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Author Topic: Debian problems installing Dwarf fortress  (Read 4855 times)

mikekchar

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Re: Debian problems installing Dwarf fortress
« Reply #15 on: September 13, 2018, 12:38:06 am »

So it works now?  If so, congrats!

Very hard to debug that kind of stuff remotely and doubly so because you are using an old distro on old hardware and you don't have that much experience doing that kind of stuff :-)  BUT that's the essence of it.  Having worked on virtually every kind of system you can imagine, the main advantage of using Linux is that *everything* is possible.  The downside is that you have to learn how to do it.  Contrasting to Windows (or even Mac these days), it's usually either easy or impossible (because if they didn't give you a way to do something, they intentionally try to stop you from doing it).

So if you are keen on becoming able to do this kind of magic in the future, it's important to learn from the things that caused you pain this time.  So here are some questions that you can try to find answers for, if you are interested: What is the difference between "32 bit" and "64 bit" and why did you need to use a "32" bit version?  Are you likely to run into that problem with other software?  If so, what's the easiest way to make sure that you can deal with it?  What does the magic incantation "export LD_PRELOAD" do, and what problem did it solve?  (BTW, even though I've used unix systems for over 30 years, I didn't know about LD_PRELOAD.  That's super handy!  Thanks! :-) ).  Why did you have to delete libstdc++, etc to get things to work?  If you have to delete them, why are they there in the first place?  What does "#!/bash/sh" do?  Why did you have to insert the command where you did?

I recommend *not* asking other people the answers to these questions.  If you do, they will give you an answer, but you are unlikely to understand it.  You might try memorising all of the answers that people give you, but because you don't understand them, you won't be able to use them in the future.  One of the very interesting things I learned when I studied "language acquisition" (the science of how people learn languages) is that accumulating facts does *not* eventually enable you to get better at something! (Yah, school sucks).  You have to actively build a model of things that you understand (and are constantly testing).

So, ideally you would start poking around, experimenting and trying to find resources that will contain the answers to your questions.  It takes a *lot* of reading.  As you continue, though, you will eventually form a really good platform that will enable you to build up your understanding.   If you aren't interested in getting to that level of understanding, then don't mind my rambling :-)
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Clément

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Re: Debian problems installing Dwarf fortress
« Reply #16 on: September 13, 2018, 03:16:31 am »

Debian Stretch is not old, it is the current stable and it is only 1 year old.
« Last Edit: September 13, 2018, 03:18:22 am by Clément »
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Miuramir

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Re: Debian problems installing Dwarf fortress
« Reply #17 on: September 21, 2018, 08:28:57 pm »

Just a follow-up note: if I am reading the Intel Ark page on the Atom N2600 correctly, despite being an inexpensive CPU from 2011, it is a true 64-bit CPU.  As the 32-bit versions of Linux (and most mainstream OSs) have been increasingly depreciated for many years, it's unclear why your system is set up with a 32-bit OS; if you reinstall it at some point, you should probably try for a more modern 64-bit build.  (IIRC 32 bit support is still in Debian mainstream largely for compatibility with inexpensive embedded "IoT" type devices.) 

As a *general* rule, you can run older software on a newer system if you have the correct library support (ie, i386 on an i686, and i686 on an amd64 / x86_64), but not the other way around.  (E.g software compiled for i686 mode will contain references to processor instructions that don't exist on a true i386 CPU.)  IIRC the legacy version of DF is i386 to enable it to run on the largest number of really old systems, and to keep the versions down to just two. 
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Fleeting Frames

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Re: Debian problems installing Dwarf fortress
« Reply #18 on: September 26, 2018, 12:59:28 pm »

@mikekchar: LD_PRELOAD is also handy for therapist (though I know you don't use it). (A dfhack plugin would have to be recompiled with each release, so compiling library once is better).
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