We have not yet had an official release. Nonetheless, you can still get icculus.org/quake3 a few distributions or build it yourself from Subversion.

The Quake 3 engine is open source, this does not mean that Quake 3 Arena the game is free. You must purchase the game to use the data!

Using packages for your Linux Distribution

If you're lucky your distribution or someone else using it may have already done all of the work for you.

Gentoo

Gentoo users can just emerge quake3 to get a recent snapshot of our Subversion repository.

SUSE

Ludwig Nussel works on this project and also provides RPMs for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Note that these are just the binaries, no scripts or KDE/Gnome launchers to start them. Ludwig also mentions that the packages should work on any glibc 2.3 system.

Check out and build from Subversion

This part assumes Windows users are using Cygwin. If you aren't, TortoiseSVN is a good client.

Change into a directory that you want the tree to be kept in.

Check out the source tree:
svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/quake3/trunk quake3
(You can check out a specific revision with the -r option, like this: svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/quake3/trunk quake3 -r100)

Read the readme file. Really. Do it.

Compile and install Quake 3:

Linux and friends

Everyone else can compile it themselves

Install Quake 3 for Linux using the latest point release installer. While the Quake3 engine is Free Software, you still need to copy over legal PK3s like before.

Change into the top level directory (it contains the ui and code directories.)

Run make.

Set $COPYDIR to the directory you installed Quake3 to and make the copyfiles target. Make sure you are changed to the owner of this path (probably root).
COPYDIR="/opt/quake3" make copyfiles

Mac OS X

Open code/macosx/Quake3.pbproj in XCode, press build. Enjoy!

Windows

Building on Windows is slightly complicated. You can either use Microsoft Visual C++ or MinGW. MinGW works better currently; both methods are described in the readme you already are supposed to have read.

If everything has gone well, you should have a binary that works! If not, seek help.

Point Release Installers

As of now, you still need to install the old point releases before this project because they contain updated pk3 files. We mirror them for your convienience:

Linux

Windows

Macintosh