LinuxRogue Development

LinuxRogue is based on the original Rogue 5.3 Clone P12. The original work for this was by Tim Stoehr on UNIX. It was ported to Linux by Steve Wilson. Alan Cox maintained LinuxRogue for prehistoric Linux kernels. After that no one touched it for years.

Then, Ashwin Nanjappa discovered the source. As an experienced Nethack player, Ashwin had wanted to try out Rogue, the precursor to Nethack. He located the source, which was extremely old and in need of some major repairs, and began a project to clean them up and get them to compile again on modern systems.

Meanwhile, I discovered Rogue in with a collection of software for the Amiga A1000 I had purchased from a thrift store. I located the same source from Alan Cox and was dreading my eventual project to fix all the errors and warnings when I ran across Ashwin's work. I added a handful of features to the game and sent Ashwin an email. Rather than incorporating the changes, however, he went ahead and simply made me the new maintainer of the project. Jesse Printz and I were able to track down the last of the errors and release a semi-stable version.

Goals for this project are stated below. Jesse and I welcome any improvements and feature submissions to the code, but we have the same thoughts regarding additions to the code as Ashwin did: "The intention is not to add any new challenges or improve the difficulty or such. For those purposes there are already many other spinoffs of Rogue. I only intend to maintain this Rogue 5.3 clone on Linux clean, updated and bugfree."

Latest Release

The latest release is 0.3.7. Download linuxrogue-0.3.7.tar.gz [61 KB]

Changes in this version:

• Jesse Printz: Fixed gcc compile warnings.

Also available: linuxrogue-0.3.4.tar.bz2. This is the last version of LinuxRogue managed by Ashwin before Jesse and I took over.

Roadmap

• Add more usability features
  • Correct num-pad support
  • Nethack-style config files
  • Smarter Makefile
• Improve distribution of the game
  • Produce some RPM packages
  • Produce some deb packages
  • Produce some slack packages
  • Get the game into Portage

License

After a little research, I've finally managed to track down the license to LinuxRogue. It was originally developed at UC Berkeley and released under the BSD license. Since then maintainers have attached their own licenses to the top. Additionally, Berkeley has since retracted one of the original four clauses of the BSD license, which affects the LinuxRogue project.

What this means for you is that to the best of our knowledge, LinuxRogue falls under a 3-clause BSD license, with original copyrights held by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, Ken Arnold and Timoth C. Stoehr. The full terms of the license are available in the distribution. I have done my best to sort the licensing of this package. Others interested in verifying this may investigate linuxrogue-0.3.4.tar.bz2 (listed above), which I have not modified.

If you do make meaningful changes to the source, we would appreciate it if you would send us your efforts for inclusion in new versions. Please see the contact page for details on how to reach me.