Quite a while ago I purchased Uplink (and Defcon) for Linux through the Introversion website. Uplink worked at the time (Ubuntu 8.10) but somewhere along the way Canonical removed the libgtk1.2 libraries from the Ubuntu repositories. This presents a problem when installing the game in later versions of Ubuntu.

sh uplink-complete-1.54DOWNLOAD.sh

complains

Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Uplink complete 1.54DOWNLOAD............................................................................................
.setup9739: error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I found the solution at the Introversion forums, written by forum member pl3w5y.

Download the following deb files. I prefer to use the command line.

wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2_1.2.10-18.1build2_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/glib1.2/libglib1.2ldbl_1.2.10-19build1_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2-common_1.2.10-18.1build2_all.deb

You can swap out the ‘ca’ part of the url with ‘us’ or whatever your Ubuntu repository country code might be.

Now, inside the directory you downloaded them to, run

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

And that’s it. Now re-run the Uplink installer and the game should install fine.

3 Responses to “How to install Introversion’s Uplink in Ubuntu 9.10 (or higher)”

1. Magnus Bjarnason says:

   March 19, 2011 at 9:21 am

   Hey Guys – Just wanted to update you on a much easier way to install this, without the GUI installer, thereby bypassing the need for installing depricated libs.

   From: http://forums.introversion.co.uk/uplink/viewtopic.php?t=38670

   This example is for 64bit Linux, note that the .sh file is here called “uplink.sh”, but has a longer name when downloaded from the introversion website, which you should use instead.

   cd /home/joeuser
   mkdir uplinkinstall
   cd uplinkinstall
   sh ../uplink.sh –tar xvf
   setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup

   For 32-bit install, exchange the last line with: setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/setup

   – Magnus

2. kyle says:

   March 20, 2011 at 12:13 am

   Very cool. Thank you Magnus.

   I found that after running the command

   setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup

   that pressing ‘page down’ or the down arrow didn’t allow me to scroll through the Terms and Agreement text. Pressing the ‘d’ key scrolled me down to the ‘Do you accept? y/n’ text, though.

   And, of course, if you want to install a ‘shortcut’ (symlink) in your terminal so you can type ‘uplink’ to run the game, run the setup.data/… command as ‘sudo’.

3. mubuntu says:

   July 2, 2011 at 7:12 am

   http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=de&tl=en&u=http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Spiele/Uplink