The League of Magnificent Scoundrels

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.

Scrib (short for Scribbington Dreud) was originally just a little project I had thought up to learn Python. He was to be a simple little command line interface (CLI) chat bot. As time went by and I started using IRC more, I started building him for use on an IRC server. While he never really went public there, those who had talked with me about him had wanted to see his code. His code had been elementary at best, so I never showed anyone.

A few years later, that changed. The last few months have seen many updates to Scrib. He is often seen on Freenode and converses semi-regularly with a variety of people. For now, he is just a chatbot (a rather wonky one at that) but he’s being actively worked on to have more than just chatbot features. His source code is now available on GitHub. There is a wiki available on Scrib’s site.

Arch Linux is a great Linux distribution for those who wish to install a minimal setup and configure their system just the way they want. Coming from a Debian-based distribution (Ubuntu), I have learned that installing 32-bit applications is not as easy as downloading the ia32-lib package.

The first time I downloaded 32-bit libraries inside Arch Linux, I figured out that they can overwrite or modify existing files. After refreshing my install, I set about for a better way to run 32-bit programs. What I found was a wiki entry inside the ArchWiki. After going through the steps a few times, I decided to create a script that would automate the steps to make installing it again less cumbersome.

Since the process can be a bit intimidating for people less acquainted with Linux and the use of the terminal, I have made my script available for download. Let me know how it works for you!