running Star Citizen on Linux Mint

[mellowtigger]

A quick and easy post. I just wanted to document how I got Star Citizen (still in development since 2012) running on my Linux Mint 19.2 computer with minimal fuss. In case I ever need to rebuild my environment from scratch, these are the commands that I used.  I just followed the general suggestion on the Star Citizen forum to use Lutris for the difficult setup.

# this command is only to verify that Python3 is installed.  if it isn't, go find a command to install it
/usr/bin/python3 -V

# install wine and the core Windows fonts in it
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo apt-key add winehq.key
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-stable
sudo apt install winetricks
winetricks corefonts

# install the latest version of graphics drivers for my NVidia card, including 32-bit architecture
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-435 libnvidia-gl-435 libnvidia-gl-435:i386
sudo apt install libvulkan1 libvulkan1:i386
sudo apt update

# take advantage of the Lutris configuration work already done by other Linux gamers for Star Citizen
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lutris-team/lutris
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lutris

Then I run Lutris, select Star Citizen from their package directory, and run it.

It works. It really works. The game itself still has major issues. I'll blog later about the horrible user interface and keybinding customization.

But it works.