U61 is freely available on the internet. As it is Free Software, you might also find it on a CD-Rom - provided that someone has taken a time to prepare and burn/press such a CD 8-)
Wether you get U61 from a web or ftp site, from a CVS repository or if you find it on CD-Rom, you should always get it under terms of the GNU General Public License. This is very important.
If you do not have U61 and want to get it, try the following URLs:
You may also get U61 from CVS, using the following commands:
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/u61 login cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/u61 co u61
When you are prompted with a password, just press "ENTER".
These libraries are required only if you want to compile and install U61 from the source. The GNU/Linux and Windows binaries are statically linked against all these libs so that you don't need to install them to run the game.
Note that with the latest releases of U61 you need Lua to be installed, but you do not need Tolua nor clanLua. U61 uses Lua directly and does not use the ClanLib Lua bindings. This was not true for U61-1.0.0 which required Tolua and clanLua.
Since ClanLib is rather modular, you'll need to compile several modules, some of which are optional in ClanLib but mandatory for U61. The required modules are:
You might also compile clanLua, but U61 won't use it...
These tools are required if you try to compile U61, if you got a binary distribution, you do not need them.
In theory, the best way to install U61 is to install it from the sources. However, on my machine, it can take me up to 3 hours to compile all the required libs and then the game. And keep in mind that I'm quite used to compiling U61 8-) So it might be a wise choice to download the static binary, which is about 1Mb bigger, but will probably save you more than 2 hours, unless you have already a working ClanLib install and a fast CPU.
Here are some reasons you might wish to install U61 from the source:
The source tarball should be named:
u61-?.?.?.tar.gz
U61 uses GNU autoconf. The install scripts I've prepared aren't perfect and do not check everything, but most of the problems should be detected. Let's say for instance that you are installing version 0.3.0. Once you got u61-0.3.0.tar.gz, type:
gunzip u61-0.3.0.tar.gz tar xf u61-0.3.0.tar cd u61-0.3.0 ./configure make
Now log as root and type:
make install exit u61
And if everything is all right, you should see the game running...
Since release 0.4.1, a static binary for GNU/Linux is available. Since the executable is statically linked against ClanLib and every library including the GNU libc, it should run on any GNU/Linux box which has an up to date kernel and X-Server running. In fact, if this binary does not work, installing from the source will probably not help much, but at least it might give you an idea of what's going wrong.
Note that the files are named "...-i386-binary.tar.gz" but there might be some problems running them on a plain 80386 computer. In fact, they are "i386" files as opposed to SPARC or ALPHA files, but they probably require a Pentium to run. If you want to run the game on a true 386, you can still try and compile the source but the game will be very very sloooow.
The static binary archive should be named:
u61-?.?.?-i386-pc-linux-gnu.tgz
Let's imagine you are installing version 1.0.1. Once you have downloaded the file, log as root and type:
tar xzfP u61-1.0.1-i386-pc-linux-gnu.tgz
Now log as a single user under X11 and type "u61" in an X-Term, and the game should run.
Note the "P" option in the tar command line, which tells tar to preserve full path names. This means the files will be installed directly in /usr/local, that's why you need to log as root. More precisely, files are installed in the following directories:
Since release 1.0.1, I provide RPMs for U61. They should work pretty much like any other RPM but keep in mind that since U61 has a fair number of dependencies, installing the static binary as described above might be even easier than installing all the RPMs for ClanLib, MikMod, Lua,... and all possibly all the other packages required by U61.
Besides, I'm not an RPM expert, and the RPM I build have very basic and crude dependency informations, so they are far from being bug-free.
As a conclusion, use RPMs if you are familiar with them, otherwise, go for the static binary, it's certainly the easiest solution.
If you want to install U61 form the source under Windows, you'll need Microsoft Visual C++ 6 and a fair amount of free time 8-) The MSVC workspace is included in the GNU/Linux source tarball, so this is what you need to do:
If this succeeds, you'll probably end up with exactly the same content as the default binary release, so at this time you might wonder: "why the hell did I spent a whole afternoon doing this?" 8-}
BTW, there's no easy way - at least I do not provide it - to compile the datafiles under Windows. What I personnally do when I release windows binaries is that I import the compiled datafiles from my GNU/Linux environment. As I almost never run Microsoft Windows, and since this poor system does not have a decent batch support, I'm not ready to implement and maintain such a fonctionnality.
All you have to do is unzip the file in a directory, for instance "C:\Program Files\".
WinZip - or whatever unzipper you use - should create a "U61" subfolder, which contains everything, including the "U61.EXE" file you have to launch to play the game.