Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition on Arch Linux

Having missed some great games, I am now trying to catch up. My main source being GoG. The latest title that I am now trying to experience is Baldur's Gate.

After installing comes the usual let-down. It doesn't start on Arch Linux, calling ./start.sh in the terminal reveals the cause.

./BaldursGate: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I immediately jumped into action and tried a variety of OpenSSL versions that I could get via pacman. The debug output from the dynamic loader was a great tool to find out why it wouldn't accept these version.

LD_DEBUG=libs ./start.sh

Turns out it needs a pretty specific version of OpenSSL: 1.0.1u. One that Arch Linux doesn't ship anymore and that is probably unsafe. So it's certainly better to not have it available system-wide.

Building OpenSSL

Before you actually go ahead with this strategy, you should know that there actually is a package in the AUR. Alas, you need to adapt the PKGCONFIG so that it builds the required version. That was too annoying for me (don't really have much experience with that), so I did what I'm good at and just built it from source.

Alternatively, if you have Steam installed, you can apparently also copy the required libs from there.

If you are like me, and want to go the actually pretty easy route of doing what you know, you can get the required version 1.0.1u at the official OpenSSL GitHub. Make sure to validate the file against the checksum.

$ ./Configure shared linux-x86_64
$ make

Lastly, copy the libraries directly into the subfolder game in the install directory.

See also this forum post for more details.