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Description:#
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there are 2 ways to run gta2 with wine under linux. the first is the classic one. it installs wine and direct play on your system. this works well when you have root and you are not using a live disk(they can cause various troubles with installing and drivers).

If you don't have wine or root you can use the second method, a portable wine. depending on your system you need to run one of the installers in the portable_wine subfolder.


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Requirements:#
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-Pentium 200 MHz
-32 Mb RAM
-70 Mb of free hard disk space
-SVGA color monitor
-3D acceleration with 8 Mb RAM
-SoundBlaster compatibele sound card

all of those can vary depending on the package, the distribution, the hardware setup and other things.

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Usage:#
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To run it all .sh , .bat and .exe files must have the permission to be executed. You can do that by starting prepare.sh but you still need to allow prepare.sh to be executed. You can change permissions via file properties dialog on all modern desktop distributions or via command line (.............).If the files are in a folder that doesn't allow changing permissions because if is on a read only drive or a windows file system you have to copy it somewhere else.

local install:
start extras/linux_install.sh (if you already have wine installed you don't need to do it but it won't harm either)
then you can start the launcher scripts gta2.sh, gta2_manager.sh, gta2gh.sh ,extras/update.sh ...

important note: the script tries to install wine with all known installer system. So if only one of the commands work it is ok. Actually it is preferred that only one of the commands works.

portable install:
Go to portable_wine subfolder and select the operating system that you are running. If it is not in the list try the one you think matches the best. If you still can't get it working search for an url of a wine package for your distribution and enter it in either rpm_generic.sh or deb_generic.sh .

If the procedure was successful you should see a subfolder named after the distribuion in the gta base folder. It contains script to launch all important gta2 executables.

shortcuts:
on windows you can use shorcuts.bat to create shorcuts on your deskop. On linux this script doesnt work but you can easily create shortcuts to the launcher scripts. Unlike usual shortcuts to exe files they will also work when the shorcut is in different directory. the same can be done with the launcher scripts for the portable version.

important note: some preferences in the wineprefix can be reset when installing an additional wine version.
important note: it is recommended to install a wine version for a distribution while running it and not install it on a completely different distribution.

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additional Linux specific Information:#
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-weitblick.exe might make the game lag.
-gta2.exe often doesn't close after the game ends. you have to use kill_gta2.sh or type /t in gh.
-some few textures in the game are transparent.
-the sound quality could perhaps not be that good.
-on some PCs (mine included) gta2 runs better on linux than on windows

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Source:#
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the linux readme and scripts are included in the following paqckages:
http://elypter.net84.net/gta2.tk/packs.html#onlinep
http://elypter.net84.net/gta2.tk/packs.html#gamep