In order to get our feet wet, we were instructed, as a class, to build up the Freeciv project from its source code. Freeciv is an open source strategy game. It turns out that this was a really good learning experience because problems immediately ensued...
I downloaded the source code from the project repository with no problem, but the build process presented some interesting obstacles. As part of the build, I had to take care of a lot of dependencies by installing some required packages. This took a some time and while the "Teaching Open Source" textbook was extremely helpful, its instructions are for the Fedora distribution of Linux so a little translation via Google was needed here. The book also used RPM program to check and see if packages were already installed, but I found the "whereis" command to be a lot quicker to use. The INSTALL file within the Freeciv documentation was also helpful, if somewhat frustrating at times. Some of the packages that it said I needed were misspelled and required a little additional research to find and install. Installing the GLib utility library was particularly frustrating because the command ended up being "sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev" instead of glib or Glib. This ended up be useful because this command installed gtk+ at the same time, with GLib being a dependency.
After MANY tries at configuring (the script kept finding undocumented dependencies) I finally was able to make the project. Time for a game of Freeciv!
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