Hello Damocles,
Welcome.
Quote:
Am I correct in thinking that the tgz file contains an installer which will walk me through the install process or is it just a case of extracting that 1 file to a place of my choice?
Extract the file in your home folder, it should extract a bash/shell file ending with
.run
. If you can't run it from a GUI open a terminal and enter
./<filename>.run
. Don't use sudo if you want it installed in your home folder. The main file folder should get placed in
home/GNUstep/Applications
.
This page is for the nightly but the installation instructions are the same:
http://aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6853#p89726.
Quote:
Can I ask how people determine that an installed version of oolite needs to be updated?
I am not sure if the stable version gets many updates between releases, but you can install the latest nightly right along with the stable version. Updating is fairly easy just navigate to the oolite folder in GNUstep/Applications and click the file
oolite-update
or in a terminal run
./oolite-update
.
Quote:
I am wondering how difficult it is when updating to a newer version is it a case of replacing just certain files / folders or will i need to go through the process of adding & downloading all the oxp files
via the in-game option again?
No the updater only updates files that have been modified so all your oxps will remain unchanged. It should be noted that oxps are maintained by individuals who may not be associated directly with the oolite development team so they will not be updated by running the oolite updater. You will have to check in the manager or on these boards to be notified of \oxp updates.
Quote:
the thing which I have noticed when using catfish to search for oolite files/ folders is that they are currently scattered across both my file system partition and my home partition (this has me puzzled as to which files / folders should be backed up)
This is one of the reason I prefer to use the targz install. Those guys who maintain the repositories do some odd stuff. Oolite runs fin in the home folder yet for some reason they think some stuff should be hidden in system files. I feel that this is a very bad idea since an inexperienced user might damage the system by trying to edit oolite files that are hidden in the system. I just quit using the repository version of blender because I couldn't find some plug-ins (also installed from the repository), but the version I compiled found the plugs I manually downloaded and installed.
I would say the most important files to look for to back up would be:
home/oolite-saves
- if you have not changed the default path while saving <screenshots and game savefiles>.
home/.Oolite/AddOns
- if you have installed any oxps manually don't miss the "." before Oolite ~ make hidden files visible.
home/GNUstep/Library/ApplicationSupport/Oolite/ManagedAddOns
-AddOns downloaded with the game manager.
At least this is the way everything is set up on my linux system (Mint 17.3) .
I must say that I thought about trying Manjaro but I didn't like the idea of a rolling release because I read similar stories of updates breaking things. Fact is Mint doesn't seem to be stable enough to maintain a build environment for oolite, I just recently installed 17.3 on another machine and I had to go searching for some libs that I never had to before in order to compile my own version of oolite..