Quake2 in a Browser in Mandriva 2010

Slashdot ran a story about getting Quake2 running in a browser windows. That is very cool.

There were installation instruction at quake2-gwt-port except the instructions were not for "Linux" but only for Linux distros that provide apt-get (probably Ubuntu). That is not cool at all.

While it would have been possible for them to write their HOWTO instructions in a generic way (provide a list of all dependencies, provide links to source code for needed apps not included in every Linux distro, etc.), they just assumed that everybody uses Ubuntu. Bad. Bad. Bad.

Here's what I needed to do to get it compiled and installed on my Mandriva 2010 system. Read those Ubuntu-ed instructions first for the details. You should be using sudo to run commands that need root privileges. (All the following commands are written on one line even if they appear to be on multiple lines.)

$ sudo urpmi mercurial ant gcj-tools javacc lame vorbis-tools

URPMI asked, and I told it to install the SUN JDK.

$ hg clone https://quake2-gwt-port.googlecode.com/hg/ quake2-gwt-port

$ cd ~/quake2-gwt-port

$ sudo ant run

Which will install the original Quake II demo resources, build the client and server code, then run the server.

Although, I got these error messages, it ran OK:

/usr/bin/build-classpath: error: Could not find jaxp_parser_impl Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/build-classpath: error: Could not find xml-commons-apis Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/build-classpath: error: Some specified jars were not found

Run it in the browser with: http://localhost:8080/GwtQuake.html

It seems to run maybe OK in Firefox 4.x. It didn't in prior versions because of the opengl requirements IIRC.

While it runs on my machine (AMD Athlon XP 3000, 2GB RAM, FF 4.1), it runs very slow. Perhaps the above errors are significant? Maybe I need a newer version of FireFox or maybe Chrome? It does play smoother in the current (as of December, 2011) Chrome.

UPDATE
As of December 2012, I have a more powerful machine (and the current Firefox browser, so I tried this again and it works great!

UPDATE
As of July2015, I tried this on an x86_64 Mageia5 system with Firefox ESR 38.1.0 and it compiles and plays just fine.

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