Linux Woes, and how to remedy them

2149 words, 8 min read

Contents:

The helpdesk post here on setting up Ubuntu, while is mainly for Ubuntu, does technically apply to all distros. However, there may be times where you run into issues that seem strange or peculiar, that no other platform suffers. This guide is to give you a brief jolt down on every possible scenario, as well as common things you can do.

Filepaths you may need to know

Finding your GameMaker profiles (and um.json) /home/.config/GameMakerStudio2-Beta/

If installed via .deb package, where GameMaker IDE should be installed. /opt/GameMakerStudio2-Beta/

Finding your GameMaker Runtimes folder (And ui.log) /home/.local/share/GameMakerStudio2-Beta/

Finding your compiled Linux builds ran from the IDE (remote or local): /home/GameMakerStudio2/

Installing GameMaker on Linux in other ways (unofficial):

Arch Linux

If you are using Arch Linux, you may be able to download directly from the AUR. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gamemaker-beta-bin.

Manual extraction + Installation

In a lot of cases, you may have the .deb package unable to install, or need to manually install it yourself. You can remedy that by extracting it manually. Extracting .deb archives manually can be done via this command.

ar -x ~/Downloads/GameMaker-Beta-####.####.#.###.deb

Where # is the version number of the .deb package you wish to extract. This will allow you to extract the underlying .deb package itself.

In regards to dependencies, you still need all dependencies as listed in the setting up Ubuntu helpdesk guide. But, if you are as luck as I am, you may be able to get away with installing some. For non-ARM, ffmpeg/appimage/linuxdeploy/steam-runtimes may be all you need at minimal installed. As GameMaker on testing will build out .appimages by default, and you can still export with .appimage. On ARM-based distros, or if you are wanting to export zip builds over app image, all of the other dependencies are required.

Note: linuxdeploy/appimage/steam-runtimes is not needed on ARM-based distros at the time of writing.

Distrobox

Think of Distrobox as a matryoshka doll, but with computers instead: it's a computer inside your computer! More specifically, a linux distro inside your current distro's terminal! This is especially useful for installing apps on immutable distros, such as Fedora Atomic/Kionite and its derivatives (e.g. Bazzite) where the core system files are read-only and cannot be changed.

NOTE: Distroshelf, a graphical frontend for Distrobox, is highly recommended. You can find and install it on Flatpak through your software manager (GNOME Software, Plasma Discover, Bazzite's Bazaar etc).

Once you get Distroshelf installed, first thing you want to do is click that big, accent-colored Create Distrobox button (or the little + in the top-left corner). You'll be met with the following popup:

Screenshot

First, you want to give your Distrobox a name and choose a docker image (basically, what distro to run as a container). You'll see a ton of them, but for now we want to use Ubuntu 24.04 since that's what GameMaker is officially supported on. After that, we name our new container "Ubuntu" (you can choose any name you want!)

NOTE: Distrobox names must not contain characters such as spaces or otherwise unacceptable characters like @, !, #, $ and so on! This is because spaces and the special characters interfere with how Bash commands' arguments operate.

For now, we don't care about anything else there. NVIDIA Support, however, is useful if you have a NVIDIA GPU installed. Also, Init process makes the container run more like a full VM rather than an application container, but again, we don't care about that for now.

Once you're properly set up, after another popup showing the creation process, you should be met with this screen:

Screenshot

Booting up the container can be done by pressing the little terminal-like icon in the Container Status section. This will bring up a terminal. It will take some time on first boot, as it has to download the necessary packages required to function properly.

Once that's done you should be greeted with the classic bash prompt, and depending on what terminal you use, it might have a little box icon before the [username@distrobox]:~$. From here, just follow the Setting Up for Ubuntu guide linked at the top of this page.

NOTE: If you see stuff like dev/console: Cannot mkmod: Operation not permitted during the Steam runtime download process, do not be alarmed! As long the last line keeps moving and looking like the usual curl progress output, you're good to go!

