One thing you could try very quickly is to set the CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE variable to "Debug". This uses the CMake native support for build types, rather than the thing we hacked together ourselves (which emulates the A4 system which lets you build multiple configurations with a single configuration step, but was only done properly for gcc flags).

The latest changes to SVN fixed it.

Is the D3D additive blender hardware accelerated? With the OpenGL driver, I get 1800 FPS at 640x480 fullscreen under Vista. But with D3D, I only get around 275. Windowed mode is similar.

Probably bad OpenGL drivers by your video card. Happens to me as well, it has an ATI chipset. I haven't tried it on my nVidia card yet.

In allegro.cfg you can choose another audio driver.
There should be some info on the failure in allegro.log. Also you can run a debugger and see where it fails exactly.

Why does linking the demo fail under Ubuntu during 'make'?

system_new.c: undefined reference to `_al_register_system_interfaces`

I got it working after installing close to fifty development libraries, none of which were ever explicitly named as being required in any place that I could find.

It mostly works. The biggest problem is that none of the windows as created by Allegro have frames...

I don't know which ones they were. I kept installing libraries until it worked...

The first error (linker) was due to libx11-dev missing. I only knew that because of past experience with Allegro 4. There was no warning that no systems were detected.

Then once I installed that, cmake told me that OpenGL was required. At that point, it was just downloading dozens of libraries as recommended by Google. Eventually it stopped complaining and compiled.

I'd take a screenshot, but it's self explanatory. Just the inside of the window is shown. No window title, frame, etc.

Edit: It only happens when compiz is enabled.

Many of those libraries are supposed to be optional, which is why we don't just abort when they aren't detected. Even X11 would be optional, if we had a non-X11 backend for Unix (not any more). But okay, I'll try to stick in some warnings.

EDIT: Ok, now it will give a fatal error if X11 is missing and a warning if XF86VidMode is missing. We already aborted if Xcursor is missing. Xext and Xpm don't seem to be used any more. Anything else?

EDIT2: now also warns about JPG, PNG, FreeType, etc. if missing and the WANT_* option is enabled.

build-essentials as CGame's said, and xorg-dev are two packages you want for allegro on a Debian based distro.

And then some extras for the addons like libpng-dev, libjpeg-dev, libasound-dev, etc.

So Compiz is broken, good to know, but was already aware of that fact. Works fine in Kwin4 with its compositing enabled.

Making a compositor is easy. Making a Full window manager is hard. Compiz took the long way around.

Please read my entire message. Compiz is known to be buggy, and still isn't a full window manager yet.

KWin4 just works. So its obviously Compiz's shortcomings causing this. We don't need to work around another project's bugs.

edit: someone at the very least should figure out what it is that Compiz doesn't like that KWin4 has no problems with, and report it to the Compiz dev team.

I wasn't aware we used glut. I know we don't use it's window creation or input callbacks. So I really don't think its glut's or allegro's fault. Seems more like a bug with compiz than it did before.