Desura on Fedora 18

Desura is a nice alternative to Steam for buying, installing and running games on Linux. While not as popular as the latter, it was the first digital distribution application which introduced support for Linux games and game mods. Having a rather slow start Desura became popular with the release of Indie game bundles such as Humble Bundle and Indie Royale.

Installing Desura on Fedora 18 is fairly simple. While there are no official rpms, the installer tarball (32-bit and 64-bit) works out of the box on most distributions. You need to download the tarball, unpack it and run the desura binary which will update itself and auto-install. The default installation location is the current path ($PWD) so if you want to change that, create a new path, move the desura binary in it and run the installer from there.

$pwd
~/Games
$ tar zxvf desura-x86_64.tar.gz
desura/
desura/README
desura/desura
cd desura
./desura

After the installation a pop up window will prompt you to login or create a new account and you’re done.