Compile Allegro 5.0.x on Linux Mint and Ubuntu

Compile Allegro 5.0.x on Linux Mint and Ubuntu

As a sister article to my Cross Compile Allegro 5 Programs in Linux for Windows post, here are the steps I took to get Allegro 5 installed on Linux Mint 13, Linux Mint 14, and Ubuntu 12.10:

  1. Download and extract the latest .tar.gz-compressed source.
  2. Install the required packages: sudo apt-get install -y cmake g++ freeglut3-dev libxcursor-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev libfreetype6-dev libgtk2.0-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libopenal-dev libflac-dev libdumb1-dev libvorbis-dev libphysfs-dev
    • [Note] Would be a good idea to do a sudo apt-get update first.
  3. Create a workspace: mkdir "build" && cd "build/"
  4. Create make files: cmake "../"
    • [Note] By default cmake will want to configure make for a release shared build. If you want a debug build you will need -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug or -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Profile for a profiling build.
  5. Compile: make
    • [Optional] By default make will not eat up all the processing power it can. Add -j# to change this behavior, where # is the number of job you would like to have running in parallel. If you machine is more or less idle the number of processors available should not hurt anything. If you are using your machine you might want to some half that number instead.
  6. Install to respective paths: sudo make install && sudo ldconfig
    • [Optional] Recommended if you are unsure as to why this step is optional.

If you want to compile an Allegro 5 C++ application– assuming you completed all the steps above and have g++ installed– you can run g++ [source file(s)] -o [output] `pkg-config --libs allegro-5.0`. There are, of course, many more Allegro 5 add-ons (check out pkg-config --list-all | grep allegro) but I will leave using those up to you to discover on your own.

As of this writing Allegro 5 v5.0.8 was the latest version.

Update 2012.11.28
Seems I already had some things installed from some other projects so I did not notice some missing dependencies. Thanks to weapon_S and sorry about that.

4 thoughts on “Compile Allegro 5.0.x on Linux Mint and Ubuntu

  1. I always keep getting the same error – The source directory … does not appear to contain CMakeLists.txt.

    1. I know this is 3 years late but in case anyone else has this problem, you need to use cd to go to the directory of the allegro folder you unzipped then do step 3. So the build folder is in the allegro folder. Eg. If your allegro folder is on the desktop use the command cd Desktop/allegro then use cmake.

  2. Hi, Thank you for this tutorial. I finally managed to install the addons like allegro_ttf or the native dialog box addon. Was using the ppa on the allegro website but they would not install the addons. Spent more than 5 hours just trying to get allegro’s addons to work.

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