installing vrchat creator companion on arch linux

vcc-linux.md

today is 2023-12-04

leave a comment if google brought u here

Current problem: stuck downloading Webview2

Launch VCC but it shows a white screen, then it pops up another dialog:

Downloading Microsoft Edge Webview2

And then another dialog that's mostly the same except with two funny little unicode boxes And then yet another dialog:

Unable to connect to the internet. If you use a firewall, please allowlist MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.exe

The logs say one interesting thing:

0664:err:winediag:process_attach Failed to load libgnutls, secure connections will not be available.

yay -Qi gnutls && echo "But I have gnutls installed! What gives?"
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/users/hype/AppData/Local/Programs/VRChat\ Creator\ Companion/
file CreatorCompanion.exe MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe
# CreatorCompanion.exe:           PE32+ executable (GUI) x86-64, for MS Windows, 10 sections
# MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows, 6 sections

That Webview2Setup exe is 32-bit so it needs 32-bit gnutls to make TLS connections. Makes sense.

yay -S lib32-gnutls

Now running wine CreatorCompanion.exe takes a long time... and still aborts the install. Running wine MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe directly doesn't change much. The logs say another insteresting thing:

03d4:err:winediag:ntlm_check_version ntlm_auth was not found. Make sure that ntlm_auth >= 3.0.25 is in your path. Usually, you can find it in the winbind package of your distribution.

yay -Fx 'bin/ntlm_auth$'
# usr/bin/ntlm_auth is owned by extra/samba 4.19.3-1
yay -S samba

No luck. Downloading webview2 directly from microsoft, specifically the evergreen standalone x86_64 version? No luck. Hey what's this?

ProgramData/Microsoft/EdgeUpdate/Log/MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.log

Log kind of stopped printing much stuff after launching this exe, let's run it manually and see what happens

pwd                                      
# /home/hype/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft/EdgeUpdate/Install/{D9FE8DCE-8099-42CC-9BDE-692FAE9DD263}
wine MicrosoftEdge_X64_119.0.2151.97.exe --msedgewebview --verbose-logging --do-not-launch-msedge --system-level

Hangs forever. It does print out log stuff. One thing I find interesting:

[12/04/23 23:41:30.717][MicrosoftEdgeUpdate:msedgeupdate][108:112][COM][32-bit proxy for IID {195A2EB3-21EE-43CA-9F23-93C2C9934E2E} invalid.]

[12/04/23 23:41:30.717][MicrosoftEdgeUpdate:msedgeupdate][108:112][COM registration is not valid][is_machine: 0]

[12/04/23 23:41:30.717][MicrosoftEdgeUpdate:msedgeupdate][108:112][Failed to create process][Mode: 4][0x80070002][Cmdline: /regserver

That last line is cut off. That's not me pasting a snippet of a fuller line, no, it's genuinely cut off. All fields in this log file are square-bracket-delimited, but it doesn't seem to be completing its logs here.

Let's clean up the prefix a bit and try this direct approach again.

rm -rf ~/.wine/drive_c/"Program Files (x86)"/Microsoft/EdgeUpdate
rm -rf ~/.wine/drive_c/ProgramData/Microsoft/EdgeUpdate/
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/users/hype/AppData/Local/Programs/"VRChat Creator Companion"/MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe

Same results so far. I'll come back to this later.

Other fun tips

I find that killall sometimes doesn't work that well for wine. Just run wineserver -k to clean up all the stuck/running wine processes.