Today I bought a boxed copy of Darwinia from Best Buy. I was pleasantly surprised that it came with a keychain of a Darwinian and poster. Another surprise was the reduction of the price from $29.99 CAD to $9.99 CAD.

What dismayed me was that I could not run the Linux installer on the CD. Then I read on the Introversion forums that the US box distributors, did not bother adding two important files for the Linux installer. The workaround is:

1. Install wine. [sudo aptitude install wine]
2. Run setup.exe under wine to install the Windows version of the game. [wine /media/cdrom/setup.exe]
3. Then run the Linux installer, but uncheck the option to copy the files from the CD. [sudo sh /path/to/darwina-installer.sh]
4. Copy main.dat and sounds.dat from the folder where wine installed Darwinia, to the lib folder of the Linux install. [sudo cp /path/to/wine/main.dat /usr/local/games/darwinia/lib/ && sudo cp /path/to/wine/sounds.dat /usr/local/games/darwinia/lib/]
5. Run darwinia as if nothing happened. [darwinia]

The extra steps are a nuisance, but the Linux client for Darwina works flawlessly. I tested this install process under Ubuntu Linux 7.10, but it should work under any newer Linux distro.