Linux Support

Linux support in Flashpoint is currently experimental due to a lack of maintainers. This page describes the current state of our Linux support. If you need assistance with installing or playing, visit us at #flashpoint-mac-linux-help.

As it stands, the Docker version of Flashpoint for Linux supports Flash, HTML5, Shockwave, Unity and Java. The exceptions are content that uses the Chromium browser, and Shockwave content that plays in-browser. If you want support for the other platforms that are Windows-exclusive, there are a few options to get the Windows version of Flashpoint running on Linux:

• Download the Windows version of Flashpoint and run it in a Windows virtual machine. This is the recommended non-native option.
• Run the Windows version of Flashpoint with Wine. This works well on some computers, but does not work consistently.

Otherwise, download the latest Docker Flashpoint package and install it.

Manual Installation

Dependencies

First, install Flashpoint's dependencies.

Dependency package names on various distros
Library/command name	Docker	PulseAudio*	X11**	PHP	bash
Debian	(see this page)	pulseaudio	xorg	php	bash
Ubuntu, Linux Mint	(see this page)	pulseaudio	xorg	php	bash
Fedora-like	(see this page)	pulseaudio	xorg-x11-server-Xorg	php	bash
Arch-like	docker	pulseaudio	xorg-server	php	bash

Note: Chances are that Docker and PHP will be the only packages that you'll need to install, as most distributions come with the rest of the packages already pre-installed.

* : PipeWire can also be used in place of PulseAudio by installing the pipewire-pulse package on Ubuntu-like and Arch-like distros. For Debian, see this link.

** : X11 can also be used within Wayland by installing the xwayland package on Debian-like and Ubuntu-like distros, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland on Fedora-like distros, and xorg-xwayland on Arch-like distros.

To install them, use your distro's package manager:

Distro	Package manager install command
Debian	sudo apt-get install {PACKAGE}
Ubuntu, Linux Mint	sudo apt-get install {PACKAGE}
Fedora-like	sudo dnf install {PACKAGE}
Fedora-like (old)	sudo yum install {PACKAGE}
Arch-like	sudo pacman -S {PACKAGE}

Installation

Before you start, you need to configure Docker to run as a non-root user, then reboot your computer.

If you have an Nvidia GPU, you will need to add Nvidia's repository and install the nvidia-docker2 package. Follow the "Setting up NVIDIA Container Toolkit" instructions under the heading corresponding to your distro here.

Then, download the latest Docker Flashpoint package if you haven't already and extract it somewhere.

Go to the place where you extracted it, and pull the docker images by running pull.sh. They'll take ~3.5 GB.

Finally, run the ./flashpoint executable script to start the launcher.

Config files can be found in ./LinuxConf/ and ./FPSoftware/FSPConfigs/.

Save data is stored in ./SaveData. Java save data isn't persistent, because there's no standardized location for it.

Troubleshooting

proxy.sh: "Permission denied" error

Depending on your system's permissions, the proxy.sh script may throw a "permission denied" error in the launcher logs, causing games to fail to start. To fix this, follow these steps:

1. Close the Flashpoint launcher.
2. Open ./LinuxConf/proxy.sh in a text editor.
3. Change the line /var/lock/flashpoint-networking.lock to /tmp/flashpoint-networking.lock and save the file.
4. Relaunch Flashpoint.

Fix white screen when launching games

If you've successfully installed QEMU and PHP but are still getting a white screen when launching games, it may mean that your distro's QEMU version is too old to support loading our VM snapshot. Linux Mint is known to be affected by this issue. Click the Logs tab of the launcher and look for the following error message:

unsupported machine type 'pc-i440fx-5.2'

You can also confirm the issue by running the following command: qemu-system-i386 --version. If you see a version below 5.2, then your QEMU version is too old. To fix the problem, you'll need to disable snapshot loading by following these steps:

1. Open the Data folder within your Flashpoint folder.
2. Open the services.json file in a text editor.
3. Remove these snippets of text from the file:
   • "-machine", "pc-i440fx-5.2",
   • "-loadvm", "quick",
4. Save the file and restart Flashpoint.

With these changes applied, you'll need to wait about 10-20 seconds after starting Flashpoint before launching games, but games should work properly.

Fix Flash Player crash

If the Flash Player crashes immediately when launched, there are a few possible solutions:

• Replace our hacked Flash projector with the original, unhacked Adobe Flash projector. Follow these steps:
  1. Download the projector from here
  2. In your Flashpoint folder, open FPSoftware/Flash
  3. Replace the flashplayer_32_sa.exe file with the one you downloaded.
• Remove wine-dxvk from your system. This causes problems with the Flash projector on some computers.

Fix Wine failing to start

In some cases, a problem with Wine may prevent games in Flashpoint from working. Look for the following error in the Logs tab of the launcher:

wine: 'examplewinedirectory/.wine' is a 64-bit installation, it cannot be used with a 32-bit wineserver.

If you see this error, then run the following command to change the wineprefix that FP is trying to use.

sed -i "2 i export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine_fp" "$HOME/opt/flashpoint/launcher/flashpoint"

Alternatively, if you are running low on disk space and don't care about the contents of the wineprefix, you can take a more destructive route: navigate to your Wine directory (usually, it's your home directory) and run the commands below to resolve the problem. Note that this deletes your current wineprefix.

rm -r .wine/
winecfg

Technologies

Flashpoint Infinity, like its Windows counterpart, it uses router.php as a proxy server. But unlike Windows, Linux provides native ways to set per-application proxy settings, so no equivalent to the Flashpoint Proxy library is used. On Linux, each application is simply told via environment variables to use localhost:22500 as a proxy server. For example, before Flashpoint Launcher opens the Flash projector, it sets the http_proxy environment variable to http://localhost:22500/.

