I tried FreeOrion on Windows before i switched over to Linux, and liked it, so it was nice for me to hear it runs on Linux as well. Unfortunately, the version that comes with the software manager for Ubuntu 14.04 is 0.4.3, and i was already used to 0.4.4 from playing with Windows, so i decided to compile it myself.
I didn’t compile any of the requirements myself; the packages i had to install were:
cmake libogre-1.8-dev libboost-filesystem1.54-dev libfreetype6-dev libjpeg8-dev libtiff-dev libboost-regex1.54-dev libboost-signals1.54-dev libois-dev libboost-python1.54-dev libopenal-dev libvorbis-dev libbullet-dev
Of course, this list might not be complete; i have stuff like gcc, make, … installed anyways, but these seem to be the prereqs you don’t typically install on your workstation.
There is one problem that seems to occur only with XUbuntu, not Ubuntu: XFCE interferes with the keyboard grabbing of the OIS Library that FreeOrion uses, and since OIS is obsolete, noone is going to fix that. What helped me is to put
x11_keyboard_grab=true
into my ~/.freeorion/OISInput.cfg which keeps the keyboard focus on FreeOrion all the time. I’m still not 100% happy with this, as a) i can’t use any applications on my 2nd screen while playing, and b) minimizing FreeOrion drops the keyboard focus, but restoring the window doesn’t grab it again, so i have a way to quickly run another app if i need to, but i’ll have to save the game and restart it to be able to type again.