I had purchased both Humble Indie Bundles so that I could play some games on my Linux computers. So far, so good!
Offtopic: I am loving these indie games! The artwork, the music, the unique gameplays and user interaction!
I only have a few games left to start (and complete), one of which is Aquaria, so I decided to install it today. I installed it on my main system, which is running openSUSE 11.4, 64-bit, proprietary Nvidia driver. I was already prepared to face issues since this is a 64-bit system. After the installation was successful, I tried to run the game, but the screen flickered and returned me to the desktop. I then tried running it from a terminal, and discovered it exited with "Segmentation Fault".
I read around and saw that I needed the 32-bit libraries for libSDL and libopenal, but this didn't seem right to me, since the required libraries are located in the installation directory. Needless to say, installing them from my package manager made no difference. So out of curiosity, I installed it on a laptop running a 32-bit Linux distro, and it worked. But I had to uninstall it since the laptop (Intel video) was too slow to smoothly play Aquaria. I then tried it on a different computer, also running a 64-bit distro (also openSUSE), and it worked! This was really starting to confuse me.
After some trial and error, I eventually discovered the problem (and the easy solution). For my main system, I have /tmp mounted as a tmpfs (RAM disk) with the explicit option of "noexec" for security reasons. I remounted it with "exec" and viola! Aquaria runs, and runs well! Just wanted to share this story in case others are facing a similar issue and they've already tried other options that didn't work. I almost forgot about my /tmp mount, since I had done it on the day I installed my distro.
So in short, my /tmp was mounted with "noexec" and I had to remount it with the following command to run Aquaria:
sudo mount -o remount,exec /tmp
I am not entirely sure why this is the case, since I'm not a developer and I've never run an application which required executable permission under /tmp, but I'm glad I get to play this game. I absolutely love the artwork and, like Braid, it gives you the feeling of "playing inside of a painting."
Now, time to play this little gem!
