A guide to installing Abiathar on Ubuntu 14.04

Last time I tried Ubuntu, I never got anything interesting running on it. Today I tried again, and after a ton of fiddling I managed to get Abiathar running on it. Note that I barely know anything about Linux and I'm just compiling a bunch of instructions into one place.

First, you'll need to download the update client (EXE link), which fetches the newest version. Your Downloads folder is a good place for that. Fire up a Terminal and navigate to wherever you put it. Mark it executable with chmod +x AbiatharUpdater.exe.

Now you need Mono, which is like .NET for Linux. Open the Ubuntu Software Center application, then find and install the Mono Runtime (searching for "mono" should pull it up). You need some extra packages:

sudo apt-get install mono-vbnc
sudo apt-get install mono-devel

Unfortunately, those don't include the SSL certificates that Mono needs to fetch HTTPS files, and mozroots is no more, so we need to add another repository?

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian wheezy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-xamarin.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates-mono

For reasons unknown, installing that last certificates package takes a really long time and pokes at a bunch of other packages. Once it's done, you can finally run the Abiathar updater.

mono AbiatharUpdater.exe

If everything goes well, it will download three files. It fails with "The method or operation is not supported" at the very end, but that's OK; it was trying to launch Abiathar using a Windows function that doesn't exist on Linux.

OK, now we need WINE, which is a Windows emulator. (Abiathar needs a UI, which means window handles and stuff that isn't .NET, so just Mono won't do it.) Before we do that, mark Abiathar executable with chmod +x Abiathar.exe.

sudo apt-get install wine
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install winehq-staging

That installs the normal WINE package, then it gets the staging (development) branch, which has features we need. Now we need to configure stuff to get the .NET framework running inside WINE.

rm -rf ~/.wine
export WINEARCH=win32
export WINEPREFIX="/home/USER/.wine"
winecfg

Replace "USER" with your home folder's name. The last command produces a GUI configuration utility. While it's loading, it might ask to install some things; install them. Once the dialog comes up, change the Windows version dropdown to Windows 7, then OK out. Now we need extra WINE-related utilities to get .NET.

mkdir Winetricks
cd Winetricks
wget -r -c -N https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks

That downloads a script from the Winetricks GitHub repository. cd down through all the new folders.

chmod +x winetricks

sh winetricks

When you get a GUI, choose to "Select the default wineprefix", then choose "Install a Windows DLL or component." Scroll through the list and find dotnet40. It'll warn you about lacking support, but that's OK. Soon, you'll get the normal .NET 4 installer. Go through it as usual, and once done, cancel out of Winetricks.

Finally, cd back to where you put Abiathar, and run it.

wine Abiathar.exe

Abiathar running on Ubuntu