This guide will show you the steps to setup your computer for Linux development. This information may slightly change during the development branch testing phase but this documentation is for people who want to start familiarizing themselves with the Linux platform early. The official release of Linux platform support will come with the master branch push of Torque 2D 3.0.

While 64-bit support in Torque 2D is available on several platforms, the Linux platform code has not been updated to enable 64-bit yet.

If you run a 64-bit machine, you'll want to setup a build environment for building Torque 2D as a 32-bit program. A preferred method is to setup a chroot for this purpose and manage and access it easily.

For Debian-based users, here's a slightly old article about doing this here: http://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebootstrapChroot. Replace 'hardy' references with 'saucy' if you use Ubuntu, otherwise you can get this same information for Debian as well. Other distros can try something similar, or a bit more complex way is to setup something like VirtualBox, however that is more painful when you just want your chroot to be able to access the files in your home folder directly and easily.

First, you'll need the libraries below (if you're using a chroot like I explained above, make sure you are logged in as the root user in your chroot when installing the necessary packages).

1. build-essential
2. libsdl-dev
3. libxft-dev
4. libopenal-dev
5. nasm

Then, in a 32 bit environment, change directories to engine/compilers/Make and for a debug build run:

make -f Torque2D.makefile debug

If you wish to compile a release build run:

make -f Torque2D.makefile release

After you've compiled the 32-bit binary, you should be able to run it in a 64-bit environment.