Ultima Online for Linux FAQ

0.1) What is the current status of UO/Linux?

After the two programmers that did all of the work on the original UO/Linux client left Origin in late 1998 to start WombatGames the client went untouched for quite some time and it looked as if it would never be updated to accomidate the new encryption scheme used for client-server communications. Origin didn't reply to emails sent by WombatGames or anyone else that we are aware of inquiring about the client's status. However, a couple days after I left town for the 1998/99 holiday season Origin placed a tarball named 'client-glibc-i386-1-25-36' on the original LinuxUO ftp site. That new client worked with The Second Age and was untested with the original UO although reports indicate that it still works. It's still unsupported and the documentation that comes with it is very brief and to-the-point. On top of that the binary would not patch by itself when the next update was made to the Win32 version, but new versions have been released on the FTP server keeping it up to date. The current client still does not patch itself is is available only as a glibc binary for x86 systems.

1.1) What is required of my system?

1.2) Where do I get it?

1.3) How do I install it?

1. Get the client software mentioned above if you haven't already
2. Make a directory for the software to be installed to
3. Get the install.pl script written by Erik Arneson and run it as root to copy the necessary files from your Ultima Online CD to the directory that you created in the previous step.
4. Move the client software in to your Ultima Online directory (mv client-glibc-i386-1-25-37 uo)
5. Mount your UO CD (as root, mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom).
6. Now all you have to do to run it is to execute the binary (./client-glibc-i386-1-25-37)

2.1) Why isn't Origin supporting this?

This Linux client is pretty much a side project for a couple of the programmers at Origin that have seen the light and know that "even penguins like to have fun." Origin doesn't want their customer support department to have to support a product that they aren't familiar with. On top of that, supporting another product means more load on the tech supoort department, and that's something that Origin doesn't want to deal with. Just imagine how much tech support requests they already get from Windoze users! Please do not call Origin tech support if you have any problems, see the next section.

2.2) Who can I ask for help if I really need it?

2.3) Who should I contact if I want Origin to support this?

Please don't contact anyone at Origin about supporting a linux port of Ultima Online. If we bother them about this they may discontinue the port all-together, and we definately wouldn't want that (we have no source code!) Feel free to post on message boards and newsgroups, etc, but please do not contact Origin about this directly.

3.1) What does "Failed to initialize 640x480x16 display" mean?

This means you are not running your X server in a mode that supports 15 or 16 bit truecolor visuals. You can run 'xwininfo' and select your desktop to determine what mode you are running in. Normally you add '-bpp 15' or '-bpp 16' to your serverargs for your X server to select these modes.

3.2) Why doesn't my sound work?

Most likely this is either because you only have an 8 bit sound card or your installation is only set up to handle 8 bit sound. There are a couple uo.cfg options related to sound that may be useful to you: 'Sound8Bit=yes' may work for you - it will try to run in 8 bit mode. This is a little expensive, since it's actually mixing 16 bit samples into an 8 bit stream then. For people like me that have weird setups or cables that aren't long enough to set it up right, 'ReverseSpeakers=yes' can be useful - it swaps the left and right speakers for stereo purposes.

3.3) Why isn't there music or the intro movie?

Support for playing video and midi music in the UO client is very windows-specific, and since neither of these options actually gets used much in practice, I decided it wasn't worth the time to do the port of these features. Sorry. I may make it possible in the near future to have the uo client call an external midi file player for midi music, but the intro movie is almost definately not going to be ported.

3.6) I get strange colors in the shop gump. Why?

A couple of the gumps don't work right in 565 mode. This was going to be fixed but the programmers didn't get around to it before they left Origin.

3.7) My client crashed. What information will help the porters?

Well, Origin's FAQ make sit clear that they don't want to hear from us right now, so hold on to that core dump and hope that Origin fixes the code sometime.

3.8) What can I do to avoid problems with patch-apply and color?

If your `ls` command is in color, patch-apply may not work, but you can modify patch-apply to work by changing every reference to 'ls' in it to 'ls --color=no'. This change wasn't made to the default version of the script because it was tested with a couple systems that don't support the --color option and produced very strange results. Another option would be to simply alias your ls command to 'ls --color=no' with the 'alias' command.

4.1) Who was involved in making the port possible?

4.2) What about platforms other than Linux-x86?

The original programmers only had access to their personal x86 Linux boxen at home when they were working on the port so other platforms were not available to test on. Origin has made no announcements indicating that they plan to port to ther platforms.

4.3) How can I help?

Right now, unfortunately, there's not much we can do. Just sit and wait until something comes up.

4.4) Will Origin game X be ported to Linux?

It's fairly safe to say right now that no matter which game you're asking about, the answer is probably no. Support for Linux within Origin as a whole was observed to be very low.

4.5) Can I get a copy of the source?

Nope, Origin has it under lock and key and the original programmers weren't allowed to distribute it.

4.6) Is there a mailing list?

4.7) What tools were used for the development of UO/Linux?

They used gcc 2.8.1 for a compiler, gdb 4.17 for a debugger, and the editor of choice was vim 5.0 with modified syntax files for C++.