installing fish fillets in slackware
I don’t play games in GNU/Linux too much, but I really wanted to have Fish Fillets NG. It’s mind-bending in a very satisfying way (which unfortunately also makes it a very effective time-sink). This was the first Slackware install that gave me some fits. Fillets needs Lua libraries; I knew that but I naïvely went ahead and tried to compile fillets without checking to see if lua was present. That’s not such a bad bet, as Slackware comes with a lot of libraries needed by various apps, but not much that’s needed for games, and this time ./configure failed and told me where to get lua. I headed to slacky.it to see if they had a lua package available. They did have Lua 5.1.2, the latest, so I installed it with pkgtool and thought I’d be home free.
Well, after I learned the Slackware way to update the shared library cache, fillet’s ./configure still couldn’t find lua. Luckily, ./configure --help told me I could use --with-lua=[path] to point it to the right directory, and that seemed to work. Not so luckily, make failed, telling me that it cannot find -llualib.
Googling that error turned up very few hits, but ones with some clues. This thread made me think I might be able to get by with tweaking the makefile. Since I didn’t really know what I was doing, I wasn’t too surprised when monkeying with the makefile didn’t help.
Then I saw that Mike Frysinger of Gentoo had submitted some patches to fillet’s build system so that it would work better with newer luas. I thought maybe the fillet folks hadn’t put out a tarball since then, but checking the source I had (version 0.7.4), I found Frysinger’s patches included already. I still thought they might have clues to my troubles, so I stared at them for a while; this did nothing but give me a headache. I don’t understand much about the GNU build system, and I should stop pretending.
At this point, I was ready to give up, get some sleep, and post questions about what to do after some coffee in the morning. But as I was closing Firefox tabs, I saw I still had slacky.it open, and slacky it has Lua 5.0 for Slackware 12 as well as the Lua 5.1.2 I had grabbed. After downgrading Lua, compile of Fish Fillets went flawlessly, so I went to sleep happy.