The Flashpoint FAQ contains a list of all web game technologies ("Platforms") supported in the Windows version of Flashpoint. The Linux version currently supports a subset of these platforms. This is explained in detail below.

Supported Platforms

• Flash: Supported through Wine by default. Although a Linux Flash Projector exists, it suffers from graphical glitches on many systems. If you'd like to try your luck with the native projector, then either turn off use Wine, or tick it as a 'Native Platform' on the Config page.
• Shockwave: Supported through Wine.
• HTML5: Supported natively through the Basilisk browser. To update Basilisk, download it from here and extract it such that the executable is located at FPSoftware/Basilisk-Portable/linux/basilisk. By default, Basilisk will store its configuration in the location defined by XDG_CONFIG_DIR, so Flashpoint uses a shell script to set the configuration location. A pre-configured copy of Basilisk, along with the shell script, is packaged and also available here. This text file describes Basilisk's configuration.
• Java Applets: Supported natively using the OpenJDK. This support is not currently working, however.
• Unity Web Player: Supported through Wine. Unity 2.x and 3.x games may not work; this needs further testing.
• PopCap Plugin: Supported through Wine.
• Authorware Web Player: Supported through Wine.
• GoBit Plugin: Supported through Wine.

Unsupported Platforms

• Silverlight: In the past, Pipelight allowed Linux users to use Silverlight, but the repository is no longer available for most Linux distros. Moonlight was another option, but is also no longer available. Attempts to use Silverlight in K-Meleon using Wine have failed.
• 3DVIA Player: A previous tester received this error, which crashed K-Meleon: Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory. We need another tester to help us narrow this down.
• 3D Groove GX: When the http_proxy variable is set, Groove Player downloads but fails to load the file. Maybe the registry method described here would work better, but this needs to be tested. Two of our testers received the following set of errors: 1 2 3
• ActiveX: The most promising method so far was to install Internet Explorer 8 and each ActiveX plugin into the Wine prefix, but this needs considerable work.

Wine

Most games rely on technology only available on Windows. A lot of these however can be run through Wine. If there is no native executable, or you have the Native Platform option unticked for the game's platform then the launcher will run it through Wine.

You may choose to use the native versions, in which case tick the platform under Native Platforms in Config.

If you wish to play games that rely on Wine, be sure to install the 32-bit version of Wine. There are links below to distro specific install guides:

• Ubuntu - https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu
• Debian - https://wiki.debian.org/Wine#Installation_on_Debian_Jessie_and_newer
• Arch Linux - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wine#Installation

Important Note

Update: As of Wine 6.0-rc1, Shockwave appears to be working again. If you are on 5.22, keep an eye out for an update from your distribution.

As of Wine 5.22, the Shockwave wrappers are no longer launching. Avoid updating Wine until a fix is found.

Changelog

2021-07-26

Added 10.0 Infinity package

2021-02-16

Added Core/Ultimate standalone package for 9.0 based on 8.1 Infinity standalone

2020-11-07

Updated .deb to Flashpoint 8.2-2 Infinity

Added native executables for Flash and HTML5

Replaced modified Flash Projectors with the unmodified ones

Fixed extreme games option being disabled in config.json

2020-10-23

Updated .deb to Flashpoint 8.2-1 Infinity

2020-07-04

Updated to Flashpoint 8.1 Infinity

Updated to Flashpoint Launcher 9.0.2

2019-09-28

Updated to Flashpoint 6.3

Bundled WIP Launcher with better Multi-Platform Support:

• Proper linux argument escaping (Supersonic RC works now, yay!)
• SPR games automatically use port 22500 (Hacky, may be removed later)
• Wine will always (and only) be used for running .exe files (even if use Wine is turned off in Config)
• .bat files will always run their .sh equivalents (even if use Wine is turned on in Config)
• Windows execs are mapped to native execs (if existing), so Windows game XMLs should work out the box. (See execs.json)
• Can mark a platform as 'native' in Config, will force native execs to be used instead of Windows execs even if use Wine is turned on.
  • If no native execs are available (like Shockwave) then it will fallback to running the Windows exec with Wine.

Added native Basilisk support files

Updated SPR files

Updated router.php

2019-09-18

Added new SPR version (see update-spr.sh) and Shockwave XMLs

Added interim Launcher hack to make Shockwave games that use SPR work properly

Made the save manager scripts use a valid interpreter (/bin/sh)

• TODO: they still need further work/testing

2019-07-21 and prior

Configure Flash games to run using the Windows player, flashplayer_32_sa.exe

• The Linux flash player suffers from too many graphical glitches
• Requires Wine to be installed and enabled to play

Updated JDK to version 8u212

• startJava.sh instructions and script updated
• Made startJava.sh executable

Added support for Authorware Platform

Adds Linux versions of the Save Manager scripts

Adds a "Flashpoint" shortcut (replacing the Windows version)

Adds Flashpoint 6.2 games

Removed the game logos, as in Flashpoint Infinity 6.2 for Windows

Removed the Wineprefix because it was not used

To-Do List

• Allow the launcher to automatically start/stop the flashpoint server on Linux
• Rewrite and test startUnity.sh and startJava.sh scripts
• Find a way to get Basilisk working better in Wine, or use an alternative browser like K-Meleon
• Get Java working natively again with OpenJDK 8
• Test Unity 2.x and 3.x games
• AMF support for games like Neon Rider for the community levels