[SOLVED] Multilib, container image, or both?

Hey all,

Old dog user here, trying to learn some new tricks. This might be a silly question, but if one is installing 32-bit apps as images (e.g. flatpaks), does one still need a multilib system? Which is the simpler and/or better way to go, and why?

Eventually, I'm going to probably use both, but if I want to quickly get Wine and Steam running on a new 64-current box, what would you all recommend for an optimal install workflow?

Thanks in advance, and praise "Bob!"

If you want wine & steam working on your slackware64-current box as quickly as possible, install slackpkgplus and activate alienBob's multilib repo (make sure to give it priority).You can then issue commands slackpkg update gpg, slackpkg update, slackpkg install-new, slackpkg update-all slackpkg install multlib. You then have multilib and you can grab alienbob's wine and steamclient packages from his repo (there may be one or two dependencies to grab from there as well- but the repo has notes to tell which if any dependencies are required). That will give you a running linux steam client and wine-staging-5.6 in about 30 to 60 minutes depending on how familiar you are with slackware and slackpkg plus and the alienbob repos, and assuming you have broadband.Which is what you asked for. Once you have done this once , you can probably cut the time required to 15 to 20 minutes.YMMV.
After that keep in mind the following tips. Linux steam client comes with proton which is wine-staging modded and rebranded by steam. You can use dugan chen's slackbuild to build latest wine or wine staging (5.11)- if you want to experiment with a later version. You can directly install steam windows client into wine. You can look into the glorious eggroll third party modded version of proton. You can mess around with epic games store by installing legendary. When installing games in wine, try to use a separate wine prefix for each game. Games tend to clobber each other's installation if installed into the same wine prefix.

Originally Posted by biker_rat If you want wine & steam working on your slackware64-current box as quickly as possible, install slackpkgplus and activate alienBob's multilib repo (make sure to give it priority).You can then issue commands slackpkg update gpg, slackpkg update, slackpkg install-new, slackpkg update-all slackpkg install multlib. You then have multilib and you can grab alienbob's wine and steamclient packages from his repo (there may be one or two dependencies to grab from there as well- but the repo has notes to tell which if any dependencies are required).

That's excellent! Thanks for posting.

Steam provides its own Wine (go to Settings in Steam, go to Steam Play and enable it. It is really great. Check out ProtonDB to see what works, what doesn't, and what you need to do for a few games to get them to work. https://www.protondb.com/

Steam Slackbuild https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/games/steam/

Multilib seems to be the way for 32 bit + wine support.

For gaming on Slackware64-current, lutris is another great tool. It serves as a launcher to run games, and has support for various runners, including wine. The wine runner has support for cool features like dxvk integration (for running DX9 - DX11 games) and esync support (for multithreaded apps).

Here is a SlackBuild with instructions by DugenChen: lutris.SlackBuild

I am amazed at what is possible nowadays. :-)

Thanks for the input. Set up multilib and Steam from Alienbob's repos: easy-peasy. Now just waiting for Terraria 1.4 to port to Linux-native, since the .exe is pretty laggy under Wine. My kid is starting to agitate to go back to Windo$e. I don't suppose there are any other workarounds short of dual-boot?

How laggy is Terreria? What are your hardware specs? If your hardware isn't vintage, I would suspect your video drivers need sorting out. Did you use current instead of 14.2? 14.2 has really old video drivers. Current will almost always outperform 14.2 for gaming on wine (an exception might arise if you are using nvidia proprietary driver and an old game).

Steam does offer a linux native version of Terraria. The required video card specs listed are pretty low.

biker_rat,

Thanks! It is some generic onboard graphics on an HP with an i5 CPU. Not vintage, but not high-performance by any means. I'll look up the specs when I get home, but here are some possibly salient details:

- The same release of Terraria runs much better on Windows on the same hardware.

- I am running slackware-current.

- The available release of Terraria through Steam (1.4.x) hasn't been ported to Linux yet, so it is something to do with Wine.

- I downloaded Xonotic, a more resource-intense game but Linux-native, and it actually performed decently.

The steam website (steampowered.com) says it is ported to linux. Install the linux steam client which is in alienbob's 32bit section (but it works from 64bit with multilib installed -there may be one or two deps listed by alienbob, install those too if they exist). Install terraria with from the linux native steam client (it will install the linux version if you do not opt into proton for all linux games) and see if it works better. Please let us know which generation i5 cpu.