A quick tutorial to get Nullpomino working on Ubuntu

With the announcement of the shutdown of Tetris Online, our normal source of Tetris games for PC will soon say goodbye to all of us... That sucks, but luckily there are some other nice Tetris games around. Puyo Puyo Tetris is one of the notable ones (if you're willing to pay on Steam), Nullpomino is another. Since the latter is actually free, open source, has a great amount of game modes for everyone (including online multiplayer games), I think it's quite a good choice to replace our good old Tetris flash games that will soon be history.

It's pretty easy to get it working on Windows, just install Java from Oracle's site, install the game, run it, and there you go. On Ubuntu (or any Linux system that I have encountered), it's a little bit more trickier.

In my memory, if you decided to get Oracle's proprietary version of Java, the game would run right out of the box (correct me if I'm wrong, though). However, if for some reason you are uncomfortable with getting that version (either for the fact that they don't provide DEB packages or just because it's proprietary software) and decided to use OpenJDK instead, some extra steps are required...

...well, not much anyways, just follow the steps and you'll get it working.

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(1. Get the game. This should be pretty trivial, just download the one for Linux systems and extract it to somewhere you like. Personally I dumped them into a folder Nullpomino in my home folder. The game folder should be something like this.

(2. Get OpenJDK. For Ubuntu 18.04 (the current LTS version), you can get either openjdk-8-jre or openjdk-11-jre, but in my tests Nullpomino refuses to run on the newer version. So, just get Java 8. Execute this in a terminal.

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jre

(3. We're almost there, but if you try to launch the game directly, you will probably see it fail to even start. This is where the trick comes in. In a terminal window, cd into the game folder, and run these commands to have a script that starts the game correctly for you.

echo "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/amd64/ ./play_slick" > start.sh
chmod +x start.sh

Now that's it, you can run the game by using the script start.sh. The above script should also work for other Linux distros such as openSUSE with some tweaking. As long as you get the LD_LIBRARY_PATH pointing to its relevant folder it should be fine. On openSUSE it will point to a folder in /usr/lib64 instead, so dig somewhere there for the JRE's lib folder!

Note: This will only work on a 64-bit system. If you are using a 32-bit one for whatever reason (they are so old, just in case you happen to have one), try finding a folder with a similar path but with i386 or i686 in amd64's place. Edit the script accordingly and it should still work!

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I won't lie that I decided to write this because there really exists little information on getting game to run properly on Ubuntu Linux. So, if you stumbled upon this post because of a Google search or something, hope that it helps you to get the game working :P

For others that got this post while scrolling on your Steem UI, do try the game if you like Tetris :) It is a pretty cool game (with some pretty poor SFX but you can replace them with the ones you like in the res folder of the game. Probably a post material for a later date, xd).

That's all for now then, see you next time~

--Lilacse

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