hey everyone,
this is my first post here, and I have to say i am very impressed by the DRM free games!
so far, I've bought heroes 3 and unreal tournament.
while one of my PCs has windows on it, I am an avid Linux fan. I run ubuntu 10.04 LTS currently. I have found that (at least the games ive bought so far) GOGs installer is very friendly for the windows compatibility layers in linux. (WINE www.winehq.org if your not into the scene) I also test my games in crossover games as I own crossover pro as well.
i have found that more or less, older games work quite well with crossover and wine, and I am willing to post my finding on each game I buy from here. (I also have classic unreal and its expansion installed in crossover, but they are the original CDs and not the GOG versions). im willing to try and help people with this if anyone uses linux as well.

Welcome to GOG!
Please note there is a WINE/ Linux compatibility thread here.
Glad to see more linux users around.

GOG should distribute in 7z files or even just zips for alternate OSes.
That way, MacOSX uses can benefit too, thus opening up a niche for cross platform gaming, especially with emulated works. :)

mac users could use crossovermac, or Bordeaux (http://www.bordeauxgroup.com/ ) to run these games on mac, though Bordeaux costs $20 and crossover mac is 60 i believe

I noticed that the GOG installers work 100% of the time with Cedega and WINE, sadly 70% of the games I bought here don't even start in either of those programs. And like JA2 runs but runs so slow it's painful. I have 9.04.

thats too bad about the success rate, and a common issue. for what its worth, its always a good idea to check the wine application Database (http://appdb.winehq.org/) to see if a game will be compatible or not. this does not apply for Cedega, as they do not use any of wine's code since the relicense.

Yeah, well WineDB has an article for Antaeus Rising right? It's only for CD version and he says it runs. Well the GOG version doesn't even start. It goes to menu then crashes and locks up the PC to a reboot.That's the thing, WineDB isn't a good source to look up at, it's like a half-ass wiki.

No offense, but you don't know what you are talking about and if you are basing your opinion of AppDB on that one experience, you did not give it a fair chance in the slightest. AppDB is a fantastic resource that has saved me from a world of frustration with using Wine. Not only are its test results very accurate, but they often include detailed instructions on how to get the best possible results with whatever software you are trying to run. It's not the AppDB's fault that the tested version of the game is not the same as the version you tried. It is only as good as the people that use it, so when you tested the GOG version of Antaeus Rising, why didn't you submit your test results as a new version of the game (like the rest of us have done with every other GOG version we have tested)? That's the only way you're really going to get anyone else to try testing it and get bugs submitted against it so that Wine can be improved to actually run it.

It would be nice if GOG also provides ZIP files for DOS games in addition to windows installers. Linux and Mac users could use their native version of DOSBox with game data in the zip-archives.

Took offense, and I gave only one example. There are so many different systems using different drivers and even different distros that half the time, yes, half, the information on the AppDB isn't really helpful. It's just good reading. Even more these are CD versions of these games and that is likely why GOG versions of same games won't run too well as they are patched and fixed by GOG to run better or have more stuff in the game.

The distro used doesn't matter to Wine, it isn't even aware that it is running on a different distro. Linux is always Linux to it, the distro just changes how it looks and the default software packages installed, almost none of which affect Wine. Drivers generally don't matter either as there are really only a handful of available drivers that anyone should be using with Wine. If you are running any of the hardware accelerated drivers (i.e the one available Nvidia driver or one of the two available ATI drivers or the default Intel driver that is included with every Linux distro), then you already have all you need on the graphics side to support Wine. That leaves just the application you are trying to run in Wine and Wine itself. I will admit, Wine itself is not the most user-friendly experience and there are many apps, especially games, that it doesn't support all that well yet, but I can't even count how many times AppDB has saved me from agonizing over why Wine doesn't work, either by giving me the info I need to make it work or by telling me the app I want to use is simply a lost cause for the time being. Anyone who has dedicated any significant time to using Wine effectively will tell you AppDB is possibly the best resource available for working with Wine and while it certainly ain't perfect, it is no where near as bad as you make it sound.
In my experience running my GOG games in Wine, they almost always run at least as well as their CD/DVD counterparts, many times they run even better, since you no longer have to worry about Wine's lack of copy protection support (thanks to GOG's DRM free-ness) like you often do with CD/DVD games. What GOG does to the games does not change the functionality or add anything that wasn't present in the originally released game, so I can't see how any of that could possibly affect Wine's effectiveness with GOG games as compared to the CD/DVD versions. I can see trying to run the DOSBox based games in Wine being a potential problem (layering emulation within a compatibility layer could be ugly), but why would anyone do that anyway? Just use Wine to run the installer, then copy the game files out of the installation directory and use the Linux version of DOSBox to run it.

you are right that WINE doesnt care about which distro you are on. the only time anything like this will matter is with networking. if you need an application that has IPX, you will need this installed in the distro. also, wine does not actually support drivers. I'm not too sure how it works, but I do know that windows drivers will not work correctly. for drivers, the Linux Unified Kernel is needed, or possibly even Reactos (which isnt very stable). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Unified_Kernel
www.reactos.org
as for the user friendlyness of wine, I must suggest the "winetricks" script, and "PlayOnLinux" http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
I actually ended up paying for Crossover Linux Pro, because of the botteling feature which has given me a really easy way to seperate wine apps, and back things up, etc.

Mac OS and Linux ports were usually handled by a different developer, which can greatly complicate licensing; the publisher/developer owns all rights to a game's main release, but porting and localisation companies can retain some control over their contributions.
Additionally, the fixes necessary to get them running would be different again from those needed for the Windows versions, which could increase the workload and support costs. Things are even worse for legacy Mac OS games since the most recent versions of OS X have no backwards compatibility at all.
As for wrapping or zipping the DOS/Scumm files, GOG's official statement has been that they are focussing on Windows for now, but with Steam now coming to OS X (and possibly Linux) it might be that GOG will decide to follow. I wouldn't expect anything like that to happen while GOG is still in beta, however.
EDIT: another strong possibility is that GOG doesn't feel that the potential sales are worth the significant investment of time and money since PC gaming is almost exclusively done on Windows anyway. When you're selling a game to potentially tens of thousands of Windows customers the per-customer testing and tech support cost is very low; even if development for OS X or Linux costs the exact same amount of money it is technically more expensive because the significantly lower sales vastly increase the per-customer cost.

Hello d3drocks,
I posted a few things on the Unreal board about getting ut2k4 working natively on Linux. There are native clients for all 3 ut games iirc.
The last two posts in this thread are what you should look at:
[url=http://www.gog.com/en/forum/unreal_series/are_the_gog_unreal_tournament_games_linux_friendly
No money? I believe the Humble Indie Bundle proves you wrong sir.
http://www.wolfire.com/humble
Linux has made up roughly 25% of the sales, and they (or we rather) on average have contributed a lot more money on average.
The average Linux user contribution is double that of the average Windows user. And about 50% more than the average Mac user.
Oh awesome, Wolfire even blogged about it today.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Linux-users-contribute-twice-as-much-as-Windows-users