Antstream AppImage for Linux

A buddy of mine turned me on to Antstream while playing on his XBOX. I figured I'd have a look at it too but the console versions are not free to try like the PC versions. All I saw on Antstream's download page were the usual suspects: Windows, Mac, Android, yadda yadda. I figured I'd check to see if it worked with WINE but to my surprise there was a Linux client. Sadly it is only available via the SNAP store. I really don't like SNAP packages so I was like "Ugh". I reluctantly installed snapd on my fedora install then installed Antstream. After poking around the SNAP directory I noticed all the Antstream package was is a directory and a shell script. I moved the Antstream directory to my desktop and then uninstalled snapd. I was happy to learn that Antstream's client works fine without snapd installed. 

I figured it would be convenient to have a single executable to start Antstream from. For this I looked to AppImage, mostly since it's easy to create and work with. I looked at the AppImage wiki for guidance and threw together a quick image. I was pleased to see it working. The client is stored in the appimage and the user data is stores in ~/.antstream . Honestly I have no idea how it will handle program updates but if you double click the AppImage it starts well enough to log in and play.

If you're interested in trying Antstream but aren't too keen on SNAP packages then you can give the AppImage a shot. It's on my Google Drive. Link below.

The link is above!

If you try the AppImage then please drop me a reply below about how its working out.

Unzip a bunch of archives into their own directories - Linux

I was able to extract a few hundred zip files into their own directories (based on the zip file's name) with this shell script.

#!/bin/sh
for file in *.zip

do

unzip -d "${file%.zip}" "$file"

done

SMB "no such file or directory" error on RHEL 9 and Fedora 40 (SELNINUX)

While setting up RHEL 9.4 for a file server and I constantly ran into "No such file or directory" errors when trying to browse a samba share. It turns out I needed to set SELINUX to permissive for samba.

The below fixed my SELINUX samba woes.

sudo setsebool -P samba_export_all_rw on

CD-ROM Art - Akumajo Dracula X Chi no Rondo - PC Engine CD-ROM

 I took a low resolution image of Dracula X's disc art and made it better. It was originally made for printing on an Epson et-8550 but should scale to print on any disc printer. Hopefully someone will find this helpful.

libFLAC.so.8 errors with GOG games on Linux

I was getting ready to throw down some Starfleet justice when my crusade was derailed by the absence of libFLAC.so.8 . It seems that the DOSBOX binary GOG includes with their games is missing the libFLAC library. Not only is the library missing but it wants a specific version of it. I'm sporting Fedora 39 on my main box and my version of flac-libs was newer than what GOG's DOSBOX wanted. I found a packaged version that was as close as I could get and from a similar Linux distro. I ended up using flac-libs-1.3.3-12.el9.x86_64.rpm. My line of thought was to extract the libraries and throw them in the lib64 directory of the  installed game. In the end it worked and I was happy. 

I downloaded the correctly versioned RPM package from HERE. Once I had it in my Downloads directory I used rpm2cpio to decompress the rpm file. The command to unarchive the rpm via cpio is 

rpm2cpio flac-libs-1.3.3-12.el9.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv

After the deed was done I moved all the files form ./usr/lib64 onto the <game directory>/dosbox/lib/lib64/ directory. Upon completion of this you should be back aboard the NCC-1701 and doing whatever it is a Starfleet Captain does.

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