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!

Get icculus.org/quake3

There are three methods of installation. The preffered way is to use an official installer.

• Offical Installers
• Unofficial installers and packages
• Build from source-code

Sanctioned Installers

We have provided installers for the most popular platforms icculus.org/quake3 supports. These have been tested, and if they do not work you can report bugs to us about them.

$installers

Using packages for your Operating System

If you\'re lucky your Operating System provider or someone else using it may have already done all of the work for you. Please report problems with these to those who are guilty.

• Debian & Ubuntu

  There are packages for the i386 and amd64 versions of Ubuntu and Debian Linux, thanks to Bruno "Fuddl" Kleinert.

  • Packages for Debian Linux. These are intended for Debian unstable.
  • Packages for Ubuntu Linux. These are intended for Ubuntu Breezy.

  To install these, as root run dpkg -i package.deb.

  There are also i686 binaries built on Ubuntu made by Pascal de Bruijn. Untar this into /opt/ or where ever you keep weird isolated installs. There is a decent chance these will work on most distributions, these are not .debs.

• Fedora Core, RHEL

  Ed "Sketch" Byrne has been so kind as to provide i386 RPMs for Fedora Core 3, Fedora Core 4, and RedHat Enterprise Linux 4. Be sure to read his Readme to learn how to install it.

• Gentoo

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

Check out and build from Subversion

Prerequisites

• SDL is required (everywhere but Windows), Linux users need development packages if they want to compile the game. You can optionally disable SDL in the Makefile but this configuration is currently untested.
• OpenAL is optionally disable-able. Apple Mac OS X 10.4 comes with OpenAL.
• Subversion is used for acquiring our modified version of the id source code. If you\'re using a binary package, then you won\'t need this.
• Apple Mac OS X users need X Code installed for gcc, and subversion and other interesting things.

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

1. Change into a directory that you want the tree to be kept in.
2. 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)
3. Read the README file. Really. Do it.
4. Compile and install Quake 3:

   • Linux and friends

     We all can compile it ourselves:

     1. Agree to the EULA and grab the updated pk3 files. Extract it to someplace like /opt/quake3.
     2. Change into the top level directory (it contains the ui and code directories.)
     3. Run make.
     4. 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

     1. Change into the top level directory (it contains the ui and code directories.)
     2. Run make.
     3. Install the latest point release for OS X.
     4. Copy ioquake3.ppc in build/release-darwin-ppc/ to /Applications/Quake3/Quake3.app/Contents/MacOS/Quake3.
     5. You need a libSDL-1.2.0.dylib in that .app\'s MacOS directory.
     6. You need to copy your pak0.pk3 from your Quake 3 CD-ROM\'s /baseq3 directory to your /Applications/Quake3/baseq3 directory.
     7. Ditto for the Team Arena mission pack, though you would be substituting baseq3 in the above example for missionpack.

     After you\'ve done all of that, you can double click on the .app file, or change to the /Applications/Quake3/ directory in a terminal and run the binary.

   • 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 that you already are supposed to have read.

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