Home › Getting Gluon

Installation

Please note: The following is a guide for how to install Gluon from source on Linux. Packagers, get in touch! :)

Install Process

Dependencies

For the bare minimum experience you will need the following libraries:

  • Qt with QtDeclarative 4.7 or later. We recommend at least 4.7.2.
  • OpenGL
  • mesa
  • OpenAL (OpenAL Soft recommended on Linux)
  • alure 1.2 or later
  • libsndfile

This will allow you to build the basic libraries along with a very simple player application. Installing the KDE libraries is required for more advanced applications like the full desktop player and Gluon Creator.

LibAttica version 0.2.0 or greater is required for the integration with GamingFreedom.

Detailed instructions on what packages are needed for what distribution are described below.

The CMake scripts will detect whether or not these libraries are installed and report any errors. Note that apparently the script to locate OpenAL, which is provided by CMake, does not report this correctly and instead simply set some variables to "NOTFOUND". So if you get "Variable is set to NOTFOUND" errors from CMake double check whether you have all dependencies.

Getting the Source

You can either download the from http://gluon.gamingfreedom.org/node/26 or download the source from https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/games/gluon/repository. Once you have acquired a tarball, extract it to your preferred location.

Compile and Install

To compile you will need a compiler and CMake, along with the needed dependencies as described above. Once you are done, execute the commands below to compile Gluon:

cd /path/to/gluon
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix` //(Recommended when installing alongside KDE, otherwise use /usr or your prefferred install location)//
make
sudo make install

These commands should install gluon headers in ${kde-prefix}include and libraries in {kde4-prefix}/lib.

Test your installation

You can test your installation by running one of "gluoncreator" or "gluon_qtplayer", and loading up the Invaders project from the player/examples/invaders/ directory in the source.

Note that If you disabled "INSTALL_CMAKE_FILES" (The default when not installing to /usr) you will need to set CMAKE_MODULE_PATH to ${gluon-prefix}/share/gluon/cmake whenever you want to compile anything using Gluon.

Installing on Debian/Ubuntu

For Debian you need:

  • kdelibs5-dev
  • libqt4-dev
  • libsndfile1-dev
  • libxrandr-dev
  • libqt4-opengl-dev
  • libgl1-mesa-swx11-dev (when using free drivers) or libgl1-mesa-dev
  • libopenal-dev
  • libattica-dev
  • libalure-dev (1.2 or later is needed, but you can get it from 11.10 (oneiric) or later without any issue)

Important
There seems to be a problem with Debian and PulseAudio when it is not running, where OpenAL will try to open the PulseAudio device, which fails because it is not available and causes an infinite loop.

The workaround is to put the following into /.alsoftrc :
drivers=alsa

If it does not work, try removing libpulse or otherwise installing pulseaudio itself.

Installing on Arch Linux

For Arch Linux users

  • qt
  • kdelibs
  • mesa
  • openal
  • libsndfile
  • attica
  • alure

Installing on Chakra

For Chakra users

  • qt
  • kdelibs
  • mesa
  • openal
  • libsndfile
  • attica
  • alure

Installing on Fedora

On Fedora you will need:

  • kdebase-workspace-devel
  • mesa-devel
  • openal-soft-devel
  • libsndfile-devel
  • libalure-devel
  • libattica-devel

Installing on openSuse

On openSuse you will need:

  • qt-devel
  • libkde4-devel
  • mesa-devel
  • openal-soft-devel
  • libsndfile-devel
  • libalure-devel
  • libattica-devel

Installing on Mac

On Mac you will need:

  • (installed through macports)
  • libsndfile
  • libattica
  • libalure
  • qt4-mac

Note: /Users/foobar/gluon/player/qt/GluonPlayer.app < gluonplayer mac app

dependencies.sh

  1. requires homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/). Download homebrew from that website and run the commands below $ sudo brew update $ sudo brew install cmake $ sudo brew install qt $ sudo brew install libsndfile $ sudo brew install attica $ sudo brew install freealut
  2. alure is not currently built in to homebrew, so we need to install it from a gist $ sudo brew install https://raw.github.com/gist/1385677/4d0fc4978539492f04f0c9cd8bb929bdf3c0b7f6/alure.rb

$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .. $ make VERBOSE=1 (successfully builds macintosh application bundles) $ sudo make install

