Getting Data Files for Linux Install

Warning: This method will give you unpatched data files. It is recommended to install the game under WINE and then install the patch. This does not apply to the GotY (Game of the Year) version of the game which already includes the patch.

Detailed herein are instructions for pulling data files on Linux from the cd or image file (known hereafter as disc, for simplicity) for use with OpenMW without Wine or Windows. All commands should be run as a regular user unless specified otherwise. You can use sudo instead of root wherever appropriate, of course.

Follow the instructions for your distribution's package manager to install the unshield package. As root on archlinux do:

Mount the disc as root (some desktop enviroments also auto mount cds and image files).

Make a directory to store the files you'll be extracting.

Make that directory your current working directory.

Use unshield to extract the data files from the cab file on the disc.

Copy the Video directory from the disc to the data directory:

Umount the disc as root.

Repeat the process with Tribunal and Bloodmoon if you have them. Unshield will copy over the old files and this is okay.

Due to a recent update we need to have the Morrowind.ini file from the extracted cab file as well. It's located in App_Executables. You can also find this file yourself:

Copy this file to the data directory:

Since we only need the files in Data_Files we can copy that directory somewhere else and delete all the rest:

When you run the launcher it will ask where your data files are and if you want to import your ini file. Select the appropriate locations for the data files and import the ini. Afterward you can also select the esm files for Tribunal and Bloodmoon, but if you plan on visiting them you'll need to do one more thing. The launcher doesn't automatically update openmw.cfg with the values for the bsa files of the expansions, so you'll need to open it with a text editor and add the values yourself. Copy the line fallback-archive=Morrowind.bsa and paste it once or twice (depending on how many expansions you have) and edit them to list Tribunal.bsa and Bloodmoon.bsa respectively.