CycyX wrote:Does "fairly standard" means outdated?
No, it means "stable". If you look at distrowatch, most of the mainstream distros are still shipping much earlier glibc versions, and quite a few of them do not carry 2.11 on the mirrors, obtaining that can be quite beyond the inexperienced user, (and even bloody hard for the experienced in some cases!).
CycyX wrote:
Because I can run pretty much any game on my ArchLinux (rolling distro rules
), and I'm pretty sure a Gentto would be able to do so.
As it came 'out of the box', or did you have to work at it to get it running?
CycyX wrote:
So Book II is definitely not an "ubuntu" game, but it needs an up-to-date glibc.
Unfortunately, BlitzMax has made several assumptions, that require dependencies that are pretty much specific to Ubuntu, and a lot of other perfectly good distros need some tinkering 'under the bonnet' to get those dependencies.
It may "NEED" an up to date glibc, but it doesn`t need 2.11. Personally, I feel 2.6 is quite sufficient, although I can understand why some have called for 2.4 as the 'baseline', as that comprises the current stable release of Debian and others.
Again, I ask the question, "What if the Windoze version had been compiled under the accursed Vi$ta, or Win7, and demanded DirectX 10 or 11?"
Doesn't mean it doesn't work under DX9 or even 7, it does, why exclude potential customers unnecessarily?
Besides, there is a lot wrong with Ubuntu, the KUbuntu version is completely borked, and even the 'standard' Gnome version has problems. As an example: out of the box, it does have ALSA installed, however, nothing seems to recognise this, and on Book 2, it is not an option. Now, I can get my hands dirty in the shell, and force it, but is this what you would expect of the casual user? More likely, they`ll give it up as a bad job, and maybe then post negative "this game doesn`t work" comments on this, or another forum.
Not the kind of publicity Basilisk need, even if it was ill-informed.
CycyX wrote:
I agree, a build with a previous version would be good for a larger audience, but I wonder if BW has the time to do this...
I think he has to, Book 1 had some rave reviews, because it was so easy to install and run, on a wide range of systems.
I have it on a minimal Mandriva system Flash Disk, meaning that I can take it with me, and play anywhere I can scrounge some time on a computer.
If it starts being to fussy about what OS variants it can run on, especially when it is not due to an essential system requirement, it doesn't look good.
Don;t get me wrong, I love the game, and put in a lot of hours trying to get it to run on a system that should have handled it with ease, the question is, should I have had to do that?