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How to play Osmos on FreeBSD

The "Humble Bundle" project brings indie games to the masses by allowing people to pay any amount to buy a whole bundle of games together. Since they are developed by small developers, many of them (probably all) also work on non-Windows OS-es. I've bought the bundle and wished to play Osmos on FreeBSD. My configuration is AMD64 with an ATI card, usually a terrible one for gaming on non-Windows.

Keywords: FreeBSD, game, howto

Osmos is one of those "flow" games which, though they have a goal, can be played for the relaxation effect and soft music. It teaches patience and Newtonian physics :)

It turned out that it is fairly easy to make it work on FreeBSD, though it is very much an exotic application here!

In short, the steps I took are:

  1. Installed Linuxulator (actually I had it before...) with Fedora 10 binaries (wish they were newer Undecided )
  2. Installed linux_dri from graphics section of ports
  3. Installed linux-f10-openal to bring in dependencies but deinstalled it because it doesn't work
  4. Fetched a newer version of the OpenAL libraries RPM and manually unpacked it to /usr/compat/linux using the usual tools (or the "mc" utility from misc section)

Note that the Linuxulator is currently always 32-bit, so don't bother trying the amd64 versions of anything.

It did freeze once while I played, which I then needed to "solve" by Ctrl-C-ing it. We'll see how it goes.

Posted on 2010-12-16T00:28 by ivoras

#1 Re: How to play Osmos on FreeBSD

Added on 2011-01-01T07:27 by kace

Pretty neat.

Here's something I wonder and that could apply to this: Why don't we see more game demo's in the ports tree?

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