README.Linux

BZFlag README for Linux
=======================

BZFlag is an online multiplayer 3D tank battle game. You can play against
other people anywhere on a TCP/IP based network, including the Internet.
BZFlag is free and open source. Please read the file COPYING in the
bzflag-<version> directory of the standard doc directory (probably
/usr/share/doc).

Hardware accelerated OpenGL is *highly* recommended. Intel graphics chipsets
are well supported on Linux, with the exception of the few PowerVR-based
versions. AMD graphics cards are also well supported on Linux, but may require
additional firmware to be installed for 3D accelerated graphics to function.
For instance, on Debian this is accomplished by enabling the contrib and
non-free repositories and installing the firmware-amd-graphics package. For
nVidia, there is an open-source Nouveau driver, but you might find this does
not function well enough and may instead need the proprietary nVidia drivers.
Install those through your package/driver manager (or, less ideally, from
nvidia.com).

More information about BZFlag is available in the man pages for bzflag, bzfs,
bzadmin, and bzw. Also check:

  http://www.BZFlag.org/

Different Linux distributions use different naming conventions for the packages
that provide the dependencies needed to compile and run BZFlag. Known build
requirements include:

  Alpine:
    apk add autoconf automake c-ares-dev curl-dev g++ git glew libtool make \
    ncurses sdl2 zlib

  Debian & Ubuntu:

    apt-get install g++ libtool automake autoconf libsdl2-dev libcurl3-dev \
    libc-ares-dev zlib1g-dev libncurses-dev libglew-dev make

  Fedora:

    dnf install SDL2-devel c-ares-devel libcurl-devel gcc-c++ libtool \
    ncurses-devel zlib-devel glew-devel

After any development packages are installed, execute the following commands
from the top-level BZFlag source directory:

  ./autogen.sh
  ./configure
  make

This will build BZFlag. The autogen.sh step can be skipped if the source code
was received from the tarball package, but must be included if the source came
directly from a git clone.

If you wish to install the executables to the usr directory after the build,
then execute as root:

  make install


Submit bug reports and comments on the GitHub site
https://github.com/BZFlag-Dev/bzflag/issues