Question: tar.gz what is that? How do I open this?
Answer: tar.gz means, it's a gzipped tarball, thus an archive. Use tar -xzf archive.tar.gz to extract the package archive.tar.gz, for instance.

Question: How does this whole compile yourself stuff works?
Answer: A good start is this documentation of Compiling Basics from MandrakeUser.

Question: What the hell is SDL?
Answer: It's the Simple DirectMedia Layer available at http://libsdl.org.

Question: And I guess SDL_mixer is...
Answer: Yes! It's a mixing tool based on SDL. These two libraries are all you need to compile an LGame (Okay, some libraries like libmath, libpng and libz are also required but any distro ships it! If yours doesn't try to hit your dealer's head with it... and demand your money back!)

Question: And you're trying to say...
Answer: SDL is required by ALL games and SDL_mixer is recommended for LGeneral, LBreakout2 and LTris. If you don't get SDL_mixer the game will run but obviously without sound. For win32 you'll need SDL.dll and SDL_mixer.dll from http://libsdl.org copied to your windows directory.

Question: I have both libraries installed but the configure script can't find 'sdl-config'?
Answer: Your distro ships the SDL and SDL_mixer RPMs and there's nothing wrong with it as long as you run RPMs but you want to compile source and therefore you'll also need the development packages from http://libsdl.org. Mandrake and SuSE are both known to have this problem.

Question: Okay, I updated both libraries but it still can't be found?
Answer: If you installed the latest source you must run 'ldconfig' to apply the change to your system. You also need to delete the 'config.cache' file no matter if you used source or RPM.

Question: Okay, 'sdl-config' is found but it bails out with strange errors?
Answer: Then SDL is making some trouble so check there FAQ at http://libsdl.org.

Question: I'm running RedHat 8.0 beta and I installed everything from SDL to SDL_mixer devel but when configure checks for SDL_mixer it utterly fails?
Answer: One of the patches for libsmpeg is corrupted in RH 8.0b so if you downgrade libsmpeg to 7.3's compiling should work again.

Question: I can neither change my playername in LBreakout2 nor can I type in levelset names!
Answer: Please update to 2.2.2 which offers a bugfix.

Question: Fullscreen isn't fullscreen!
Answer: I once had that problem, too and it's an X SDL, SDL X problem. I solved it by updating my distro but maybe it's also okay to check if you have 640x480 resolution available in your Xconfig.

Question: Sound comes with some delay?
Answer: Since 2.4 there is a hidden option in the config file called audio_buffer_size which has a default value of 512. The location of the config file is either ~/.lgames/lbreakout2.conf (Linux) or <INSTALLPATH>\lgames\lbreakout2.conf (Win32). I'm running a K6II-450 and if your computer is faster increase this value (1024) and if it's slower decrease it (256).

Question: Sound is delayed and I used GCC 3.4 to compile the game.
Answer: Get the patch from Gentoo and recompile SDL 1.2.7 (without the patch it won't compile). This should fix the problem. (Thanks to Eddie Dulaney)

Question: I have LGeneral, the Panzer General data and lgc-pg but the converter doesn't work?
Answer: The default installation path is /usr/local/share/games/lgeneral but some distro RPMs change the path (ASP Linux is known to do so) which results in a problem when running 'lgc-pg'. So either get the LGeneral stuff completely from source (it doesn't compile long) or check the installation path when using an LGeneral RPM.

Question: I tried to play a recent version of LBreakout2 in windowed mode in Windows but the mouse won't move.
Answer: In the game directory open lgames\lbreakout2.conf with an text editor and set the option rel_motion from 1 to 0.

If you encounter a different problem that should be listed here contact me.