Installing CKAN on Steam Deck

NOTE: These instructions might not work in the future. The Lutris-Method was last revised in 10.2024. The Distrobox-Method does not currently work.

These instructions were contributed by CKAN users who have Steam Decks (no one on the CKAN team has one).

Proceed only if you are prepared to figure things out yourself, and we'd love it if you could make improvements!

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Lutris Method

Installing Lutris

Open the Desktop Mode. Install Lutris via Discover.

Installing CKAN

Download the latest ckan.exe from GitHub Releases. In Lutris, add a new game by clicking the "+" in the top left corner. Choose the "Add locally installed game" option. On the Game info tab, Enter a Name (ie. "CKAN") and select "Wine (Runs Windows games)" as the Runner. On the Game options tab, select ckan.exe wherever you saved it. For Arguments, enter --asroot. For Wine prefix, create a new folder somewhere and select it (ie. ~/Games/CKAN). Set the Prefix architecture to "32-bit". Click "Save" in the top right corner.

Install dependencies within Lutris

Within Lutris, in the Games library, click on the newly added "CKAN". Click the wine glass icon to the right of "Play", then select "Winetricks". You will need to wait a short time while Wine sets itself up. Winetricks has a quirk, in that, it likes to open new windows in the background. Keep this in mind, you might need to open them up through the task bar or minimize the Lutris window (and any other windows you have open). To make the following steps less painfull, select "Disable silent install“ in the wintetricks window and click OK. Choose "Select the default wineprefix" and click OK. You will need to add dotnet48 to the wine prefix. Select "Install a Windows DLL or component" and click OK. Scroll down to dotnet48, select it and click OK. If you have silent install active, get a snack and a book to read. You will need to wait quite some time! If you have silent install disabled, walk through the installation.

Optionally, you can copy ckan.exe into the new "game" folder with a file manager to make file organization cleaner and have everything together (ie. ~/Games/CKAN/drive_c/ckan.exe). If you do this, you need to update the configuration of your CKAN "game" in Lutris by right clicking on the CKAN entry and selecting "Configure". On the Game options tab, update the Executable field to the new location that you copied ckan.exe to.

Prepare KSP

Open the file manager, in the left panel click on "Home". Then click on the burger menu on the top right (the three horizontal bars) and select "show hidden files". Navigate to .local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal Space Program. You will see KSP.x86_64. Click and drag the icon to a free place in the folder and let go. Select "Link Here". You will be prompted to enter a new link name. Enter KSP_x64.exe, so CKAN recognises the executable.

Running CKAN for the first time

Copy paste ckan.exe and rename it ksp.exe (to fake a windows install for ckan)

Start CKAN in Lutris by clicking Play. When creating a New game instance, click the "/" entry on the left hand side, then navigate to /home/deck, you'll need to type .local in the file name box and then hit enter to continue (since it is a hidden folder and you won't see it in the file browser) Continue navigating on to /home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal Space Program or wherever you have KSP installed. Select ksp.exe.

(OPTIONAL) Adding CKAN to Steam

If you want to be able to launch CKAN in game mode, you can add it to Steam, but this isn't necessary and it is better usability-wise to just use CKAN in desktop mode for mod management, then return to game mode to launch KSP and play. In Lutris, right click CKAN and select "Create steam shortcut" I highly recommend you start CKAN in Desktop Mode for the first setup and initial configurations, as the UI-scaling in Gaming-Mode does not work properly and you can not exit the settings menu without stopping CKAN entirely.

For regular mod management the Desktop mode works well enough. Set the controller layout for CKAN to "Mouse Only", as CKAN does not support controller input.