Civilization® is one of these mythical and addictive strategy video games that many of us in IT have played, well into the night. The original Sid Meier's Civilization game, now in it fourth version, runs on Windows only. If you are running any flavor of Unix --Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris-- instead, you have the alternative of playing Freeciv, an open-source strategy game based on the gameplay of Civilization II.
Since Solaris 10, which comes blunded with the GNU developer stack --read gcc, g++, gmake-- and Gnome 2 --read lib glib and gtk+ 2.0--, Freeciv --read, the default GTK+ 2.0 client-- compiles out-of-the-box on Solaris. The Solaris 2.5 recommendation to built a Xaw client and notes about the Xpm library, that you can find in the INSTALL
file of the Freeciv distribution, are now obsolete.
You can access my Solaris build for the latest 2.1.9 version at http://opensolaris.free.fr/. It has tested to work --well, to start, I have not actually played it-- on Solaris 10 Update 7 and OpenSolaris 2008.11 --both running under VirtualBox 2.2.2 by the way-- as you can see from the snapshots below. Instructions are pretty simple:
unzip
under /usr/local
civclient
Just in case... when I say "compiles out of the box", I did have to add /usr/sfw/bin:/usr/ccs/bin to my $PATH.
Hey Frederic. It works great on an Acer AspireOne netbook running OpenSolaris.