There’s a small games studio in the UK called Introversion Software who have, over the past couple of years, quietly produced some of the most interesting games around. Moreover, their games all run not just on Windows, but Mac and (most importantly) Linux. There are 3 titles in their history, Uplink, Darwinia and Defcon (you can buy all 3 for only £20 for the download edition at the moment, or £10 for Uplink on its own). I have, in fact, talked about Uplink and Darwinia before.

Anyway, enough of the blurb. I got hold of a copy of Uplink the other day, and was a little concerned about how difficult it would be to install under Ubuntu Hardy. I needn’t have worried - it was so easy. But I thought it would be best to lay out how I did it for Google to find. All of this info can also be found on the Uplink Forums which are still active.

How to do it:

1. Download the latest patch. I used the Loki installer version of 1.55 (get it here) but it’s probably worth checking the Patch forum in case there’s a new release out
2. Run the installer - sudo sh uplink-patch-1.55.sh which installs the patch to /usr/local/games/uplink although you can install it to your home directory if you like.
3. Pop in the CD, and unzip the linux version somewhere convenient ( unzip /media/cdrom/linux/uplink.zip )
4. Copy the .dat files into the /usr/local/games/uplink/lib folder. ( cp *.dat /usr/local/games/uplink/lib )
5. Profit!

Once you’ve done all that, you should be able to run uplink just by typing uplink from the command line, or clicking Applications -> Other -> uplink.

Hope that helps someone enjoy the game as much as I do.

mrBen

I have just gone and downloaded Uplink - I’m going to have fun with that one… But got a Q for you - are you going to re-enable linkpot.net?

Linkpot.net will be returning, yes. I don’t have an exact timeframe, but there will be an announcement about it in the near future. Watch this space