first hit "pysolfc" and you will have more card games you can care for

And then there's the KDE RISK boardgame clone ksirk (which grabs about 170MB of KDE Library files, but hey, if you're into any other KDE apps such as kate, krita, kalzium, kalgebra, or kdenlive, why not?).

Now I could be wrong but I think from the other slimming thread that the idea behind the question is how to install one game from a game pack...? to which the attempted answer was to download said game from outside of the repo. Likely as it is not quite clear how to select one outside of the pack when using the repo.

Jerry3904 wrote:This makes no sense to me:

--What does "qupzilla won't download games that use apt" mean? I'm sorry, but do you understand at all how packages are handled?
--Why do you show a list of images? What does that have to do with the question I don't understand?

My advice: read the Users Manual Section 5! You generally get and install packages with MX Package Installer or Synaptic. Once installed, they show up in the menu.

Well Jerry, it means just exactly what it says - for instance I went to sourceforge and tried downloading a couple of games, one of which (FreeCell) came back with a message box that said it wouldn't download an apt game (or some such wording) in other words, I couldn't download it! When I did download a freecell game, I couldn't find it using 'find' so I used 'locate' and that was the output in the terminal. I don't like synaptic, or the package managers, I prefer wget if I'm downloading from a website and apt-get if I'm downloading from the repositories. That's the way I was taught in years past, and so now that I'm back to using Linux, that's the way I prefer to do it nowadays. If that's a problem, all you have to do is say so. I guess I'll just have to figure out these things on my own if it's going to cause heat on the forum. I'll try not to ask anymore dumb questions .... Thanks.

Stevo wrote:Please, when you ask for help, help us help you by providing more details of what you did, such as providing links. I suspect you are still using the Windows model of getting software from websites, and Linux versions there are very often just the source code, not compiled, ready-to-run programs.

But in the case of gnome-freecell, that's one in a collection of GNOME solitaire games already in the repo as the aisleriot package. I know the name is not intuitive, but you can search for "freecell" in the Synaptic package manager and it will show you that.

Stevo - I had aisle riot, and deleted it ... I didn't need a bunch of games that are a waste of space. I just wanted Freecell!

Jerry3904 wrote:That game is installed by default, buddy!

See my answer to Stevo, Thanks

I just couldn't make any sense of it.

Buck Fankers wrote:Beginner myself, but maybe I can help.

To run that card game that is already installed on your system, go to MX menu (whisker menu) and type in "aisle" and you will see "AisleRiotSolitaire" card game, that you can play.

But, there is one really cool card game you may want to check out, it comes with over 1000 different card games. Go again to MX whisker menu (or whatever is it's name) and type in it "mx pack" and run MX Package Manager. Then click on "Full App Catalog" tab and then select "Stable Repo" once it is loaded, type in search box on the right side "pysol" and install first hit "pysolfc" and you will have more card games you can care for

@ Buck - See my answers to Stevo and Jerry, Thanks

azrielle wrote:And then there's the KDE RISK boardgame clone ksirk (which grabs about 170MB of KDE Library files, but hey, if you're into any other KDE apps such as kate, krita, kalzium, kalgebra, or kdenlive, why not?).

Nope, just freecell, Majong, and Shisen-Sho, but thanks anyways

antiX-Dave wrote:Now I could be wrong but I think from the other slimming thread that the idea behind the question is how to install one game from a game pack...? to which the attempted answer was to download said game from outside of the repo. Likely as it is not quite clear how to select one outside of the pack when using the repo.

Dave, at least you understood! I guess I didn't make it clear enuff. That's exactly what I was doing, when I couldn't get it from the Debian or MX repos, I had to go on the net and find a stand-alone version of the games I wanted, not download 200 or 300 Mb of junk I had no interest in, just for the sake of having 2 or 3 games I like to play. Thanks, you did a good job of figuring out what I didn't word correctly.

Jerry3904 wrote:I just couldn't make any sense of it.

