Tuxtype2 is an addictive typing game in which our intrepid hero, tux, must either zap letter meteors before they hit the helpless cities, or eat up all the letter fish swimming by. I had fun playing this game with the kids at the farm this summer. It was included in the linux for kids livecd which I burned for indoctrination educational purposes. With exams coming on, of course I am looking for all the distractions I can find, so I thought I might try playing this game again.

Being an ubuntu user I figured that there was probably a deb for this entertaining and educational game included in the universe source. Well, there is one, but it’s an old version, and I have to say that it really doesn’t come close to being as good as the new version (tuxtype2). After much frustration with first installing gcc (why wasn’t it there in the first place?) and then a bunch of sdl things, I found out that installing from the 1.5.3 source doesn’t work. It installs ok, but while you can choose the game type, as soon as you load the game it segfaults.

So, back to the drawing board. After a bit of googling, I found this site which suggests using the rpm. I decided to give it a try. It turns out that the rpm is version 1.5.2. I used these commands:

sudo alien -d tuxtype2-1.5.2.i386.rpm
sudo dpkg -i tuxtype2-1.5.2.i386.deb

which installed it to some extent, but extracted folders that should be in /usr/… to /$prefix/usr/… I moved the three folders to their proper location. Then typing tuxtype2 in the terminal runs the program without segfaulting! Yay!

Unfortunately, it looks like this project died about three years ago (January 2003). As it is though, the game is pretty good. Too bad it isn’t being developed anymore.

Posted in Techie Stuff |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.