Oolite Bulletins

I was excited to find Oolite as I used to love Elite on my old Atari ST, and I've been playing happily - and not getting killed too often - for a couple of weeks now, on an hp laptop running Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal). As an aside, I seem to be the only person who can get on with Unity - but that's another story.
I'm an oddity - a Linux user who's not into the depths of code and command lines. I use Linux because it's quick, stable and doesn't add to Micro$oft's profits, but almost everything I want to do assumes that I am intimately familiar with the inner workings of the kernel. I'm not.

So when the installation instructions for oxp's tell me to place them in the AddOns folder, I looked for it; haven't got one. Read the Wiki and find it should be in $Home/.Oolite/Addons - but where do I find that? My system appears to have no folder ANYWHERE that refers to Oolite apart from the one which contains the game saves.
Is $Home MY home folder (File System/home/username)? 'Cos there ain't no Oolite folder there.
I did a Search - and got no results.
I explored, taking as my start point the shortcut which launches the game, which took me into the uncharted territory of the GNU Step folder, but I STILL can't find anything that resembles what I'm looking for.

So, please, can some explain to me, in terms I can understand, how and where to install addons?

Hi thenudehamster and welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat.

Yeah AddOns can be hard to find if you don't know where to look....but easy if you do.

Go to 'Places', 'Home Folder', then click on 'view' then 'show hidden files'. This will show all the home folder files including '.oolite' which is where you'll find AddOns and Logs.
Just put the oxpname.oxp folder in AddOns, and you should be good to go.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Smivs.

Eyup miduk; (I lived in Nottingham for twenty-odd years)

Ta muchly for the advice; I hadn't even considered the possibility of hidden files and folders. It didn't help, of course that I realised after posting the request that I was using v1.65 and most addons are written for 1.72 or later.
However, I have since installed 1.75 but the Addons folder is not in the .Oolite folder, it is in Home/username/GNU Step/Applications/Oolite - which may not be where everyone expects it, but Addons in it seem to work

Thanks again

Ha! I've only been in Notts for four years....I'm from Sussex, with Cockney and Brummy ancestry.

I think how you install the game has a baring on where things are. I use Ubuntu but am not a Linux expert. One of our Linux chaps can probably explain more, but if it's all working, great!

In linux ~ symbol in pathnames is translated into /home/name_of-active_user .
In other words , ~ is shorthand for "the home folder of the currently active user" .

as for the ~/GNU Step/Applications/Oolite folder, that folder is not created by by the current installer for linux
New distribution-neutral package format .

Do you remember how you installed oolite 1.75.2 ?

Lone_Wolf wrote:

as for the ~/GNU Step/Applications/Oolite folder, that folder is not created by by the current installer for linux
=-https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php? ... age format .

Do you remember how you installed oolite 1.75.2 ?

I downloaded the package from the oolite.org website, extracted the .run from the archive, then double-clicked on it (history of windows use - try a d/click first and see what happens) I was offered a number of options, "Run" and "Run in Terminal" being the significant ones, so I chose Run. It opened a terminal window (didn't look to me like the standard one Ubuntu uses) ran a couple of commands, asked me if I wanted to install for single user or everyone, then promptly closed me out when it realised I wasn't root, (quite how you sudo in an automatic installer I don't know, but...) which is why this is now installed in my home folder. Any folders that were created by this process were done by the installation script. The GNU Step folder was already there - I think the 1.65 install put that in, that coming from the Software Centre; whether that might have affected things I have no idea.
Incidentally, after the first lockout, I tried the "Run in Terminal" option; it opened the same terminal window. That confused me even more so I went back to plan A and ran it direct. It seems to have worked because I'm playing, with addons.

[EDIT] Not having realised that there were installation instructions probably accounts for a lot of my problems; that and the fact that almost everyone developing for Linux seems to think that we all know as much as they do. My grateful thanks to Getafix for the detailed installation instructions. I have now uninstalled the single-user version and installed the system-wide one.
No doubt the developers have noticed it - it is a beta, after all - but on my machine the full-screen display is not full-screen, but retains the menubar at the top of the screen (Ubuntu 11.04, Unity) and has an annoying flashing flicker. It works OK in a large window, though.

What gfx are you running?

Have you tried "ole faithful" - and running with the -nosplash option set - that sorts out a lot of gfx issues.

The flickery thing seems to be normal.....I always have to play in full-screen mode. It's the F12 key if you haven't found it yet.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

What gfx are you running?

gfx? Graphics card/processor, I assume? It's an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250. The machine is an hp G62 a29SA laptop with an AMD 64 AthlonII dual core processor, 3GB RAM

Have you tried "ole faithful" - and running with the -nosplash option set - that sorts out a lot of gfx issues.

I have very little experience of the innards of Linux, so no, I haven't used the -nosplash switch; I would have had no idea it even existed. I assume it goes after the (effective) run command in the Terminal?

My previous experience with Oolite was on my other hp laptop (Pavilion dv9646em) a year or so ago, before it developed unrelated problems (which I'm still working on) and that was the then stable release. I was running 1.65 on this machine until I started looking at OXP's. I'm not honestly that bothered about this as an issue. As I said, it's a beta; it's bound to have the odd bug, and if graphics issues are well-known, I assume developers must know about them.

Smivs wrote:

The flickery thing seems to be normal.....I always have to play in full-screen mode. It's the F12 key if you haven't found it yet.

I can't play it in full-screen mode - the display is so unstable as to render it useless - but with an unmaximised window stretched almost to its limit, it plays clean.
The F12 key? I'm not sure if it works, because this is one of those hp laptops where hp have been sooooo helpful and put all the 'extras' for the multi-media functions as defaults on the F keys, so to get the Fkey functions I have to press fn+key. Theory says it should work, but I never pushed it. I'll give it a try next time I play.