As the instructions say, all you need is to unpack A5 to location of your choice, then

$mkdir build
$cd build
$cmake ..
$make
#make install

except that as an end-user distro (for consumers, not producers) quite a few libraries are missing by default.

That's not enough?

Ariesnl, if you have a good tolerance for initial frustration, abandon Code::Blocks for vim and makefiles. The very foundations of Linux flow to this, and being closer to the metal makes a lot of things simpler (installations generally being one of them)... I'll stop pimping now. Have a safe New Year's, everyone.

I still prefer Allegro for my 2D games. Allegro 5 was a great upgrade, but a few of the things that put me off of it and made it frustrating was building it. Specifically CMAKE. Sorry, but no matter how much it is touted as a great thing, I hate it. I was always able to build my own Allegro 4 in the past, Allegro 5 has a lot of dependancies which has hurt it, and you have to figure out how to build all or some of those (if you can find them), then try and build Allegro once you're done without errors (good luck with that). I only thank God there are people who can build binaries and release them for my compiler, and even they have been dying off it seems which means, I cannot use a newer version of MinGW because the latest binaries are for 4.7.1, so I am stuck at that (not that it matters that much to be honest). If a newer Allegro comes out, I can only hope someone takes the time to put up binaries. I already tried to compile it and was frustrated. Missing dependencies etc... etc... but I trudge on. Currently I have Allegro 5.0.10 installed with MinGW32 4.7.0 and have programmed a decent game (my Deluxe Pacman 1 game, still gets over 2000 downloads a week from one website I checked, and it is Allegro 4! I only wish I got $1 for each download, heheh).

Also, someone else nailed it about us all aging. I am about to turn 50 and I started programming with Allegro 2 I think it was when I was around 30 I think. Since then I have diabetes, my eye sight went from perfect to crap. The programming bug that infected me since the early 1980s seems to be vanishing. I guess I just miss the days of the 1990s and earlier, modern programming just seems to have sucked the fun out of it, for me anyhow.

I'm trying to get back into it. Certain online games (WoW) took up a few years of my time, but they are boring anymore. Maybe we'll get more people back now that the MMO fad is (hopefully) fading. I know I want to do more programming, but my patience isn't what it used to be.

I am VERY thankful for all the work all of the Allegro maintainers have put into it over the years, no matter what happens I fully understand if people get tired of working on it.

Now I just need a time machine so I can go back to the 1990s, that was probably the most fun for me programming with Allegro for DOS.

Sure, the old stuff seems easy now, but back then it was about as difficult to achieve. It was difficult to get compilers, paint programs and documentation without the internet, and the few that existed were buggy and hard to use.

What I meant is, to make a practical large project, you'll need more than just A5. You'll probably need an xml library, networking, gui, and several others depending on your project. And unlike writing something in C# or Java, C++ letting you do whatever you want results in some libraries not being const correct, and several other issues can come up which makes it tricky. For example, a gui library might not use std string, or might not use char*. This complicates things. Even with Allegro, while al_ustr is awesome, you sort of have to riddle your code with it if you use it and it makes it harder to port your game to another library or have your strings be compatible with another library. In .Net or Java this probably would not be an issue.

That is of course not Allegro's fault. I was talking in the general sense comparing back to simpler games of the 80s or 90s that would not need xml, networking, or gui and back then, if you just linked to A4, you could probably build a commercial game with just linking to A4.