How to I run Dwarf Fortress?

Question

I have downloaded Dwarf Fortress, collected the required files I believe but there is a problem, I click on the df file, it asks me some things, I click on "Run," but nothing happens. The games just does not open at all.

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 3 on 64-bit. If I could get the game to open I am sure I could deal with the other problems that may occur.

I am fairly new to Ubuntu, haven't used Linux since 2009.

Most likely there are some files I don't know about.

Edit

Running it throw terminal:

$ ./df
./libs/Dwarf_Fortress: error while loading shared libraries: libSDL_image-1.2.so.0:
    cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory 

Answer 1

It seems the game can't find some SDL libraries. Using apt-file the package I get (on 12.10) that provides that libraries is libsdl-image1.2:

➜  apt-file search  libSDL_image-1.2.so.0
libsdl-image1.2: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libSDL_image-1.2.so.0
libsdl-image1.2: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libSDL_image-1.2.so.0.8.4

So you should first verify that package is really installed. If it is then either the program needs the 32bit version or it indeed needs the 64bit version but can't find it.

To install the 32 bit version:

sudo apt-get install libsdl-image1.2:i386

If this still doesn't solve the problem you can try to run the game using LD_DEBUG=libs ./df. This will output a lot of info that could help to detect why it can't find that lib. Also, take a look at the README.linux file in Dwarf Fortress folder and check if all the requirements are satisfied.