Hi,

I read about a game called Oolite which is an Elite Clone. I read the Readme file and it says that all you have to do is type make and everything works. This would be okay if there was in fact a makefile but there isn't. Has anyone installed this and if so how? I am on 64bit SUSE 10.0

I have no idea what that game is, nor do I care. The typical compile commands are: ./configure, ./make, ./make install.

You have a real problem though in that you have to make sure you have 32-bit libraries loaded on your 64-bit machine. That is an option on install with Suse. Games don't run on 64-bit. They have to be run in 32-bit userland. Good luck.

Normally this would be the first thing I would look for but there us no configure file, There is however a .package file which I am told has everything but I can't get at it so that's not much use.

Mat

Just get the binary from here http://oolite-linux.berlios.de/

From: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de/faq.html

OK, I have just installed oolite

Took a bit of doing... however, in case this is not known, oolite comes as an autopackage

When it says to "make the file executable" it means use a file manager, right click on the *.package, select properties and check the box for exec. Next time you click on the package it will run. I had one error, which was resolved when I installed bzip

Hope this helps.

OK, quick synopsis: if you've never used an Autopackage (if you're not sure, you probably haven't) here's a simple two step process:

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Type 'sh oolite-linux-1.55-1.x86.package' (or whatever the package is called).

The game appears in the Games menu for Gnome/KDE, or you can just type 'oolite' in a terminal.

Now the longer explanation:
Oolite is not your typical Linux program - it was targetted for Mac OS X and is written in Objective C for Cocoa, the OS X standard ObjC library/user interface.

To run on Linux, it uses GNUstep, which provides the same API as Cocoa does on OS X (it's a pity we all went for GNOME/KDE - had all that effort been put in with GNUstep, we'd have been compatible with Mac OS X which would have been a great boon for Linux software, but I digress).

If you just want to play the game, use the Autopackage. Autopackage is a reasonably recent installation system, somewhat reminiscent of those install shield installers you get on Windows (except it has more features, such as the ability to resolve dependencies and it will also run in a terminal without needing a GUI). See haytch tee tee pee (sorry, this board won't let me post URLS) ://autopackage.org for more information on Autopackage. Basically, Autopackage is there to solve the lack of a distribution-independent install method, so one package can install on any distro.

At its heart, an Autopackage is a good old fashioned shell archive - i.e. it's a shell script that unpacks itself like a self-extracting ZIP file. Therefore, all you do is run the .package file - it's a program. Normally, it won't be executable when you download it, and if you've never installed an Autopackage before, your system will not have the Autopackage support tools (don't worry, these get automatically installed). Until Linux distros start installing these by default, the first time you come across an Autopackage, there are two ways of running it:

1. Open a terminal
2. Type 'sh oolite-linux-1.55-1.x86.package'

Or:

1. Make the .package file an executable, either by opening a terminal and 'chmod +x oolite-linux....package' or by using Gnome/KDE's file manager to add execute permission.
2. Run it like any other program (double click it, or ./oolite-linux-1.55... in a terminal).

Autopackage will then install Oolite. Oolite will appear in you games menu on Gnome, or you can type 'oolite' in a terminal. You can install it either system wide (by entering root's password) or just locally in your home directory without needing superuser privileges.

Once you have used an Autopackage at least once, you'll have all the Autopackage support. You'll find there's a "Add and remove 3rd party software" menu item added to your GNOME/KDE menu which lists everything installed using Autopackage. Also, your system will now recognise any Autopackage files for what they are and you shouldn't need to chmod +x them any more.

Building from source:
There *is* a Makefile, but it's called GNUmakefile (which is the convention it seems for GNUstep programs). You just type 'make' in the source directory. Of course you need all the GNUstep development libraries and headers, an Objective-C compiler (part of GCC) and the SDL development libraries (including SDL_mixer and SDL_image). To run it, type 'openapp oolite' (to use GNUstep's support framework).

Oh, and by the way - if anyone can contribute a native amd64 build I would be very grateful. I only have the hardware to provide x86 builds.

There is also an Oolite-Linux forum - if you're having trouble, you will probably get the most help by going to it (see aegidian.org/bb)