Install ScummVM From Daily Build in Ubuntu

July 28th, 2010

A friend of mine asked me how to install ScummVM from a daily build. Since I myself had not done this before, I thought I would write a little tutorial. For those who do not know (and who do not necessarily want to click the link above), ScummVM is “an implementation of LucasArts SCUMM interpreter”.

Requirements

First, we must clear any requirements that ScummVM needs in order to build. Luckily, there are only a few required dependencies: SDL 1.2.x and build-essential which are both in the Ubuntu repositories. The rest of the optional requirements are (as of Ubuntu 10.04) already installed. These are:

  • flac: required to play compressed games without quality loss
  • libmad: libmad is for playing mp3-compressed games
  • libogg and libvorbis: to play OGG-Vorbis-compressed games
  • libmpeg2: some games use re-recoded cutscenes

One thing I always do when setting up my environment to build an application is make sure that the dependencies are installed, whether or not I think they are:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libsdl1.2-dev libsdl1.2debian flac libmad0 libogg0 libvorbis0a libmpeg2-4

The line above will install the required dependency as well as the optional dependencies if they are not available. If you do not want to install one of the optional dependencies, do not add its name into the list.

Source Files

We are now ready to grab the latest sources for ScummVM. They are available from this website. Download the newest source, which generally shows up first on the list. Make sure you download from the “Source” column. For this tutorial, I decided to move the downloaded file from my Downloads to ~/Desktop/tmp/

After this is downloaded, extract it to an empty folder. When the extraction is complete, you should have a scummvm folder with its contents. To extract via the Terminal (file name will be different for you):

$ bunzip2 scummvm-20100727.bz2
$ tar -xvf scummvm-20100727.tar
$ cd scummvm

You will notice that the above shows us changing the directory (cd) to the newly unarchived folder. From here we will want to make sure that our machine has everything needed for building. We do this by running the configure file. If this completes successfully, we will then run make to compile, and make install to install the application on our system.

(If you do not want to install this, you can still run it from this folder with ./scummvm. You won’t need to do the “&& make install”)

$ ./configure
$ sudo make && make install

After this is complete, you should be able to now run scummvm. If you run into any problems, please let me know and I will do what I can to help you.

Whube: Simple Project Tracker

July 25th, 2010

There are a lot of project trackers out in the wilds of the Net, but there haven’t really been any that struck my fancy. For several years now I have been looking for a way to track bugs in various projects of mine so that I remember them (and so that others can file bugs without having to go through me). I’ve tried many, from the big ones such as BugZilla to Mantis, even Trac, to ones that I had never really heard of before, such as The Bug Genie. None of these ever really fit my palette; they were either too big or did not work on my setup.

As it happened, after getting more involved with the Ubuntu Beginners Team, I had heard about a project tracker that one of the members, paultag, was making: Whube. I was interested but it wasn’t until a few months ago (I can’t remember the exact amount of time) that I seriously started helping out. Now I am a core developer of the project, which in itself is pretty amazing.

Whube is great for it’s simplicity in project and bug tracking. It’s being built by and for people who just need a tracker that works and isn’t stuffy. While it’s still not “ready” to be used in a live environment, that time is shortly arriving. If you want to check out the code, you can find it on GitHub – this is an AGPLv3 licensed project.

Amazing Fort

July 10th, 2010

So, I am sure that you have this little song (Amazing Horse is not exactly sfw) embedded forever in your braincase, like I do. If not, go embed it now so that the following makes sense. Well, it will probably make most sense to those who play Dwarf Fortress. While playing said game and being tortured enlightened by this tune playing itself over and over and over and over again, these altered lyrics melted out from between my ears.

Look at my fort, my fort is amazing
Give it a kick, Mm, it feels just like claystone
Step on this grate and it opens a gate
And it closes again when you pull on this pigtail
Eww that’s clumsy!
Do you think so? Well I better not show you where the alcohol is made
Sweet alcohol, Mmm sweet alcohol
Sweet Alcohol, yeah sweet alcohol
(Instrument solo)
Get in my fort, I’ll take you round the magma pit and all the other places too
I think you’ll find that the magma pit is home to many scary things
Shut up woman, get in my fort

What can I say, my fort is amazing! It menaces with fun.