Installing Brutal Doom on Ubuntu

Hello. Hope everyone is enjoying their Memorial Day weekend. I’m spending mine with my son and family for his upcoming graduation.

With that said, my son introduced me to Brutal Doom, a Doom Mod that makes the game play a little more modern. You get mouse look, aiming, jumping, and the graphics got a slight upgrade as well as the AI of the enemies is better, and they have new weapons. One thing that got me is the brutalness of the game. Blood everywhere, and it stays, and if you walk through it you leave foot prints. You can also rip enemies apart with you get the Berzerker mode which now stays active all level. You can grab enemies, use them as shields, and even throw them at enemies. Its an upgrade that makes the game that much better. And this blog entry will be how to get it up and running in Ubuntu.

So, first you need to download the Brutal Doom mod. You can get it from ModDB. Once you download it, you will also need a copy of the original Doom.WAD file or Doom2.WAD file. You can use a licensed version from Steam, like I did, or you can download it from the FreeDoom project on GitHub. Now that you have the required files, we need to install GZDoom. I use the snap version since it is easily available through the Ubuntu App Store, or you can install it via CLI:

sudo snap install gzdoom

Once it is installed, you need to run it once so that the snap will create the proper directories so that you can put the WAD files where the snap can access them. I just open the app through the Ubuntu desktop.

You will get an error that GZDoom can’t find the WAD files, this is normal, just click OK to close the app. Now in terminal lets copy the WAD files to the correct localtion:

cp brutalv21.pk3 ~/snap/gzdoom/current/.config/gzdoom
cp DOOM.WAD DOOM2.WAD TNT.WAD \   
   ~/snap/gzdoom/current/.config/gzdoom

Now the WAD files are where we need them, but we need to have the Brutal Doom file load at startup. To do this, I updated the gzdoom.ini file in the snap folder to load it.

vi ~/snap/gzdoom/current/.config/gzdoom/gzdoom.ini

File the section: [Global.Autoload] and add the following below:

Path=/home/username/snap/gzdoom/current/.config/gzdoom/brutalv21.pk3

Save the file and then reload the game and you’ll be gibbing in now time.

Have fun!