Note: Steam not required to play the offline 'LAN play' version via WINE.

Note 2: Iocaine Studios does not officially support linux issues, especially issues like how to install or compile WINE with whatever one of the bajillion flavors of linux you have ;d

First, Install WINE

We can't help you with this. Theres a bajillion distros, and each one installs differently. For ubuntu, though, we simply did the following in a command box, and that was all it took:

sudo apt-get install wine

Now install STEAM (only required if you want to play online via Starport)

You can follow the instructions here: http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=1554

Now install ThreadSpace: Hyperbol via steam.

There's nothing special about this step - it should appear in the Steam storefront. Install it just like you would in windows. If you already 'own' it, it will just magically appear on your games list and you can double click to install it. Whee!

"Obtain" D3DX9_31.dll

We can't help you with this - it comes with every installation of DirectX.

Iocaine cannot redistribute this file except as part of the redistributable package. Its probably in a million places though.

Since the redist comes with Hyperbol in the redists folder (steam/steamapps/common/tshb/redists) its been said that you can use the 'cabextract' program (ubuntu: sudo apt-get install cabextract), feeding it the various cabs to find the D3DX9_31.dll file.

Wherever you get it from, place it in the hyperbol folder. It will be in your WINE location, wherever you installed Steam to, under a 'steamapps/common/tshb' subfolder. ~/.wine/drivec/Program\ Files/steam/steamapps/common/tshb Alternatively, you can place it in a common DLL location or pull some other WINE trickery - your mileage may vary.

• Perhaps by the time you read this, it might not even be necessary to do so anymore. WINE moves fast.

Failure to properly install this will cause Steam to say 'starting hyperbol...' and then do nothing. If you run Steam via command line , you'll see it say that it could not find the DLL.

Update: As of July 25, 2008, You really do need to still find and use this DLL. Even though wine now comes with the library, there are numerous bugs which cause many strange things to occur if you're not using the "real" D3DX9_31.dll file. Not copying the real one will cause wine to try to do the various functions itself (load textures, etc) and that can cause mystery errors and crashes.

Set the launch options on Hyperbol

Thats right, Iocaine Studios included some launch options with WINE in mind!

Right click on the Hyperbol application in your Steam games menu, choose properties, and 'launch options'. These are command line parameters. I recommend using the following:

-noredists -nomovies -windowed -width 1280 -height 1024

You can also specify -adapter to choose a different graphics adapter, but that should be unnecessary.

Play

Thats all there is to it.

The intro movies won't play, but the new -noredists command line option avoids any nastiness when trying to launch the game. the width and height are necessary because Linux/WINE seems to currently have an issue with width/height detection.

Because of this, if you wanna make fine tuned graphics tweaks, I highly recommend editing the gameoptions.cfg file in the data folder by hand, rather than using the graphics config screen.

Note: This was tested to work in Ubuntu Feisty, with WINE + Steam. No crazy tweaking was necessary, in that distro. It even worked with Compiz/Beryl running, looked quite cool on the cube. And yes, it worked on Starport, Online, too. Your mileage may vary.