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1. Introduction

1.1 Preamble

Linux Quake sits at the crossroads of two computing revolutions - GNU/Linux, the popular free operating system, and GLQuake, the first "first person shooter" to use the 3D graphics library OpenGL. Quake has a loyal community still making games ten years after it's release by ID Software, and thanks to John Carmack releasing the software under the GPL, people are able to enjoy it on non-proprietary platforms.

Does all this mean our game is important ? No... It's just fun ;-)

1.2 About

This document is not an exhaustive how-to about setting up any particular program, but an overall guide to Quake, including compilation notes, tips, and pointers to the best web resources. It concentrates on the many engine rewrites and incredible add-ons which make Quake the phenomena it is.

1.3 Notation

In some places, a shorthand is used to represent changes to a program's source code. This is of the form:

- code to be removed
+ code to be inserted in its place

and is similar to the output of the GNU "diff" program when generating unified patches.

Where the term "$PWD" is used, the user should already have executed the command cd {Linux Quake directory}, and have this as their current directory.

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