Recently I've become nostalgic for a old classic Mac OS shooter, Marathon. Then someone in an IRC room I frequent pointed out a little gem called AlephOne, an open source clone/fork of the original Marathon engine, 100% compatible with marathon data files.
Since AlephOne isn't in the Debian or Ubuntu repositores, and there's no .deb package for it, I decided to make my own. With thousands of .deb's out there it can't be that hard to make a package, at least one would assume. But I ended up fighting with debhelper for 12 hours before I got it to work right.
Well, to be fair, I was trying to do something more than just package a single binary. I was trying to make multiple packages from the same source tree, because I decided to do something a little different and put the game data in the source tree as well as the engine source.
Nonetheless, after fighting for half a day I finally got AlephOne packaged, and it's now in my launchpad ppa for Ubuntu users. The alephone-data package contains the game data for Marathon Infinity, and you can run it by executing alephone-infinity from a terminal.
Comments
Good work
Recently installed your package and tried it out. Works great.
Any plans to package the other data files?
Just wanted to say thanks,
Clay
Yes, I've been putting it off
Yes, I've been putting it off due to possible license issues, I'm still not sure if the data files allow redistribution. Either way, I had planned on packaging the other datafiles, and packaging it all properly (currently I have -data and the engine build from the same source .deb, which is silly, need to split them out).
Stefan Nuxoll
Yami
The packages work perfectly on Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10! GREAT WORK!
Hope you keep the deb "alive" and upgraded ;)
THANKS!
Well, since intrepid doesn't
Well, since intrepid doesn't like me I'm glad someone else tested them. I've been caught up with some other projects, but hopefully I can finally publish an updated package along with the other two marathon games.
Stefan Nuxoll
It would be great
It would be really, really GREAT if you could find the time to upgrade the packages, maybe including Marathon 1 and 2 "Durandal". Marathon it's a wonderful game, and it is nice that you make possible to play it easily on Ubuntu.
I've bookmarked your (cool) blog! ;)
- Yami (http://www.yamasutra.com)
Next...
Well, next I need to make some .desktop files for them, launching them from the console is pretty easy, but people would probably prefer entries in the games menu.
Stefan Nuxoll
Cant' Wait
Can't wait for the release of the packages, thanks :)
iPhone
This will rock!! eagerly waiting for the release. Thanks
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Since AlephOne isn't in the Debian or Ubuntu repositores, and there's no .deb package for it, I decided to make my own. With thousands of .deb's out there it can't be that hard to make a package, at least one would assume. But I ended up fighting with debhelper for 12 hours before I got it to work right.
"I Am Agree"
cool
I really like your site, hopefull we can use it again, r4 ds
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