In this post I’ll document the steps I had to take to build DXX-Rebirth (a modernized Descent game engine) for Windows using MSYS and MinGW.

MinGW, MSYS

From  Pantokrator’s blog:

• install MinGW
  • choose a lowercase install path: c:\mingw
  • choose to download and install current version
  • enable g++ (for physfs)
• install MSYS
• install msysDTK

SDL and SDL_mixer

Also from  Pantokrator’s blog:

• download the SDL source
• in the MSYS shell, compile it with

./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install

• download the SDL_mixer source and in a MSYS shell, build it with the same command:

./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install

PhysicsFS

• Download the physfs 1.1.0 source.

• Compile with the same command again:

./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install

SCons and Python

From Globulation2 MinGW instructions:

• install Python 2.6
• install SCons
• add:

PATH=$PATH:/c/Python26:/c/Python26/Scripts

• to the end of /etc/profile in MSYS so that SCons can run from the MSYS shell.

Subversion

• install TortoiseSVN

DXX-Rebirth

• checkout DXX-Rebirth from https://dxx-rebirth.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dxx-rebirth
• change the SConstruct script to call sdl-config as ‘sh sdl-config ‘:

...
Flags and stuff for all platforms...
env.ParseConfig('sh sdl-config --cflags')
env.ParseConfig('sh sdl-config --libs')
env.Append(CPPFLAGS = ['-Wall', '-funsigned-char'])
...

• finally, in the MSYS shell, built with:

scons sdlmixer=1

Final Remarks

I had trouble with the latest version of PhysicsFS (1.1.1) because it uses cmake. For some reason it failing to find some prerequisites in MSYS. I also had trouble with version 1.0.1 of PhysicsFS (this is the version the official d1x-rebirth_v0.55.1-win.zip is built with) because the built failed with the following error:

warning: cannot find entry symbol _DllMainCRTStartup@12; defaulting to 00401000
...
undefined reference to WinMain@16

If you notice any problems or mistakes in this post, please mention them in the comments.

ifcfg-eth0

First, I changed the host’s (auto-generated) /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 script from this:

# Attansic Technology Corp. L1 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=00:1D:60:35:A7:64
ONBOOT=yes

to this:

# Attansic Technology Corp. L1 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
DEVICE=eth0
TYPE=Ethernet
BRIDGE=br0
ONBOOT=yes

This turns off DHCP on the physical Ethernet device and just specifies that it will be connected to or a part of a bridge.

ifcfg-br0

Second, I created /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-br0, which will be called to setup a bridge device:

DEVICE=br0
TYPE=Bridge
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=00:1D:60:35:A7:64
ONBOOT=yes
DELAY=0
STP=off

As you can see, most of this configuration is copied from eth0 plus the bridge configuration as per the Qemu Wikibook.

qemu-ifup/down

Third, I shortened the /etc/qemu-ifup and /etc/qemu-ifdown from Wikibooks to get this:

/etc/qemu-ifup:

#!/bin/sh
USER=$(id -un)
sudo /usr/sbin/openvpn --mktun --dev $1 --user "$USER"
sudo /sbin/ifconfig $1 0.0.0.0 promisc up
sudo /usr/sbin/brctl addif br0 $1

/etc/qemu-ifdown:

#!/bin/sh
sudo /sbin/ifconfig $1 down
sudo /usr/sbin/brctl delif br0 $1
sudo /usr/sbin/openvpn --rmtun --dev $1

Here I basically removed all of the configuration that is taken care of in the sysconfig scripts. I also made explicit use of sudo simply because that is my preference.

Final steps

Now I can simply run /etc/qemu-ifup tap0 once to create a TAP device, and use something like: qemu-kvm -hda /virtual-machines/fedora9.disk -m 512 -net nic -net tap,ifname=tap0,script=no to start a virtual machine. When I’m done running the virtual machine, I can run /etc/qemu-ifdown tap0 to remove the TAP device.

All this sounds simple now that it’s working, but initially it took a lot of guessing on my part so I’m documenting it here for the future.

I would appreciate it if someone can point me to the official Redhat/Fedora documentation on editing /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ scripts.

Right away I knew that I wanted to be able to easily attach to the bittorrent screen session at any time, so I used an easy to remember name for it:

screen -s torrent

I also knew that for screen to work with cron it had to start in a “detached” mode. Thankfully, the screen manual told me how to do that:

screen -d m

During my research I came across different people mentioning a short form for all of the above switches:

screen -dmS torrent

Since I like to simplify things I immediately adopted it and unfortunately paid dearly in the end. In fact, this was one of those attractive in theory but poorly executed features that cause other things to fail and waste my time with unhelpful error messages. It took me a few hours to figure out that it was causing screen to keep failing to start from inside cron with a “Must be connected to a terminal.” error.

Once I got over that hurdle I tried the full command without cron:

screen -d -m -S torrent /usr/bin/rtorrent

Everything was good until I noticed that I couldn’t use any rTorrent keyboard commands. I couldn’t even quit it apart from killing it from a separate terminal. According to the rTorrent user guide this was a result of a flow control conflict with screen. Thankfully screen also had a switch -fa just for that:

screen -fa -d -m -S torrent /usr/bin/rtorrent

To be on the safe side I used an absolute path to screen in the cron job:

/usr/bin/screen -fa -d -m -S torrent /usr/bin/rtorrent

Making sure cron starts this each time my computer boots was easy with the @reboot directive so this is exactly what should go in the crontab:

@reboot /usr/bin/screen -fa -d -m -S torrent /usr/bin/rtorrent

After running rTorrent like this for a few days I noticed that it was a bit unstable and would crash sometimes so I came up with a simple Bash script to keep it running:

$ cat ~/bin/myrtorrent
#!/bin/bash
PROGRAM="/usr/bin/rtorrent"
GRACE_DELAY=15
while true;
do
    "$PROGRAM"
    RETURNED=$?
    if [ $RETURNED -ne 0 ]
    then
	echo "$PROGRAM did not exit cleanly with status code $RETURNED"
	echo "pausing for $GRACE_DELAY seconds before restarting $PROGRAM"
	sleep $GRACE_DELAY;
    else
	echo "$PROGRAM exited cleanly. It will not be restarted automatically"
	exit 0
    fi
done

The final cronjob looks like this now:

@reboot /usr/bin/screen -fa -d -m -S torrent $HOME/bin/myrtorrent

Sadly, the usefullness of this setup is questionable since Bell is throttling DSL resellers’ peer-to-peer traffic.