Oolite Bulletins

I recently put up a post about a fresh 1.76 install, and it got me thinking about this topic. I had already played around with those options before when installing. Obviously, you have to use sudo to install Oolite system-wide, and gksudo nautilus to put any OXPs in the Addons folder, but I always go for a home folder install. So, as a new linux user (and, of course, about as dangerous as penguin with a superuser password), I'm wondering, for next time I need to install, which is the best way to go? - Or does it even matter?

CommRLock78 wrote:

I recently put up a post about a fresh 1.76 install, and it got me thinking about this topic. I had already played around with those options before when installing. Obviously, you have to use sudo to install Oolite system-wide, and gksudo nautilus to put any OXPs in the Addons folder, but I always go for a home folder install. So, as a new linux user (and, of course, about as dangerous as penguin with a superuser password), I'm wondering, for next time I need to install, which is the best way to go? - Or does it even matter?

Even with a system-wide install you can use ~/.Oolite/Addons for your own addons.
Unless you have more than one user account on the machine that would like to play Oolite, you probably don't really gain anything from a system-wide install over a home folder install.

Thanks for the reply cim

cim wrote:

Even with a system-wide install you can use ~/.Oolite/Addons for your own addons.

Interesting, I don't know that I ever looked in the ~/.Oolite since I went system wide on my old machine. I'm still having trouble getting Oolite not to crash on that, but I think that's because of my lack of enough memory (I have only 512MB on that macine - I really need to put more in). I just checked ~/.Oolite on there and there isn't an Addons foler, so I just create one?

cim wrote:

Unless you have more than one user account on the machine that would like to play Oolite, you probably don't really gain anything from a system-wide install over a home folder install.

Duh, that would make sense. I guess I was thinking that somehow a system wide might be more efficient somehow (but I suppose still worth asking since applications aren't generally installed to the home folder). I suppose in a way it is more efficient - by allowing other users to easily play the game - makes perfect sense. Thanks!

CommRLock78 wrote:

Interesting, I don't know that I ever looked in the ~/.Oolite since I went system wide on my old machine. I just checked ~/.Oolite on there and there isn't an Addons foler, so I just create one?

Yes, but note it is [size=130]AddOns[/size] with a capital 'O'.

SandJ wrote:

Yes, but note it is [size=130]AddOns[/size] with a capital 'O'.

That's right! Thanks fellas. I hope this will help anyone else new to linux with the same question

CommRLock78 wrote:

Duh, that would make sense. I guess I was thinking that somehow a system wide might be more efficient somehow (but I suppose still worth asking since applications aren't generally installed to the home folder). I suppose in a way it is more efficient - by allowing other users to easily play the game - makes perfect sense. Thanks!

generally, when using a restricted-rights account I'd prefer to have stuff installed in userspace, to avoid any potential problems from missing rights (to edit this or that file, or such stuff).

Thargoid wrote:

The other useful bit about a system-wide installation is that trunk and test parallel installations can share an AddOns folder in the opt tree. So you can have installation-specific OXPs (like debug.oxp) in the user folder, but common ones in the opt folder to save duplication.

It's something I find quite nice (and something that's notably absent in the Windows way of doing things without some file-hacking).

For Linux and Windows alike (NTFS 3.1 or higher, maybe also 3.0) you can always have this by symbolic links, that is well below file-hacking.

You just have your one-and-only-AddOns-folder, and in each Oolite installation you want to use that AddOns folder you replace the AddOns folder created from installer with a symlink to the one-and-only-AddOns-folder.
that's it.