Installing Unity3D 4.x on Linux

Quick video on getting Unity 4 working under Ubuntu 13.04. Though it should work just fine on any other distro. It's relatively easy once you fix the issue getting around the license issues. Hope somebody finds it useful if for some reason you want to work in Linux.


What doesn't work
Creating a project - So you will have to use the angry bots project and clean it out. Or create one in Windows/Mac and copy it over.
Asset store - This should be fixable. However I haven't tried fixing it yet.

How to install Unity3D 4 on Linux

Video showing it works just fine

 

Even if it does work on ubuntu 13.04 (and on "appdb.winehq.org" it is reported to work also on ubuntu 12.10, fedora 18, linux mint 15 and arch linux), unfortunately it does not seem to work on Ubuntu 13.10 64 bit.

I have tried on Ubuntu 13.10 64 bit using the unity3d installers for versions 4.3, 4.2, 4.1 and 4.0, under both wine 1.4 (from oficial ubuntu repository) and wine 1.6 (from wine ppa "ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa"). It installs fine (using WINEARCH=win32), starts the program fine (creating the HKLM.Software.Microsoft.WindowsNT.CurrentVersion.ProductID registry key), does not create new projects as expected, but when opening another project, even an completely empty one (an empty folder with just an empty "Assets" folder inside), the unity 3d program window opens empty. The menu bars are there, with all menu itens inside it, and the menu itens wich should open another windows indeed open them. But every window comes "empty", just a black canvas inside the window frame.

I have tryied also some winetrick words, like corefonts, tahoma, d3dx9, forcemono, but none gave me sucess.

Also, installing Unity3D on windows xp as guest on virtualbox does not work. After installation, when trying to start the program, it complains with a popup saying "Fatal Error! Failed to initialize unity graphics", even with virtualbox guest aditions installed, with 2D and 3D acceleration enabled, and running the virtual machine under windows or linux hosts. I have not tried yet to run on windows vista, 7 or 8 as guests.



Unity3D already have a Mac version, thus it should not be too dificult to do a linux port. Hope that, because of steam and their steam machines and SteamOS, Unity Technologies consider making a linux port of Unity3D editor, even if it would be only oficially compatible with just one distro, whichever it would be.

 

The Mac version wasn't a port, it was the first version; Unity didn't run on Windows until 2.5. A Linux version isn't nearly as simple as you seem to think, or they would have done it by now...it's not like Unity is a simple Unix command-line utility, and OS X and Linux are quite different in many ways. But even then, porting the editor is only part of the process--there's also a fair amount of third-party software (like Beast) that would have to be ported, licensing issues to sort out, etc., and it all needs to be maintained over time. Personally I'm in favor of a Linux version, but you need to look at it realistically. It's not just a recompile and it's not like porting an SDL game or something.

--Eric

 

hello, I installed Unity3D on Ubuntu, but nothing appears!
Only the top menu.
How can I fix this

 

You're right. It's not as simple as porting an SDL game, but you're wrong in the sense that it's far easier than you think. Their editor is written ( At my last scan of their internals ) over 3/4 in C#. And the rest clearly works on Linux or their games wouldn't either. My point here is that they very easily could hammer out a Linux version if they wanted to. The biggest issue is that the latest OS scans point Windows as "too far" ahead of Linux in terms of users. If you discounted the Linux users who boot into Windows once or twice a week to play old DirectX games as "Windows Users", that number suddenly evens out quite a bit.

 

Mmm...nope, it's mostly C++, and the executable itself is ~68MB. The C# stuff isn't anywhere close to that; a lot of the functions are just calls to native code. Also all the third-party stuff (Enlighten, PhysX etc. etc.) is not C# and doesn't necessarily have a Linux version, so all that needs to be ported and maintained as well.

That's just blatantly false. It took quite a lot of time/effort just to get 64-bit working on the two platforms they already support, for example.

--Eric

 

It does not works