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.
For those who are just browsing through here is the explanation from the ScummVM site.
ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!
Hi,
I am going to try Ubuntu myself. I am getting the cd image right now. While getting it i was searching for some info on Ubuntu linux. That is how i came acros your blog. Thanks for the information you shared, i will certanly need it when i am going to use Ubuntu linux.
Thanks!
You’re quite welcome, Elane! If you have any questions, we’ve recently opened a forum up over at http://thescoundrels.org !