How to install Neverwinter Nights

[Seoushi]

I just got done installing neverwinter nights after a little bit of trouble. Heres how I did it and a little bit of troubleshooting. This is my first documentation that I felt like posting, if you feel that it should be in gaming and players then feel free to move it, feedback is also welcome .

What you need

• o Ravage's installer from http://www.icculus.org/~ravage/nwn/
  o The 3 cd's, install disc 1 and 2 and the play disc.
  o Game Manual or knowing your cdkey
  o Newest Beta release tarball (current is beta 6) from http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/linuxclient.html

How to install with ravage's installer
run ravages installer as root and follow the onscreen instructions

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#./nwn_129_linux_installer.run

move nwclient129beta6.tar.gz to your neverwinter nights directory

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# mv nwclient129beta6.tar.gz /usr/local/games/nwn

change to the neverwinter nights directory

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# cd /usr/local/games/nwn

now extract the beta tarball

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# tar -xzvf nwclient129beta6.tar.gz

then set all the permissions so all users in the group games can run/save the game

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#chown root:games /usr/local/games/nwn
#chmod 770 /usr/local/games/nwn
#chown root:games * -R
#chmod 770 * -R

Installer Problems
I've had problems with ravages installer not installing all the files because when wine starts up to extract from the installsheild cab files it fails and can't extract that data. Heres how I fixed that problem.

first you need to have some version of wine installed.(you can remove it afterwards, this is just for installing)
then you need to get a file called i6comp.exe(it extracts installsheild cabs) you can find a zip which contains it here http://myplc.com/sony/bin/i6comp.zip

make a temporay folder in your home directory called temp (make sure you have atleast 1.5 gigs of temporary storage)
move the i6comp.zip into temp

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#mv i6comp.zip $HOME/temp

then go in that folder and unzip it and get the file needed out of it

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#cd $HOME/temp
#unzip i6comp.zip
#mv Release/i6comp.exe ./

now you need to mount your install disc 1 cd and cp data1.cab data1.hdr and data2.cab to your current directory

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#mount /mnt/cdrom
# cp /mnt/cdrom/data1.cab ./
# cp /mnt/cdrom/data1.hdr ./
# cp /mnt/cdrom/data2.cab ./

now its time to extract all the files out of the cabs

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#wine i6comp.exe x data1.cab

now you have all your files here but they aren't organized
you first need to make the appropiate folders in your nwn's install directory

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#mkdir /usr/local/games/nwn/localvault /usr/local/games/nwn/dmvault /usr/local/games/nwn/texturepacks

now you need to copy some of the files your extracted to their right directories

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#mv *.erf /usr/local/games/nwn/texturepacks
#mv dungeonmaster.bic /usr/local/games/nwn/dmvault
#mv *.bic /usr/local/games/nwn/localvault
#mv *.bif /usr/local/games/nwn/data

now you can remove the directory your in and all the left over files

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#cd ..
#rm temp -r

You should have all the files in the right place, all you have left is reseting the permissions

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#chown root:games /usr/local/games/nwn
#chmod 770 /usr/local/games/nwn
#chown root:games /usr/local/games/nwn/* -R
#chmod 770 /usr/local/games/nwn/* -R

Windows Install

for people not wanting to use ravages installer for some reason here is the windows copy install procedure

install neverwinter nights on your windows machine
patch the game to 1.29 using the update button inside the game
boot into your linux parition/machine and put the files in a directory called /usr/local/games/nwn or whatever you want to use
now move the nwclient129beta6.tar.gz and extract it into your directory

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#mv nwclient129beta6.tar.gz /usr/local/games/nwn
#cd /usr/local/games/nwn
#tar -xzvf nwclient129beta6.tar.gz

You should have everything you need but some people have been having problems with SDL parachute bug so lets fix that

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# ./fixinstall

Last you need to set your permissions and you should be good to go

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#chown root:games ../nwn
#chmod 770 ../nwn
#chown root:games * -R
#chmod 770 * -R

Have fun playing nwn

[Tobi 2.4.20]

It works! Great! Thanks alot dude!

Rock on! :D

[beowulf]

Hey thanks for the guide... I'll be working through it... Just finished downloading the installer.

Just a side note, it would appear the program needs to be able to exec files in /tmp - and i usually mount /tmp in noexec. A quick unmount and mount was all that was needed but just a little FYI for anyone else who reads this...

[Seoushi]

thats not the problem because I even did an

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export TMP=$HOME

just to make sure that permissions weren't screwed up, and it still didn't work right, although I see others have gotten the installer to work fine it doesn't here.

[beowulf]

Another update... i got it to install correctly.. had to install wine to get the remaining files...

However, although the files may have been patched with ravage's installer, when going online, it does not registered as patched... Luckily for myself, i still dual-boot... so i'm now going through the windows install...

[Seoushi]

yeah I don't usualy play online due to 26.4 dialup for the summer. so I didn't notice that, although I assume you can use wine with the windows manual update.. another idea I might try later is after the first cd fails to extract the cab files you can manualy extract them through wine and then move it into the nwn folder.. hoping that it patches itself after all files are copied over.. I will see how that works out when I have the time and then update these docs.

[beowulf]

Everything worked great! I just finished the prelude to the official campaign and everything ran smooth as it does on windows

I'd like to make one final suggestion... i hope i'm not bothersome... and this tip doesn't really relate to the installation of the game...

If a person is running xfree 4.3, they will find the game default to a 60hz refresh rate... The solution is to link libSDL.so.0 to a newer version. Currently in portage we're at 1.2.5-r1. After that is emerged, this command would probably work:
ln -sf /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 $NWN_DIR/libs/liibSDL-1.2.so.0

The older version distributed with bioware's tarball is older.... With the newer libSDL, the refresh rate used will match the one currently used in xfree.

Thanks again for the guide!

[DooBeDooBeDo]

Erm, rather than using some widows prog under wine to extract the files from the .cabs wouldn't cabextract (available in portage) do just as well?

[Seoushi]

I haven't heard of that program but I believe that still wouldn't work. these are not cab files there are installsheild files, they have no relavance to windows, I even heard that there is installsheild for linux although I have not seen it yet, if you can find me that I would be very grateful.

and thanks for the SDLlib tip.. although my files is called libSDL-1.2.so.0.0.5

[|cJ|]

the download link for the installer is down !