Since Unreal Engine 5.0, EPIC have been providing pre-compiled binaries that can be run on most common Linux installations, including Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS. I’ve tried it out on a brand new Fedora 40 system and it worked great, without having spend an additional hour waiting for the compiler to do its thing. So yay!
However, it being a “Linux thing” and all, the process was quite from intuitive. In case either of us ever have to do this again, here’s how it worked for me.
For reference, I’ve used my backup workstation with the following configuration:
- HP Z840 with 2x Xeon E5-2670 CPUs
- 256GB of System RAM
- RTX 2080 GPU (8GB of VRAM)
- Fedora 40 Workstation
Downloading pre-compiled Unreal Engine binaries
Head over here and get any of the recent versions as a ZIP file. You’ll have to be logged in with your EPIC account to access this link:
Extract the contents into a suitable location of your choice, then navigate to Engine/Binaries/Linux and execute UnrealEngine (without extension). All permissions have been setup correctly, how nice is that?
This won’t work by default of course, because we need a few driver packages to make this happen.
Installing NVIDIA and Vulkan Drivers
Thankfully the process of getting NVIDIA drivers going is WAY simpler in 2024 than it ever was before. The Workstation version of Fedora comes with the RPM Fusion repos enabled, so we can install the following package for modern NVIDIA GPUs (2014 onwards):
dnf install akmod-nvidia # rhel/centos users can use kmod-nvidia instead
dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
dnf install vulkanThis requires a restart. It is recommended to update to the latest kernel before you do. Once done, UE should start.