Download Trackballs

Latest release: Trackballs v1.1.2

Because of the nature of OpenSource projects there exists many different ways to download and run Trackballs depending on your operating system, distribution, if you just want to get a precompiled version of the game, if you want to inspect the sourcecode or perhaps even try out the latest cutting-edge developers version of the game. So, to satisfy your needs here's a description for how to download and run the game for some of the major distributions. If you feel that your favourite distribution is missing, please help us out by packaging the game for us and sending us download instructions to put here.

- Mathias

The Official Download Site

All official files released or hosted by the trackballs developers can be found at the corresponding sourceforge page, please take a look here if you are looking for the sourcecode releases, official music etc.

The Sourcecode

If you are not afraid of compiling trackballs yourself, something which is usually not all that difficult if you have recent linux distribution, you can download the latest sourcecode release. Before compiling it note however the requirements list further down on the page. When compiling from the sourcecode these requirments usually require you to download the corresponding "*-devel" packages or have the libraries installed from sourcecode also.

Windows

There now exists a windows port of trackballs thanks to Samuel Listopad (many thanks for the help!). If you want to try the windows version you can download the unzipping executable.

Gentoo

Gentoo: Use emerge trackballs to get a working copy of trackballs.

Debian

If everything is setup the right way you can just use apt-get trackballs to acquire the latest release of trackballs. Otherwise, read on.

Trackballs is now in Debian "Sid"/unstable. Debian users can install the game without upgrading their entire system if they follow the steps outlined below. We recommend against simply downloading the .debs and using dpkg to install, as there are other packages that might be needed from unstable.

Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
From the console type: apt-get update
From the console type: apt-get install trackballs
From the console type: apt-get install trackballs-music
Remove the following line from your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
From the console type: apt-get update
Logged in as a user, from the console type: trackballs

Static Binaries

An alternative that works for many (but not all) modern linux distributions. Download the binary release, unpack and start the game using the "run-trackballs" script. If you wish to have good background music download one or more of the soundtracks and place them in the trackballs-1.1.2/share/trackballs/music directory.

Redhat / Fedora

Redhat: The latest release have now been compiled for Fedora 5 and can be found below:

Mandrake

Mandrake: Quite frequently trackballs is compiled for mandrake. See the Mandrake Cooker (links anyone?) if you are looking for the latest release. The trackballs v1.1.1 release can be also found precompiled at the sourceforge page. These RPM's for Mandrake and SuSE might also work for other distributions. Note that the music RPM is optional and you usually do not needed to update it if you have one from previous releases. If you have any problems with these files please contact the package author (guillaume dot bedot at wanadoo dot fr) first.

Dependencies and requirements

Trackballs uses the SDL 1.2 and Guile 1.8 libraries. These will need to be installed to work, period. The pre-compiled binarys downloaded from this site, have been compiled against gcc 3.1. If you do not have gcc/g++ 3.1 (and its compatibility libraries) installed you will need libstdc++5 (else you will get an error about needing 'libstdc++.so.5') from your Linux distribution.

You WILL need OpenGL hardware acceleration and a reasonably spec'ed pc to run Trackballs. If trackballs is running extermly slow on your (Linux) computer you can check to see that you have hardware accellaration working by typing the command: glxinfo and look for the line "Direct Rendering: Yes" to see if it is working properly. If it says "No" then you have to setup rendering rendering on your computer before you can play trackballs (please see google for how to do this).

Trackballs has been tested on:


CPU: Duron 700, XP1800+ cpus, Celeron 333Mhz, Celeron 1500 Mhz  

VGA: NVidia TNT and Geforce 2 video cards running NVidia's drivers (31.23 & 41.91), Matrix MGA 400 (32MB), ATI Radeon Mobility (16MB), ATI Radeon 9800 running ATI's drivers (fglrx) 

OS: Red Hat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 & "Sid",  SuSE 8.1/8.2,
Mandrake Linux, Gentoo and Kubuntu. 

Kernel: 2.4.19, 2.4.20, 2.6.11 

Platform: x86

Last modified 01/06/08
mathias dot broxvall at gmail.om