Hello. I have a bad feeling I'm gonna get nailed for being an ignoramus here, but I swear I really couldn't find the answer anywhere, and have been looking for days now.

My Windows machine shit itself, so I decided I'd try Ubuntu, seeing as how I wasn't able to reinstall Windows. I'm brand new to any Linux distributions, but my hunch here is that in order to run Pico-8, I have to build the package.

Is that accurate? And, if so, can someone kindly point me in the direction of any literature on the subject? I'd like to be able to understand what I'm trying to even do. I've gotten as far as checking it's architecture(citation needed) using "ldd" and that's about it.

Thank you very, very much.

Nope. You don't have to build the package. I just run the bin file.

I think I figured out that it's because my distribution is 32-bit. The software package downloaded from this website says it's 32, but typing "file" or "ldd" returns that it's a 64 bit package. Does that sound plausible?

I can confirm this on 32-bit void, I'd guess the build got packaged wrong somehow.

@andrewws hm. well, thank you. my laptop has 4gigs of ram anyway, so I'll try the 64bit distribution. forum doesn't seem to interested in the post, but I'll update what happens in case anyone else runs into the same problem. thanks guys!

I am not quite sure what problem you are having, though. Could you try to post some error messages that you get when you try to run pico8?

Normally for pico8 on linux, you should just unzip the download and run the binary. It might complain that you need some SDL libraries, but other than that you don't need to build anything.

I'm on 64 bit Ubuntu and it runs just fine. I'm not sure why you'd want to be on a 32 bit OS in 2017 in the first place

It's just an exec format error. The bin is there and executable, but it is a 64-bit executable. I'm on a 32 bit OS because I'm trying to use an old laptop for it, I wouldn't have a problem if a 32 bit build wasn't offered, but since it's there and packaged wrong it seems worth calling attention to.

Yeah, the distribution was the problem. not that i really needed to update the post, when it was fairly obvious i suppose.

@borden It's a wacom enabled laptop from 2006 - since i use it as a wacom tablet, it's very important that i don't get frame drops or input lag. I've owned a cintiq, similar off-brand products, and now own a $1000 cintiq pro, and this laptop trumps them all in terms of parallax, tip feel and accessibility. so i keep it around, and in my experience old hardware with just 4 gigs can run a 64bit OS, but not very well.

@caranha "cannot execute binary file: exec format error"
ldd pico8_dyn: "not a dynamic executable"
file pico8_dyn: "ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64", etc etc.

@andrewws thanks for sticking up for me, buddy!