Finally, after hours of mindless torture, I beat Falcon's Eye into submission. Release 3 fixes all previous problems with my and SuSE's RPMs. Bad News: After desperately trying to get FE to be FHS-compliant (e.g., put log files in /var/log, etc.), I have come to the conclusion that this is not possible and/nor worth my time. [FYI, after hours of browsing through source code and applying patches, I got all but one file, record_lock IIRC, to be created/destroyed in the proper location.] Because of internal FE limitations, music and effects cannot be played at the same time (along with a bug in FE), but both are enabled by default. This caused much frustration in me and other wannabe-FE players. My solution: disable music/effects by default. i.e., you have no enable them manually. Good News: Everything works! By default, no less. The solution was actually was to make the FE binary setguid (which SuSE did) and make the nethack directory belong to group games (which SuSE didn't). I was worried the group 'games' didn't exist on SuSE 8.1, but it appears to be the default. Also, thanks to advice from Anders Johansson, it does not matter in what order nethack_data and falconseye are installed, as nethack_data will be installed first. How to install: I put them up on my apt repository, so you can grab them by 'apt-get install falconseye nethack_data'. :) I recommend deleting all your config files before doing so though: # rm -f /usr/share/games/nethack/config/* If you don't have apt-get, you can grab them from my SF.net page: http://suserpm.sourceforge.net Semi-direct links: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/suserpm/falconseye-1.9.3-3.i686.rpm?downl... http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/suserpm/nethack_data-3.3.1-3.i686.rpm?dow... General info: Everyone else must be wondering what the hell all the commotion is about, and rightfully so. Falcon's Eye [http://falconseye.sf.net] is a "pseudo-3D" frontend for Nethack [http://www.nethack.org], which is considered by many to be the greatest game of all time. Description from the NH home page: \begin What is NetHack? NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems, with a variety of graphical and text interfaces all using the same game engine. Unlike many other Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games, the emphasis in NetHack is on discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight - in fact, killing everything in sight is a good way to die quickly. Each game presents a different landscape - the random number generator provides an essentially unlimited number of variations of the dungeon and its denizens to be discovered by the player in one of a number of characters: you can pick your race, your role, and your gender. \end [Source: http://nethack.sourceforge.net/common/info.html] It has a very active community, with fan sites, newsgroups (rec.games.roguelike.nethack), many guides, and even more derivates (e.g., Slash'em, ADOM, etc.). Screenshots of FE: http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/nhfeatures.html On Sunday 09 February 2003 00:43, Bob S. wrote:
I can't imagine what has caused that. Only thing I did was turn off the machine last night and turn it on again today. Good luck. Will be watching for your new rpm's in apt.