Well the focus of AutoKey seems to be more productivity and utility. It works perfectly fine, but antimicrox is better suited for my usecase.

Turns out Lutris even has an option to enable a specific antimicrox profile on launching a game. Perfect. Thank you!

Yeah, both the test-script that just echos and the real script I was trying to get to run now work.

I’m guessing when I run it from the terminal I’m already in the context of bash, so the script runs, but when Lutris runs the script I don’t have this context?

That’s what was missing. Thank you!

There is no space in the path.

And it is executable, if I paste the exact line from the config-dialog into a terminal the script runs as expected and creates the text-file.

With the help of this forum post and a bit of persistence I managed to get it to work and I wanted to share how with future generations and/or my future self.

First Problem: libstdc++.so.5
dnf does not have libstdc++5 but apt does.
Solution: I installed Mint on a Virtual Machine ran sudo apt install libstdc++5 and then copied the library to my real machine into the system directory of UT2004. The game now starts. I know there must be a better way to solve this.

Second Problem: Game starts in a tiny window stuck in the top left corner
Alt+Enter switches it to a real window that makes the game useable, but setting a proper resolution and trying to make it fullscreen again crashes the game.
Solution: Open /home/user/.ut2004/System/UT2004.ini, go to the [SDLDrv.SDLClient] section and set all lines with viewport to the desired resolution.

Third Problem: No sound
UT2004 uses the obsolete OSS sound system.
Solution: Run the game under a compatibility wrapper. Debian and derivatives have aoss available. Fedora and derivatives have padsp. Thus run the game with padsp "./ut2004-bin-linux-amd64" and the sound works.

If all else fails I’ll fall back to the Windows version, would make me very sad though.

That helped. Thank you very much! Crashes everytime I try to switch to fullscreen though, I’ll play around with it for a bit, hopefully I’ll figure it out.

The DVD includes SDL and OpenAL, but not libstdc++

Right. I tried that patch now, but it still wants libstdc++.so.5

To be honest I’m having way less problems than I was expecting. I would never want to switch back.

Well yeah, but how do i figure out which version I need and where do I get that version?

Well obviously the version on the DVD is ancient. I did apply the latest available patch, but that is also ancient.

I assume the steam version the Lutris script uses was updated at some point after the last retail patch.