Installing Allegro Developmental Branch 4.3.10 on Ubuntu

Last night I spent a fair bit of time reinstalling Ubuntu and downloading all the packages I need for video playback and other stuff you do when you first install Ubuntu. When it came time to install Allegro, I decided to skip getting the repository version, and go for the latest 4.3.10 version. I had a bit of a hard time so here is a list of instructions on what you need to do to get it working for others with the same troubles.

1. Download Allegro from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5665&package_id=40805&release_id=569935 get the file named allegro-4.3.10.tar.gz
2. Extract the files into a folder of your choice. I extracted mine like thus /home/cosmicr/Projects/allegro-4.3.10/
3. You need to do all this stuff as root, so type sudo su (enter) and type your password.
4. Next, because mine was a fresh install of Ubuntu, I didnt have autoconf installed. So load up the Synaptic package manager and install autoconf.
5. This next step is only required because we are compiling the Developmental Branch.
   • From terminal, cd (your installed folder)/allegro-4.3.10/
   • autoconf (enter).
6. Here there are two options. You can dynamically link the library, from the same directory now type ./configure (enter).
   This may take a minute or so.
   Or second option is to type ./configure --enable-static (enter). The second option is how the library in the repository was built.
7. At the end of the configure process it will tell you which modules wont be built because you dont have those packages installed. At this point you might want to go into Synaptic and install those packages, especially the X11 development files.
8. If you installed new packages, you'll need to run ./configure again.
9. Now type make (enter).
10. After make is finished, type make install (enter).
11. At this point you're good to go, but you can also run make install-man to compile the manuals too. There's a whole heap of manual compiling options, such as pdf etc. Have a look at the instructions in the build folder.

To get it working in Code::Blocks, normally you would add this to linker options:

• `allegro-config --libs --static`

(from http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/showtopic56986.htm)

But if you didn't compile with --static-enabled instead you have to put

• `allegro-config --cflags` `allegro-config --libs`

(from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=185287)

And thats about it! Everything should be good to go.