Introduction
Giocoso Version 2 has been tested on most of the Linux distros that were, as of May 2022, in the top 20 of the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking, so hopefully almost all regular Linux users will be covered! Broadly speaking, anything based on Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuse and Arch should work without drama, along with some 'outliers' that appear not to be part of a larger distro 'family', such as Solus and Fedora. Giocoso runs happily on distros using PulseAudio and ALSA sound systems, and regardless of whether X11 or Wayland is being used as the graphical server mechanism. Your choice of desktop environment also makes no difference to whether Giocoso works or not: it runs happily on Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, KDE, Gnome, Budgie, LXDE, LXQt and any number of other desktop environments and window managers.
In general, Giocoso requires installation of ffmpeg, flac, ImageMagick and Sqlite3 and will prompt for those things if they are not already present on your system. Despite my best efforts, it is still possible that Giocoso on a particular distro may prompt for the installation of (say) 'ImageMagick' (that is, in mixed upper/lower case) when that distro's package name is actually 'imagemagick' (i.e., all lower case). Similar case-confusion might arise elsewhere, too, but ImageMagick seems more susceptible to this issue than most other packages I'm aware of! Hopefully, incidents of this will be rare, but be prepared to switch case to achieve a successful prerequisites installation when 'unknown package' errors otherwise arise.
The Giocoso installation process is very similar on all Linux distros, though the specific software prerequisites that are prompted for in each case will be slightly different, because different distros call packages by different names or come with a different variety of software pre-installed. The installation process basically comes down to: download an installation script from this website; run it; fulfil any instructions to install additional packages; and then start using Giocoso. It's not a terribly complicated affair and requires no prior special configuration steps (unlike the installation on Mac or Windows, for example!)
In the instructions that follow, I always start with a 'clean' and default installation of the distro in question, which then gets fully updated before I start doing any Giocoso-related work on it. If you are installing Giocoso onto a 'well-used' distro installation, it's possible some of your existing software may conflict with what Giocoso wants or expects, but examples of this sort of thing should be rare. If you encounter such problems, however, by all means let me know and I'll see what I can do to fix them and/or update the documentation.
Click on each distro name to be taken to a page specifically documenting Giocoso installation on that distro. Distros have been arranged in 'family groups' for ease of discovery. I've lumped the three distros that run on Raspberry Pi hardware into their own distinct family, since their use of the ARM processor architecture gives them more in common with each other than with their x86_64 'cousins'.
If your particular choice of distro is not listed, I am open to adding support for additional distros over time, if I can. Just get in touch and make a request.
Arch-based Distros |
Ubuntu-based Distros |
Debian-based Distros |
OpenSuse-based Distros |
Other Distros |
Giocoso on Raspberry Pi |
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