Sorry, it made sense in my head, but then, I've never been the best communicator, just ask my wife of over 50 years!

If the developers of a games package make them all work and depend on one another in one pack, it may not be possible to extract just a part or a single game from it, and make it run. You''ll need to know enough about the program, programming, and packaging.

https://www.google.com.sg/search?q=linu ... uiX57qqvAJ

From what I can see from those search results, even if there are individual programs that run just freecell, be prepared for stuff that looks different or ugly, or which are no longer maintained and so does not work on the current version of Debian.

If you can't find something suitable, I guess you have to ask yourself, is it worth it to "download 200 or 300 Mb of junk I had no interest in, just for the sake of having 2 or 3 games I like to play" or to forego the 2 or 3 games just to save 200 or 300 mb.

bierhundt wrote:I used the wget command to download a game...

You really do need to read up on making Package Requests, from the manual and this forum.

Because once you found what you thought was a potential standalone freecell linux game, what you could have done was to make a package request in the appropriate subforum, provide the link from which you tried to download said game, and let the packaging team tell you whether the game could be packaged to run with MX17.

qupzilla won't download games that use apt

Users coming over from Mint or Ubuntu may have grown accustomed to having https://launchpad.net/apturl installed on their system.
IIRC, it registers a mimetype handler with compatible browsers, so that clicking an apt:// hyperlink results in OpenWith(gDebi, or somesuch)

Here's an example bug report where a user is explaining the expected behavior (er, expected result):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1453576

The availability and use of the apt-url mechanism is a fine example of "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
(likelihood of introducing system instability / breakage due to incompatible libraries, prospect of downloading malware...)

If you have the package installed or downloaded and extracted you could run ldd against the game's bin file. This will tell you what it exactly needs for library files. Everything that the command lists you can copy to a folder to back it up. Then you can delete the pack it came from and either build a deb file to install it or manually copy the files back. You may also need to copy some extra files that would not be in the list. For example the .desktop file from /usr/share/applications so it will show in the menu and maybe some help files. You may desire to run the locate or find command to see if there are any similarly named files that you would like to keep before removing the package.

Edit this is assuming that they are not already separately packaged in the repo and just packaged into one deb because it is easier for the game maintainers.

Since any particular game is just a set of rules, which takes up very little disk space when reduced to machine language, the vast percentage of space used by any card game is going to be the graphics plus any sound files, such as the card designs. So all the games in aisleriot are going to share those resources between themselves, and you are only saving a tiny bit of disk space by not using it instead of some hypothetical standalone gnome-freecell. Which is only distributed as part of aisleriot, BTW, since no sane developer would do it any other way.

asqwerth wrote:If the developers of a games package make them all work and depend on one another in one pack, it may not be possible to extract just a part or a single game from it, and make it run. You''ll need to know enough about the program, programming, and packaging.

https://www.google.com.sg/search?q=linu ... uiX57qqvAJ

Yeah, that's definitely NOT me

From what I can see from those search results, even if there are individual programs that run just freecell, be prepared for stuff that looks different or ugly, or which are no longer maintained and so does not work on the current version of Debian.

If you can't find something suitable, I guess you have to ask yourself, is it worth it to "download 200 or 300 Mb of junk I had no interest in, just for the sake of having 2 or 3 games I like to play" or to forego the 2 or 3 games just to save 200 or 300 mb.

That's what I finally figured out .... now it's down to two games ;>).

asqwerth wrote:

bierhundt wrote:I used the wget command to download a game...

You really do need to read up on making Package Requests, from the manual and this forum.

Because once you found what you thought was a potential standalone freecell linux game, what you could have done was to make a package request in the appropriate subforum, provide the link from which you tried to download said game, and let the packaging team tell you whether the game could be packaged to run with MX17.