  1. gluonplayer is packaged in GluonPlayer.app $ ./tools/viewer/GluonPlayer.app/Contents/MacOS/GluonPlayer /usr/share/gluon/games/apocalypse.gluon/game.gluonproject

Installing on MeeGo

On MeeGo you will need:

  • libsndfile-devel
  • attica-devel
  • alure-devel (>=1.2)
  • libopenal1-soft
  • openal-soft
  • libqt-devel (>= 4.7.1)

Notes:

  • openal-soft packages will hopefully be integrated in the MeeGo release 1.3.
  • CPack is able to generate "deb" or "rpm" packages. These options are implemented mostly for development purposes, commit by commit package generation. It can also be used if there are no available for instance OBS generated rpm packages for MeeGo or debian packages for Maemo, et cetera.
  • You can also download a generated rpm from the git master branch here (Other packages here (not available in the official repositories)): http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/sandst1/standard/

Installing on Harmattan

On Harmattan you will need:

  • libqt4-dev
  • libsndfile1-dev
  • libxrandr-dev
  • libqt4-opengl-dev
  • libopenal-dev
  • libattica-dev
  • libalure-dev (1.2 or later is needed)

You can download these packages from the Community Open Build Service page or directly from this repository (You can also add it to your etc/apt/sources.list file): echo 'deb http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/rzr:/harmattan/MeeGo_1.2_Harmattan_Maemo.org_MeeGo_1.2_Harmattan_standard/ .' >>/etc/apt/sources.list.d/nicks.list

apt-get install gluon-games

Source compilation on Windows

On Windows you will need:

  • qt (msvc or mingw version)
  • attica
  • alure.
  • ...

Please follow the instruction here in order to set up the KDE Windows and emerge environment. You can do the whole procedure, but "emerge" will help simplify your activity. http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/Windows/emerge

Gluon can be installed either by using emerge or "manually". It is just "emerge gluon" by using emerge, and if you choose the manual build: you need to the following from the build directory: cmake -DCMAKiE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=%KDEROOT% -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=%KDEROOT% ../

In addition, some systems do not have openAL, using your favourite package manager, ensure openal-dev is installed.

CMake Options

There are several options you can use to control the build of Gluon. They are listed during the CMake process along with their corresponding values. Below is also a list of all these options with a description and their default value:

  • WITH_KDE (ON): Build Gluon with KDE support. This will build the applications along with the libraries.
  • BUILD_AUDIO (ON): Build Gluon Audio. If you disable this, anything depending on Gluon Audio will also not be built. (For example, components)
  • BUILD_GRAPHICS (ON): Build Gluon Graphics. See above.
  • BUILD_INPUT (ON): Build Gluon Input. See above.
  • BUILD_ENGINE (ON): Build Gluon Engine. See above. Note that Gluon Engine has several options to control building of pieces of Gluon Engine. These are listed during the CMake process.
  • BUILD_CREATOR (ON): Build Gluon Creator. Note that this required WITH_KDE to be ON and KDELibs packages to be found.
  • BUILD_GLUON_CREATOR_VCS (ON) "Build Version Control System support for the Gluon Creator"
  • BUILD_PLAYER (ON): Build Gluon Player. This will build whatever Gluon Player instances make sense for your operating system. Currently this means it will build the command line gluon_qtplayer application
  • BUILD_PLASMOID (ON): Build Gluon Player Plasmoid.
  • INSTALL_CMAKE_FILES (ON if installing to /usr, OFF if otherwise): Install the FindGluon* Cmake macros to CMAKE_ROOT. This will make it easier to compile third-party applications using Gluon.
  • INSTALL_EXAMPLES (ON): Install the example Gluon projects into the Gluon data directory

Troubleshooting

I can hear music playing but nothing is visible!

The recent rewrite of the render system depends on programmable pipeline features. If these are not available things might not render. You can try to see if this is the case by running LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=TRUE gluon_qtplayer from the command line. If this does work, it means something in the combination of Gluon and your graphics driver is not working correctly. Please tell us your graphics card and other information by contacting us on IRC.

Blank screen on Windows

We currently have some issues on Windows with the graphics stack. This is probably the last issue before we can get a working game on Windows since audio and others already work nicely. Please do keep tunned; this entry will hopefully be removed quite soon. :)