NOTE: If you try to disable AppArmor and it shows sysctl: cannot stat /proc/sys/kernel/apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns: No such file or directory, that's actually fine! It means AppArmor is not present.

After you're done setting up, get the latest GameMaker Beta IDE .deb package, just press the Install .deb package button and select the aformentioned file. It will do the installing for you, and you can call it a successful day.

If you go into Applications, you should be able to see GameMaker here.

Screenshot

Simply click on GameMaker-Beta and enjoy!

NOTE: Attempting to compile a game might result in the following output:

/bin/bash -c 'appimagetool --appimage-extract-and-run --runtime-file /home/user/GameMakerStudio2/vm/YourProjectHere/AppImage-runtime /home/user/GameMakerStudio2/vm/YourProjectHere/AppDir/ /home/user/GameMakerStudio2/vm/YourProjectHere/YourProjectHere.AppImage'
appimagetool, continuous build (commit 5735cc5), build <local dev build> built on 2023-03-08 22:52:04 UTC
file command is missing but required, please install it
System.Exception: command 'appimagetool --appimage-extract-and-run --runtime-file  /home/user/GameMakerStudio2/vm/YourProjectHere/AppImage-runtime /home/user/GameMakerStudio2/vm/YourProjectHere/AppDir/ /home/user/GameMakerStudio2/vm/YourProjectHere/YourProjectHere.AppImage' failed with exit status 1
   at Igor.LinuxBuilder.plink_async(String command, Boolean fail_on_error)
   at Igor.LinuxBuilder.BuildAppImage(String work_dir, String exe_path, String assets_zip_path, String projectName, Boolean package)
   at Igor.LinuxBuilder.Run()
   at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethod(Object target, Void** arguments, Signature sig, Boolean isConstructor)
   at System.Reflection.MethodBaseInvoker.InvokeWithNoArgs(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr)
Igor complete.
elapsed time 00:00:19.6563488s for command "/home/user/.local/share/GameMakerStudio2-Beta/Cache/runtimes/runtime-2024.1400.0.899/bin/igor/linux/x64/Igor" -j=8  -options="/tmp/GameMakerStudio2-Beta/GMS2TEMP/build.bff" -v -- Linux Run started at 11/05/2025 22:05:33, exited with 1
FAILED: Run Program Complete
For the details of why this build failed, please review the whole log above and also see your Compile Errors window.

While this may look bad, this is just GameMaker attempting to run the newly created AppImage file and failing for some reason. By this point, your game has already been compiled and turned into an executable! You can manually run the game by going into $HOME/GameMakerStudo2/vm/YourProjectHere/AppDir and double-click the AppRun.AppImage file. That's your game!

Screenshot

Bugs, tricks and tips:

When I start up GameMaker, the IDE looks messed up!

This may be caused by a DPI-related issue on some distro platforms. To work around this, you may override it directly. Create a file at /home/.local/share/GameMakerStudio2-Beta/dpi_override.json. And add the following

[{"Key":"is_enabled","Value":true},{"Key":"percentage","Value":92}]

via your preferred text editor. After starting GameMaker back up, your DPI will be overriden.

Note: As of more recent versions (presumably 2024.8+), this may have changed slightly. You may instead need to have

[{"Key":"is_enabled","Value":true},{"Key":"percentage","Value":92}]

I can't open the IDE on Fedora!

Fedora, not unlike other distros but unlike Ubuntu, has some packages named differently. That's ok! Most dependencies, once you find and install them, will work out-of-the-box. Except for one: GameMaker's bundled freetype library, which relies on bz2. Because of the aforementioned package naming disparity, this also may include files themselves: as of the writing of this section, GameMaker looks specifically for /usr/lib64/libbz2.so.1.0, which is named/versioned differently on Fedora.

Although tedious, you may do either one of the following:

  • Create a symlink to libbz2.so.####, where # is the version present in your Fedora installation
  • Modify the SharpFont.dll.config in /opt/GameMaker-Beta/x86_64 to use the system's installed freetype package

NOTE: Be careful when modifying or moving around system files or program libraries and configurations, as doing so without caution may cause your program and/or system break!

