Keep Your Feathers Oiled and Your Beak Down

Rather than work this Christmas Eve Morn, I decided to get Tux Racer running on the Windows machine. If you've never seen it, Tux is a penguin who loves to slide down slippery slopes collecting herring on the way. You get points for quick runs and the number of fish you grab. You can race down various slopes, compete for different "Cups," and download other courses, and design your own course. There's even a Windows version available, as well as one for the Mac, which I've yet to try. You can get them through links on the Tux Racer download page.

Tux used to be available on with the Fedora Core 3 distribution, but it was dropped from FC4 for reasons of space, I guess. The "recommended" way of getting Tux to run under Linux is to install from source. I tried that, using the usual tar -xvf; ./configure ; make ; make install procedure, but that failed at the ./configure stage with the message

configure: error: Your copy of glx.h is out of date. You can get a more recent copy from the latest Mesa distribution (http://mesa3d.sourceforge.net).

I tried to Google for a solution, but didn't find anything that would help much, except for digging out a copy of /usr/include/GL/glx.h from another Mesa distribution and trying that. That seemed rather too much work for a Saturday morning, especially on Christmas Eve.

Then I remembered that Tux Racer was in the Fedora Core 3 distribution. A quick search of rpm.pbone.net found several locations for tuxracer-0.61-28.src.rpm, the Fedora Core 3 source RPM for Tux. Hopefully this would have whatever fixes were needed to get Tux to race under FC4.

From then on we follow the standard method for building RPM files from source RPMs.

1. cp tuxracer-0.61-28.src.rpm $HOME/rpmbuild/SRPMS
2. $ cd $HOME/rpmbuild/SRPMS
3. $ sudo rpmbuild --rebuild tuxracer-0.61-28.src.rpm
4. Wait a bit. There are lots of warning messages, but nothing stops. (You may have to install some other packages to get to this point, but they are all in the FC4 distribution, I think.)
5. $ cd ../RPMS/i386/
6. $ sudo rpm -ivh tuxracer-0.61-28.i386.rpm
7. $ rehash
8. $ tuxracer

And now you should be gliding down the mountain.