Installing Not Tetris on a recent Ubuntu version

Source

Not Tetris is an awesome game which is just like Tetris except not. Everyone should play this game. Unfortunately, it was built with a very old version of the Löve game engine, which makes it tricky to install on a modern system.

Building Löve 0.7.2 on Ubuntu Zesty is failing for me for some reason, although hopefully this is a fixable issue. Edit: you fix it by installing headers for SDL 1.2 and Lua 5.1 -- then you can check out and build the source, which is much simpler. The executable from the 0.7.2 Ubuntu Precise package works just fine, however -- here are streamlined instructions for extracting it and instaling it locally in your own bin directory.

(You can also just install the package with dpkg, copy the executable and then uninstall it (so that it isn't overwritten by the updated version of the same package), but it's much less tedious to extract the package without installing it.)

# Work in a subdirectory to make it easier to clean up
mkdir tmp
cd tmp

# This is the package for amd64; replace with other architecture if applicable
wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/love_0.7.2-1build1_amd64.deb

# Extract
ar x love_0.7.2-1build1_amd64.deb
tar -xzf data.tar.gz

# Copy executable
cp usr/bin/love-0.7 ~/bin/

# Clean up
cd ..
rm -rf tmp

Make sure your ~bin is in your path.

Now you can get Not Tetris!

# Get the ZIP and put it in a sensible place
mkdir -p ~/Games/NotTetris
cd ~/Games/NotTetris
wget 'http://stabyourself.net/dl.php?file=nottetris2/nottetris2-linux.zip'

# Unpack
unzip nottetris2-linux.zip
rm nottetris2-linux.zip

First let's make an executable wrapper you can run on the commandline:

echo 'love-0.7 ~/Games/NotTetris/Not\ Tetris\ 2.love' > bin/nottetris
chmod +x bin/nottetris

Now you should be able to launch the game with the command nottetris. You can also integrate it into the XDG menu. Put this into ~/.local/share/applications/nottetris.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Value=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Not Tetris
GenericName=Not Tetris
Exec=nottetris
Categories=Game

Now it should also appear in your menu under Games.

Happy Not Tetrising!