[crossfire] Server setup an Debian - newbie

[Yann Chachkoff]

> I'm a Debian user/admin from way back. Debian is known for stability and robustness but not for having the latest packages. The Crossfire server in Debian is way behind the current stable release.

You must be joking, I suppose ? Although Debian Sarge - the "stable" branch of the Debian distribution - is indeed out of date (which is somewhat logical), Debian testing and unstable both have Crossfire 1.9.1, which is the latest release of it.

Answer to the initial question:

The lack of plugins in the Debian package of Crossfire is documented as bug #379348, and has been solved by the package manager (just give it a couple of days for the new package to spread and become available in the repositories).

Unless you are (1) using Debian Stable or (2) cannot wait a couple days more, you wouldn't need to worry about compiling stuff yourself.

In case you really want to compile it yourself anyway, note that building the Python plugin will require the python-dev package to be installed before you use the configure script shipped with the Crossfire sources. To get the sources, you can do an "apt-get source crossfire-server", then cd into the directory created and do a "./configure; make; make install". I also suggest first removing the installed Debian package, to avoid clashes between both.