(I orginally wrote this on my website, but it's much more useful to post here - hope some of you find it useful)

I’ve been playing a lot of Elite: Dangerous since I got my Valve Index VR headset. As a result, I decided I’d try my hand at mining, and found myself on sites like EDTools to look for good mining lcoations.

That, in turn, led me to realise that there’s a whole sub-culture of plug-ins and third party tools like Inara that track in-game buy/sell prices for the Market. What really surprised me though, was learning that these prices aren’t “official”. They’re literally crowd-sourced and contributed by players who use third party tools like the Market Connector while they’re playing.

So how do we get this running on Linux? Well, this post was incredibly useful, if slightly incomplete, so I thought I’d outline the process here, for Mint 20 (also tested Pop!_OS 20.04).

Turns out, the Market Connector is just a python app, and while there’s a Windows executable version available (because Windows peeps like their one-click installs), it’s far easier just to clone the original project and run it directly. So that’s what we’ll do, in four pretty simple (or at least "automated") steps.

Step One – Set up the dependencies
sudo apt install pip3 python3-iniparse python3-requests python3-tk python3-semantic-version git
Done. What’s next?

Step Two – Grab the project
git clone https://github.com/Marginal/EDMarketConnector.git ~/Games/EDMC
then
cd ~/Games/EDMC
git checkout stable

That puts the project into its own EDMC directory inside my home’s Games directory. Feel free to customise, but if you do, you’ll have to customise the launch script in step four.

Step Three – Install its requirements
This is why we installed pip3 earlier.
pip3 -r requirements.txt

This command will read EDMC's requirements.txt file and install a few, more updated, versions of the python modules that this little tool needs to get working. Out of the box in most distros, certain modules, like requests are out of date, and EDMC will almost certainly fail to start.

Step Four – Run it
python3 ~/Games/EDMC/EDMarketConnector.py

You should get the little GUI appearing, but you might, like me, get an error that it can’t find the journal.

If you do, click on File, then Settings, then choose the Configuration tab. I had to browse to the journal directory before the client kicked into life. My journal file was here, and this will probably be the same as your own:
~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/359320/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Saved Games/Frontier Developments/Elite Dangerous

When it did, it also launches you to an E:D connector page where you authorise the app to connect to your account.



Last edited by scaine on 1 March 2021 at 7:44 pm UTC