Do I always need to be ROOT in order to install games?

[ChojinDSL]

Hi there, I was just wondering. Do I always need to become root first, in order to install games, specifically commercial games, i,e, quake3, unreal tournament, etc...

The reason why I am asking is because I'm using the Loki_updater to update my games, but if I run it as a user, then it comes up and says that it couldnt find games that it could update.
If I exit my desktop, log off and back on as root and start a root X session then I can run Loki Update properly and it shows me all of my installed Loki Games.

[BonezTheGoon]

In short, no. In a longer answer, no but for the loki updater issue specifically you must run it as whomever was the user that installed the game. Meaning if you were root when you installed it you must be root to patch it, likewise if you were user_bob when you installed the game then you must be user_bob to patch it using the loki updater. Reason being (so far as I understand) is basically that the games are installed into different directories/paths depending on who the user was that installed it, then loki updater only checks in the specific location for the current user.

If you have more than one user account on your machine and you want them to be able to play the games as well it makes the most sense to install them as root, since you won't have to do any additional work or installs to allow additional users to play the game. If you are the only user on your system it would probably be 'safe' to install the games as your user account, keep in mind each case differs slightly and there (as always) are good and bad points to either situation.

Regards,
BonezTheGoon

[ChojinDSL]

Ahh, ok.
I was just wondering, because for most of my games the default installation path is /usr/local/games/ and only root can write to that directory. Is it safe to change the permissions for the games directory or should I have the install path point to somewhere on my home directory?

By the way, how come Linux knows where a game or program is installed?
I mean, no matter where I am on my harddrive, I just have to type quake3 (for example) and the games starts. Does Linux have something like a system register which logs each installation or what?

[Pythonhead]

For your first question, its not really safe to change the permissions to let all users write anywhere in /usr. Install it as root, or install it in your home directory as your regular user.

Question two, when you type in the game name it looks for it in every directory in your PATH variable:

[bakgwailo]

if you install it in your home directory, just sym link it to say /usr/games/bin or somewhere in your path so you can still type in quake3 and run it from anywhere on your disk. That way you can update it with out root and still play.
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