I'm having some trouble running allegro programs under linux. I get the error:

I created an allegro.cfg file and added:

[system]
system = XWIN

The only effect this had was to shorten the error to:

The crash seems to occur right when I call allegro_init(); This confuses me, because "Unable to find a usable VT" seems to imply it's trying to initialize graphics? Or what? Here's my program:

#include "allegro.h"

int main(int argc,
         char* argv[])
{
  allegro_init();

  return 0;
}//main
END_OF_MAIN()

This must be what is happening, because I originally got:

...until I ran chmod a+rw /dev/console

And the FINAL CLUE is:

I've been searching for them here, any idea what their file name(s) might be?

I'm running Debian Linux Sarge, with kernel 2.4.27 Any help or ideas would be very appreciated!

I would expect to find x11-devel, but that's not listed. Maybe Debian uses different application names.
Doesn't Debian come with a graphical installer where you can just tell it to get some package? Or is Debian the one where you could do `apt-get x11-devel' from the commandline and it'd work?

x11-dev? xfree86-dev? I think debian uses "dev" rather than "devel" in any case.

Yes, debian uses apt, and that would work.

After more searching, I found this:
http://packages.debian.org/testing/libs/liballegro4.1
Wow! It had never occurred to me that Debian might actually have an Allegro package. I mean, an OS with built-in Allegro support.8-)

I'm going to give it a shot with apt-get as soon as I get home.

Hehe... actually, all (major) Linux distributions ship with Allegro.

I had no idea Allegro was so widely accepted!

Anyways, after more confusion, I discovered that these are the actual packages that should be installed:
http://packages.debian.org/testing/libdevel/liballegro-dev
http://packages.debian.org/testing/doc/liballegro-doc
http://packages.debian.org/testing/utils/allegro-examples

And this is the command that will automagically retrieve and install them (as root):
apt-get install liballegro-dev liballegro-doc allegro-examples

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to add this information to the file page or the unix build doc? Might save Debian users a lot of hassle.

To compile Allegro for X11 from sources, you just need this:

apt-get install libx11-dev

And to use hardware cursor support, this:

apt-get install libxcursor-dev

And so on for other optional drivers, like sound drivers. If someone creates a list of devel packages needed for various distributions, we could add it to docs/build/unix.txt. Maybe I get around to doing it for Debian..

I'm a newcomer to Debian, but I'm not sure if that's necessary? All Debian packages list any other packages they require to work properly. For example, liballegro-dev requires liballegro4.1, libx11-dev, libxext-dev, libxpm-dev, xlibs-static-dev and xlibs-static-pic.

You can get similar info for the other packages by clicking on the above links, but I believe that Debian handles all of this for you. When I did a 'man apt-get', I got:

I have yet to try this out though, because I already had all the required libs. But if my understanding is right, the only line a Debian user should ever have to run is:
apt-get install liballegro-dev liballegro-doc allegro-examples

[EDIT] Huzzah! Here's a log of an allegro install on my server machine:

Yes, of course, as long as Sam Hovecar (or whatever was the maintainers name) fills in all the dependencies But he forgot libxcursor for 4.1.16 I believe.