LINUX Air Combat was originally built on long-stable, tried-and-true programming libraries. One of these, named "Simple Direct-Media Layer", has advanced from version 1.2 up to version 2.0 in the interim. Because thousands and thousands of popular programs were built on SDL1.2, we never expected to be compelled to migrate to SDL2.
Evidently we were wrong about that.
Commencing in early 2023, users began reporting problems with LAC after updating certain LINUX distros to the latest, greatest version. The observed symptom is that LAC's menus no longer respond to mouse clicks or to the <ENTER> or <SPACE> keys, rendering the entire menu system useless.
It seems that some LINUX distros have finally eliminated SDL1.2, and
our best guess is this is the underlying cause of LAC's new problem on
those recently updated platforms. Those distros DO include a
"translation library" that attemtps to intercept and convert all SDL1.2
library requests into SDL2-compatible requests and to satisfy those
requests with the new, more modern SDL2 library, but it is evident that
the translation library has bugs that fail to support LAC's menu code.
Accordingly, we are now in the early stages of converting Linux Air Combat from an SDL1.2 application to an SDL2 application. We don't know how long it will be before we complete this task. Stay tuned... we will update this page with related news from time to time.
Update 25May2023 (Three days after publishing the above)
I just updated my formerly problematic LINUX MINT system to the latest, greatest patches and applications as of this date (25May2023) and the problem described above went away. I'm unsure what is happening. It looks to me like they brought the old SDL1.2 libraries back into their mainstream. Perhaps complaints and problems like the one I describe above are widespread?
Another update, this time from 15Jun2023:
I just updated my formerly problematic Manjaro desktop LINUX machine to the latest version, based on the downloadable "manjaro-xfce-22.1.3-230529-linux61.iso" file, and the problems described at the top of this page immediately went away. Further details can be found in our forums here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxaircombat/discussion/manjarolinuxandlac/thread/b0eb8b724f/(We do still plan to upgrade LAC to SDL2.0 at some point.) In the meantime, evidently it isn't as critical as we had thought....