Install Dwarf Fortress?

Question

I'm trying to install Dwarf Fortress, and you have to unpack the file in a certain way. Here are the instructions they give:

Unpacking: Dwarf Fortress is shipped as a (bzip2) compressed tar archive. It will extract into a new directory called df_linux. So, cd to wherever you want the game to be unpacked, and then run tar xjf /path/to/df_XX_YY_linux.tar.bz2 (where df_XX_YY_linux.tar.bz2 is the filename). Then run cd df_linux to change into the new directory.

I cd'd to Desktop, where I wanted to unpack the file. However, when I entered tar xjf /path/to/df_XX_YY_linux.tar.bz2, this was the result:

pickle@pickle-NC10:~/Desktop$ tar xjf /path/to/df_34_11_linux.tar.bz2
tar (child): /path/to/df_34_11_linux.tar.bz2: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I already am on a 32-bit system, but I still tried to use sudo apt-get install ia32-libs libsdl-image1.2 libsdl-sound1.2 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 to see if it would change anything. As I expected, no change. The filename is correct, I double checked. I'm not experienced with using the terminal, so is there something I'm missing? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

By the way, if you want a link straight to the installation page for Dwarf Fortress, here you go.

Update: I tried using

pickle@pickle-NC10:~/Desktop$ tar xjf /path/to/home/pickle/Downloads/df_34_11_linux.tar.bz2

Same result as before. This is me using the complete file name, same response as before.

Answer 1

There are two problems, first of all, the "/path/to/" is a placeholder that you should replace with the actual values. In fact, most of the time it just mean tar Downloads/df_*_linux.tar.bz2 if you downloaded DF with a browser. The other problem is due missing libraries. Since version 0.43.05, you can get 64-bits builds and watching that the default Ubuntu image offered to users is the 64-bits, this should not offer more complications than necessary.

The required libraries can be listed, after you extracted the tar file, with a simple ldd df_linux/libs/Dwarf_Fortress, and passing the library path to dpkg -S which would list the packages. Most of these would be already installed, try to find those that are "not found", which normally is the library that the libsdl-ttf2.0-0 package provides.