Well, I didn't see that when I skimmed the manual. I'm down to two games, (I may just d/l Aisle-riot as Stevo suggests in a post a couple of posts down, becuz I suspect that no one is going to make up a package for just one request, so I'll pass. Thanks

skidoo wrote:

qupzilla won't download games that use apt

Users coming over from Mint or Ubuntu may have grown accustomed to having https://launchpad.net/apturl installed on their system.
IIRC, it registers a mimetype handler with compatible browsers, so that clicking an apt:// hyperlink results in OpenWith(gDebi, or somesuch)

Here's an example bug report where a user is explaining the expected behavior (er, expected result):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1453576

The availability and use of the apt-url mechanism is a fine example of "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
(likelihood of introducing system instability / breakage due to incompatible libraries, prospect of downloading malware...)

I've never used Mint, and Ubuntu never worked well for me, but that was in the 'old days.' Wget always worked well for me back in those days, so I just used it without trying to research any difficulties that it may have. I've never heard of the apt-url mechanism, so I wouldn't have tried it. I wouldn't think that SourceForge would have any malware in their downloads, but it's been a few years since I d/l'ed anything from them. They used to have a sterling reputation. Thanks

antiX-Dave wrote:If you have the package installed or downloaded and extracted you could run ldd against the game's bin file. This will tell you what it exactly needs for library files. Everything that the command lists you can copy to a folder to back it up. Then you can delete the pack it came from and either build a deb file to install it or manually copy the files back. You may also need to copy some extra files that would not be in the list. For example the .desktop file from /usr/share/applications so it will show in the menu and maybe some help files. You may desire to run the locate or find command to see if there are any similarly named files that you would like to keep before removing the package.

Edit this is assuming that they are not already separately packaged in the repo and just packaged into one deb because it is easier for the game maintainers.

Thanks Dave, but that stuff sounds like it's way over my head. That's why I failed at Arch Linux - wayyyy over my head! I busted it so many times I finally gave up and went back to a Debian deriv. I'll use your ldd command (If that's what you meant) to see if I can find any of those files and remove them so they don't conflict with anything else - I don't want to break this install. I've almost got things set up the way I like them

Do not remove anything manually based off ldd, that will almost guarantee breakage. Instead copy the files and apt-get remove the package then copy the files back.

Stevo wrote:Since any particular game is just a set of rules, which takes up very little disk space when reduced to machine language, the vast percentage of space used by any card game is going to be the graphics plus any sound files, such as the card designs. So all the games in aisleriot are going to share those resources between themselves, and you are only saving a tiny bit of disk space by not using it instead of some hypothetical standalone gnome-freecell. Which is only distributed as part of aisleriot, BTW, since no sane developer would do it any other way.

I'm definitely taking that under consideration Stevo, I'll just apt-get and it will tell me how many Mbs it will add - I've got rid of a lot of them so far, so I guess I could add some back .... I wonder if I can set up Aisle-Riot so that it will open up with Freecell instead of Solitaire? - just a hypothetical thot I just had.... I'll have to read their manual to see if that's possible!

antiX-Dave wrote:Do not remove anything manually based off ldd, that will almost guarantee breakage. Instead copy the files and apt-get remove the package then copy the files back.

Thanks much for the warning! I just thot that command might tell me the location that they landed in. I'll just apt-get remove the Freecell the old fashioned way, and not use that command, altho, it wouldn't hurt me to take a look at the man page and see what the command is used for ;>).

Bierhundt wrote:I wonder if I can set up Aisle-Riot so that it will open up with Freecell instead of Solitaire? - just a hypothetical thot I just had.... I'll have to read their manual to see if that's possible!

Hello it looks like AisleRiot just opens up with whatever game was open last

I just looked at the difference in size between Gnome Aisle Riot v. KDE Patience - 24Mb v. 57Mb on this laptop (maybe I've already got some of the Gnome dependencies on the MX install) -so I'm going to go with Aisle Riot.

Thanks to all who helped/advised me on this quest.
Bierhundt