It is crucial that you follow all these instructions carefully, to the letter.

Go to the Chipmunk home page, and get at least the psys and logfiles (and maybe webdoc).

Setting up a directory:

Create a "top" directory with the name and location of your choice, and upack the psys and log files there. This will produce subdirectories called psys and log, and eventually the compilation process will create new directories such as bin, again as immediate subdirectories of this top directory.

Compiling:

You will build psys, then log. Follow the instructions on the Chipmunk home pagexactly.

Go first to psys/src and edit the Makefile there, setting various information as indicated in the comments. In particular, set the variable XINCLUDEDIR to whichever directory has X11 as a subdirectory with the file Xlib.h in that directory. In other words, the file Xlib.h is in the directory $XINCLUDEDIR/X11. For example, in the Red Hat distribution of Linux, you would typically set the line in Makefile to

XINCLUDEDIR = /usr/X11R6/include

(Make sure to remove the existing definition of XINCLUDEDIR.)

If you do not know the location of Xlib.h, you can use the UNIX find command to determine its location.

Also, remember to add to CHIPMUNKFLAGS as suggested for your platform, e.g. Linux, within the comments in the Makefile (When you later run make, for Linux on a PC, you may get a message saying that -m486 is deprecated. That's OK, but you can use -mcpu=i486 instead if you wish.)

Then type

make install

Then go to log/src. Again change the XINCLUDEDIR line in log/src/Makefile and in log/src/ana/Makefile. Also, in both cases, remember again to add to CHIPMUNKFLAGS. For that first Makefile, make sure to check the definition of LIBX11 as directed.

Then type make install from the directory log/src.

Note that once you build Chipmunk, you cannot move it, because certain directory paths will be hard-coded. Running the software:

I've heard a report that there are some font or color problems under the Gnome and Afterstep window managers. KDE, fvwm, fvwm2, icewm and twm all work fine. In Gnome and Afterstep, the problem is probably due to other applications, chiefly the window manager, "using up" all the colors.