I'm downloading
this right now and I've already downloaded the
binary installer. Hopefully these two together will allow the game to run.
EDIT: It seems to work. I opened the ZIP file that the Torrent downloaded, extracted the Freespace2.zip file from that ZIP, then moved the FreeSpace2 directory from the subzip to /usr/local/games/fs2_open. I then ran the binary installer as root and installed the Linux binaries to /usr/local/games/fs2_open as well, and now the game seems to run fine. I haven't tried any of the FMVs yet, though, and I can't seem to adjust the resolution to something other than 640x480.
EDIT AGAIN: It looks like you can adjust the resolution by editing ~/.fs2_open/fs2_open.ini. Also, if you install the game as root, make sure you don't launch the game from the installer, as that will cause your .fs2 directory to belong to root and will give you problems when you try to run the game again as a normal user. If you accidentally created the .fs2 directory as root, delete it and run the game again as your normal user to re-create it with the proper permissions.
EDIT ME BABY ONE MORE TIME: Even after getting the game to run, I was still experiencing a glitch where the smoke effects from damaged ships or missile trails would have ugly opaque black squares around them. I was able to fix them by installing the patches linked to
here. Just uncompressive the archives and move the .vp files to the mediavps subdirectory of your FreeSpace 2 installation directory. Everything seems to be working fine now.
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