Chapter 5 Exercise

After setting up our project's source code on the Subversion server I completed the exercise in Chapter Five of the Open Source textbook we are reading. This exercise requires us to get the source code for FreeCiv, an open source role playing game, and build it on our machines. This is already a familiar process so it did not take me very long to complete.

I started by getting the source code from FreeCiv's source code repo. This is done by using the command 'svn co svn://svn.gna.org/svn/freeciv/trunk freeciv'. Running this command downloaded the code to my machine. It took a while to transfer all the code to my machine but it eventually finished.

I opened the INSTALL file to check the needed dependencies. I went through the list and checked if each was installed and discovered I was missing a few but could not install them by the name used in the documentation. So I decided to just try and build it without the few I was missing. This did not work, go figure!

The first package I was missing was referred to as 'glib'. Like I stated above, I could not find this package to install by its name so I searched the package manager. Here I found all of the missing packages that I needed.Through trial and error build attempts, I installed all my missing packages and was able to build the code. After that it was the same process, run the make command and then './ser' and the program was up and running.

Like I said this whole process probably took me 15 minutes and was familiar to me, maybe I am getting a little better at this open source stuff.... ;-)