BeamMP Run On Linux Guide 2025

I’m new here, but I ran into some difficulties.
I am on PopOS (Debian based), with a fresh native steam install of BeamNG. I installed all of the dependencies, and attempted the instillation multiple times.
Terminal throws errors during the final script (cmake --build bin --parallel --config Release). Here are the last few lines:

[ 94%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/Launcher.dir/src/main.cpp.o
/home/[USER]/BeamMP-Launcher/src/main.cpp: In function ‘int main(int, const char**)’:
/home/[USER]/BeamMP-Launcher/src/main.cpp:31:11: warning: ignoring return value of ‘int system(const char*)’ declared with attribute ‘warn_unused_result’ [-Wunused-result]
31 | system(“clear”);
| ^~~
/home/[USER]/BeamMP-Launcher/src/Startup.cpp: In function ‘void ReLaunch()’:
/home/[USER]/BeamMP-Launcher/src/Startup.cpp:131:11: warning: ignoring return value of ‘int system(const char*)’ declared with attribute ‘warn_unused_result’ [-Wunused-result]
131 | system(“clear”);
| ^~~
[100%] Linking CXX executable BeamMP-Launcher
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lssl: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lcrypto: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lws2_32: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lssp: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lcrypt32: No such file or directory
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
gmake[2]: *** [CMakeFiles/Launcher.dir/build.make:341: BeamMP-Launcher] Error 1
gmake[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:83: CMakeFiles/Launcher.dir/all] Error 2
gmake: *** [Makefile:91: all] Error 2

I assume this is supposed to generate an executable (x64) in BeamMP-Launcher/bin, but no such file appears.
I really have no idea what happened, I’m a total newbie with this. Any help would be appreciated.

I first suggest you try update your system via terminal.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Then restart, open terminal and continue from this step

cd BeamMP-Launcher

Refer to the instructions above for the final commands.

Please let us know if this helps and if you get a different error be sure to post it.

Thanks for the help, but it didn’t change anything.
Is it possible that my BeamNG install is not in the correct location? It is in home/[USER]/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/BeamNG.drive

whoops! looks like you’re still missing dependencies necessary for the compilation! you gotta install at least openssl (beammp is literally revolving around this) and libcrypto packages. not to worry, they should link by ld across all your $HOME paths. and always install packages WITH their dependencies! though it is possible that your distro itself is missing something… you might have to reinstall every package in the system! and no, the path to your game is probably irrelevant, what matters is your user folder that beammp checks for, which should be in ~/.local/share/BeamNG.drive/

so, is there anything else you’re missing? let us know :heart:

Protontricks can do that easily. So all I need is BeamMP launching the normal version and not the experimental Vulkan version and we will manage the rest.

sorry, that wasnt clear to me, please be patient. do you want to launch the windows version of beamMP under proton? this has been done in the past when there was no native version of beamMP, so head over to these outdated guides. they are outdated, because proton was and always will be slower and unreliable than native, but experience may vary on different hardware nonetheless:

that is assuming that you are aware that it will be difficult to launch the native version of beamNG with it, not to mention the many translated layers of software-to-hardware

unless i am mistaken and you want to somehow launch beamMP natively BUT launch beamNG via directX (?) from the launcher on linux, using only wine instructions, avoiding the native vulkan version altogether? why? this is where you lose performance and start contemplating to try it on windows instead, and you’re only going to make it harder for yourself. vulkan works best with linux anyway

besides, im afraid it is impossible to do, and for a good reason! directX will translate to vulkan by default anyhow, unless you force wine to otherwise. it will take more time for the software to reach your hardware, if you ever ran a virtual machine inside a virtual machine, then you know how slow it can be. is there a problem with vulkan that you are having?

I would advise against using the windows version of the launcher on proton, it seems to have become unstable and will fail to decompress packets in some cases.

However you are able to open the native launcher with --no-launch and then open the game yourself in proton.

1 Like

this. i forgot about --no-launch

also, yeah, i did encounter that problem, i was probably the first one to long time ago, it’s somewhere here on the forums. does it fail to decompress or does it not have the signal to stop sending bytes? i remember it was stuck at 99.9% and thats it. actually, hold on, now that i think about it, i might give you some clues. firstly, that happens only when there is a large file to download, like a map. it doesnt happen with smaller files. perhaps your decompression method is wrong? actually, what exactly is decompressing here at all? we need the mod archives un-compressed, right? sorry i just woke up, could be a stupid question

:heart:

The error that the launcher throws is zlib saying that the data it’s trying to decompress is corrupted. It only happens with our compressed packets (e.g. vehicle spawn), not mods because they’re already zipped. I’m guessing either the sockets are messed up now or something is wrong with our decompression, but then I wonder why would this issue only occurs when using proton/wine.

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just throwing a buncha guesses here… is it BY ANY CHANCE using manual memory allocation? which then stores packets in RAM? and then it decompresses them (or not?) via zlib? remember though that load to memory is different on linux!!! if it doesnt do that, then yeah, it’s probably winsocks again (hopefully theyre not raw sockets haha), i wouldnt be surprised, and you shouldnt be too, because wine is notorious for this, as is windows, it’s a riddle after riddle every time… with that, i can only wish you all good luck XD

also, it is a good idea to include in the documentation that one should strip the binary of debug symbols, which negatively affect performance and memory allocation, possibly even network overall

Initially this did not work. I tried updating lots of things. However, after a few weeks, I tried again, and this time it worked perfectly.

Idk if it has anything to do with a new firmware update or 0.34 or what, but I’m happy lmao.

Thanks for you help!

Problems with Vulkan

Hello everyone! I decided to try to compile the launcher because the launcher through Proton stopped working normally (after the next update, I suppose). Playing through Proton I used Directx and everything was fine, but on Vulkan there were problems in the form of constant freezes and screen flickering. As you know, on the launcher that is compiled from the source code, it is impossible to use Directx, but Vulkan works just disgustingly on my system. Maps load for a long time, the same screen flickering, and also when changing the window size/spawning a car/using a free camera, complete freezes of the launcher are observed, which can sometimes make my PC completely freeze. I use Fedora Linux, and I know that this distribution is not officially supported, but it seems to me that this is not the problem, since most of the problems occur only in the BeamMP launcher, during normal BeamNG on Vulkan such frequent crashes and freezes do not happen. My video card is RX6500xt. Sorry for my bad English, I use Google translator, thanks in advance for your answers =)

Hey, you’re able to run the proton version of the game with the native launcher. Allowing you to use directx beamng with the native launcher.
See BeamMP STEAM / LUTRIS / CUSTOM LAUNCHER Guide [LINUX]