UFO AI on Fedora 8

UFO AI (http://ufoai.sourceforge.net) is a nice game, you have to save to world from aliens.

I wanted to play it, so i had to install it first. First I used yum, but the version available was one number behind. So i downloaded the Linux installer from the site, 400MB. The installation was easy as the download. You also need the packages SDL and SDL_ttf. Your graphic card should support direct rendering, you can get information about your card with glxinfo. The command glxgears draws running gears on your screen.


To start the game, call $ufoai/ufoai.
Do not call $ufoai/ufo directly because the script ufoai sets necessary environment variables. If you do, you will see a window with a red border and nothing more.

After starting i got this nice error:
./ufo: error while loading shared libraries: libcurl-gnutls.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I started yum, looked for libcurl-gnutls, couldn't find anything. Searched the web. Found out that the binary is compiled on Ubuntu, the knowledge didn't solve my problem.

To get ride of this problem, i tried to create a link from libcurl.so.4 to libcurl-gnutls.so.4 and it worked.

cd /usr/lib
ln -s libcurl.so.4 libcurl-gnutls.so.4

Run again $ufoai/ufoai, the game started but without a sound and hanged up on exit. The problem was that SDL loaded the wrong sound driver. Comment out the line SDL_AUDIODRIVER="alsa" in $ufoai/ufoai solved the problem.

Now the game even works better than on Windows.
When i run the game in full screen mode, the multimedia keys on the keyboard, like Launch Calculator or volume lower/raise, doesn't work.