FreeOrion

If I do not sudo freeorion-start, then the program will either hang or crash.
I have tried changing the permissions on the installation folder to my own user id to no avail.

You probably installed as root, and then may have run the game the first time as root. This would have resulted in the log files and config.xml being created by root, and thus not modifiable by non-root, which might cause problems.

I thought I'd fixed things so this wouldn't be a problem, but Linux might have a different set of issues with this than I was able to test on Win32.

Try deleting everything in ~/.freeorion and seeing if the game will run as non-root then.

After performing an chown to my user and a chgrp to the users group, it works fine.

Could you be more specific? What files did you have to change ownership of?

Also, could you post the log files file from after trying to run FreeOrion not as root with those files owned by root? (Unless it's the log files you had to change ownership of...)

When running setup, I used the command:

sudo bash ./setup.sh

the game gets installed into /usr/local/games/freeorion, as I would expect.

the user directory gets installed to ~/.freeorion, but for some reason, the first time it runs, it wants to save the files as owner=root/group=root.

executing:

sudo chown -R [userid] ~/.freeorion

and

sudo chgrp -R users ~/.freeorion

seems to fix everything.

As above, when you first ran FreeOrion, you probably did so from within the installer, which you ran with sudo, meaning any files it created were owned by root.

Could you post the log files from after trying to run FreeOrion not as root with ~/.freeorion and all the files in it owned by root (or however it was after the install and first run, when the problem was happening)? It may not be possible to get log files for this case, if those log files need to be owned by root to cause the problem. But if it is possible, I'd like to see them.