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PC Gaming With Linux Made Easy

We used to be among the many to say, "If you want to do any serious gaming, you will need to stick with Windows." However... while doing the research for Episode 84 of the podcast, Tom discovered a wonderful game manager for Linux called Dépôt Jeux Linux (DJL). DJL is a GPL licensed, open source game manager for Linux. Inspired by Valve's Steam software for Windows, DJL is written in Python 2.5. Thanks to a Make Tech Easier article entitled, "Linux: Access 100+ Games Instantly With DJL" we now know that not only are there many, many games for Linux that rival the best PC games for Windows, they are also easy to find and to install!

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Installing DJL
You can follow the instructions in the article referenced above, or follow Tom's instructions, below. Here is how Tom got started with DJL:

Step 1. I downloaded the script and save it in your home directory. This is the command line:
  wget http://en.djl-linux.org/maj_djl/archives/djl-1.2.20.tar.gz
Of course that's a tarball (a type of archive file) containing the script. The archive contains one folder with several files.

Step 2. I used "extract here" in Nautilus. That worked.

Step 3. Now to install Python. If you are using Ubuntu 9.10 or later you already have it and can skip this step.
  sudo apt-get install python-qt4
I already had it, but the exercise proved that the command is right. At first this command didn't install Python at all on Larry's older machine running Ubuntu 8.10, but that may have been because it had not been updaed in a while. After running the updater, it installed without a hitch.

Step 4. Now give the script permission to run.
  chmod +x ~/djl/djl.sh

Step 5. Now run the script;
  sh ~/djl/djl.sh
That worked.

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Getting Started with DJL
Now I'm looking at a configuration window.
DJL Configuration Screen
I clicked to enable dependencies downloading, and clicked the button to add a shortcut to the panel. I clicked to save the settings.

Now I have what I believe to be the main window, and the "News" tab is selected. Clicking an entry opens a window to display the news.
DJL News Tab

This animation shows just the first 14 games of 122 but that should provide a taste. (Click to enlarge.)
DJL - Just a sampling of the the games available

Now the hard part... picking one or more to try! Auteria, Alien Arena and Assault Cube look interesting.

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