Installation on Linux and UNIX Systems

This page guides you through the steps for getting PrBoom running on UNIX and Linux systems.

Steps

Install the PrBoom program and required libraries - Please see the most appropriate instructions depending on your system distribution:
- Linux/x86 RPM based distros (Redhat, Mandrake, ...)
- Debian, Ubuntu (and derivatives)
- FreeBSD (may be appropriate for other BSDs)
- Generic UNIX (anything else)
Getting a Doom IWAD
Getting music (optional).

Linux/x86 RPM based distributions

Several of the main desktop Linux distributions ship with and install all the required libraries by default. So you can just grab the RPM of PrBoom, prboom-2.4.5-1.i386.rpm, and install it with the following command (as root):

rpm -ivh prboom-2.4.5-1.i386.rpm

You can then run PrBoom as /usr/games/prboom (or just prboom if the games are in your PATH).

Notes:

There may be newer versions of some of these libraries available from their websites; anything in the 1.2 series should work fine, let us know if not.
If you are using a partiularly stripped down setup, you might need to install a few more RPMs required by these ones. They should be on your distribution CDs.
No source RPM (SRPM) is provided for PrBoom. The RPM is built from the source tarball unmodified: see the INSTALL file in the source tarball for details.
If you have information on installing PrBoom on other distributions, if there were any special steps required (or if there weren't!), let us know, and I'll update the instructions here.

Debian

Build the latest PrBoom from source — this is easy to do on Debian. Install the libsdl1.2-dev, libsdl-mixer1.2-dev and libsdl-net1.2-dev packages — these are all available in Debian woody and above. Get the prboom source code prboom-2.4.5.tar.gz from our download page, extract, and then follow the included INSTALL instructions.

If you have an Athlon 64 (aka amd64 or x86_64) system, the version of SDL_mixer shipped with Debian and Ubuntu has some bugs that affect music playback. You may want to get the source to the libsdl-mixer1.2 package and recompile it with the patch, or just install a patched .deb, or get SDL_mixer 1.2.7 or later and install that instead.

FreeBSD

I have tested on various FreeBSD versions. The ports tree contains packages of the stuff you need. Make the following ports:

devel/sdl12
audio/sdl_mixer (requires audio/smpeg)
net/sdl_net

Finally, get prboom-2.4.5.tar.gz the PrBoom source, extract, and follow the included INSTALL instructions.

Generic UNIX

You need to get and install the following libraries:

SDL 1.2.x, from the SDL 1.2 download page.
SDL_mixer, from its home page. You might need to compile and install SMPEG first to compile this, but I think that recent versions do not require SMPEG (it provides mp3 music support I think, which is not needed for PrBoom).
SDL_net, from its home page.

Then get prboom-2.4.5.tar.gz the PrBoom source, extract, and follow the included INSTALL instructions.

Download page

Download either the RPM or the tarball here. It's possible that the version numbers on this page may not be up to date. You can figure it out :-).

Getting a Doom IWAD

The IWAD is the main data file containing the graphics and levels for Doom. You need one to use PrBoom. If you have a copy of one of the original Doom games, copy your Doom, Doom 2, Ultimate Doom or Final Doom IWAD (doom.wad, doom2.wad, tnt.wad or plutonia.wad) to /usr/local/share/games/doom/. Or, if you don't have any of those, use the shareware IWAD, which you can get from http://www.doomworld.com/ or http://www.idsoftware.com/.

Music

The SDL_mixer library used by PrBoom supports software MIDI music synthesis. If you want to hear the Doom music, you need a set of Timidity instrument patches. Get the timidity.tar.gz from the bottom of the SDL_mixer page, and extract in /usr/local/lib. You may need to symlink /usr/local/lib/timidity/timidity.cfg to /etc/timidity — see the console output from PrBoom to see where it is looking for this file.