Creating a symlink to libbz2.so.####:

If you're unfamiliar with what a symlink is, think of it like a Windows shortcut. It points towards a file. Simply go to /usr/lib64 and then run this command:

ln -sf /path/to/file /path/to/symlink

Think of it as if ln stands for link, where /path/to/file is Fedora's libbz2.so.1.0 and /path/to/symlink is where you want to place your symlink. Do note your symlink has to be /usr/lib64/libbz2.so.1.0 in order for this to work!

Modifying GameMaker's SharpFont.dll.config:

GameMaker's SharpFont/freetype library makes use of the aformentioned libbz2.so.1.0 file, but you can easily edit the configuration file to make use of the system's freetype library package in case you don't like fiddling in system directories.

The configuration in question should be located in /opt/GameMaker-Beta/x86_64 and can be opened in your text editor of choice (e.g. gedit, GNOME Text Editor, COSMIC Text Editor, Kate etc.) and by default should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="Vendor/freetype/freetype-x86_64-ubuntu-Release/freetype.so"    os="linux"   cpu="x86-64,x64,amd64" />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="32" target="Vendor/freetype/freetype-armv7-ubuntu-Release/freetype.so"     os="linux"   cpu="arm,armv7,arm32"  />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="Vendor/freetype/freetype-aarch64-ubuntu-Release/freetype.so"   os="linux"   cpu="armv8,arm64"   	/>

<!--
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="libfreetype.so.6"    os="linux"   cpu="x86-64,x64,amd64" />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="32" target="libfreetype.so.6"     os="linux"   cpu="arm,armv7,arm32"  />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="libfreetype.so.6"   os="linux"   cpu="armv8,arm64"   	/>
-->

	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="Vendor/freetype/freetype-x86_64-windows-Release/freetype.dll"  os="windows" cpu="x86-64,x64,amd64" />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="lib/windows/arm64/freetype.dll" os="windows" cpu="arm64"      />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="Vendor/freetype/freetype-x86_64-macos-Release/freetype.dylib"  os="osx"     cpu="x86-64,x64,amd64" />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="Vendor/freetype/freetype-aarch64-macos-Release/freetype.dylib" os="osx"  	 cpu="armv8,arm64"      />
</configuration>

NOTE: The last pair does not affect linux, so it can be ignored.

<!-- and --> define comments in a XML file. Simply move the comment block from the second pair of dllmaps to the first. This will force GameMaker to use the system's installed freetype package. Your final configuration file should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<!--
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="Vendor/freetype/freetype-x86_64-ubuntu-Release/freetype.so"    os="linux"   cpu="x86-64,x64,amd64" />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="32" target="Vendor/freetype/freetype-armv7-ubuntu-Release/freetype.so"     os="linux"   cpu="arm,armv7,arm32"  />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="Vendor/freetype/freetype-aarch64-ubuntu-Release/freetype.so"   os="linux"   cpu="armv8,arm64"   	/>
-->

	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="libfreetype.so.6"    os="linux"   cpu="x86-64,x64,amd64" />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="32" target="libfreetype.so.6"     os="linux"   cpu="arm,armv7,arm32"  />
	<dllmap dll="freetype.dll" wordsize="64" target="libfreetype.so.6"   os="linux"   cpu="armv8,arm64"   	/>
  ...

There's no fonts in the Save/Load dialog on Arch!

This is a rather recent issue, mainly with Pango, GTK's text renderer, and apparently the Adwaita Sans font. Since GameMaker links directly to GTK 3 rather than relying on Zenity or xdg-desktop-portals, the offending font will cause Pango to stop rendering any text. A relatively easy fix can be done by editing $HOME/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css, adding the following:

* {
    font-family: "Noto Sans"; /* Replace with your desired font */
    font-size: 11pt; /* Adjust size as needed */
}

NOTE: This will change all default GTK fonts.