I suck at introductions tbh...

[Cheez26]

Hi. My name is Chelsea but you can call me Cheez. What brought me here is @UncleWan's PvZ JSW48 remake and I am curious about how to make kinda games.
If you got any pointers on how to use JSWED on Linux (probably with Wine I would guess), I would appreciate it. Other than that, I hope to be friends with y'all. ❤️

[UncleWan]

Hello and welcome，Cheez！🙂

I'm really glad to know that you became interested in making JSW games because of my game.

I don't use the Linux system, so I'm sorry I can't help you with this matter.Let's see what others have to say.🙂

[Cheez26]

I sure hope so because I had a one heck of a time trying to compile JSWED for MX Linux and I just hopped back to Mint recently. @UncleWan

Edited May 26 by Cheez26

[Spider]

Slightly late but Welcome @Cheez26

[jetsetdanny]

Hi Cheez, thanks for joining the forum! And yes, it's a friendly forum ❤️, I'm sure you will enjoy being here 🙂 .

It's great you want to make your own JSW game! As you probably know, the source code of JSWED, the best editor out there, is posted on John Elliott's (its authors) site (here's the direct download link).

I've had no experience with Linux, so I couldn't help you myself, but I've just written to John Elliott pointing to this thread and asking him for assistance - I hope he will help.

[JohnElliott]

Well, Linux is my main operating system and the one I wrote JSWED on, so it ought to be possible to build it (I use Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS). So I'd:

• Install the SDL 1.x compatibility libraries. In Ubuntu these are the libsdl1.2 and libsdl1.2-dev packages. I think libsdl-image1.2 and libsdl-image1.2-dev may be required as well.
• Install libxml (packages: libxml2 and libxml2-dev)
• Downloading the source code for JSWED from the link @jetsetdanny gave.
• Unpack the archive into a directory.
• Open a terminal window. Use cd to change to the directory where you unpacked jswed, and type ./configure && make && sudo make install

If it built and installed without errors, then typing jswed at a command prompt will launch it. 

[jetsetdanny]

Thank you so much for your immediate reply and valuable assistance, John - it's greatly appreciated! 🙏 🙂 

[Cheez26]

On 6/11/2026 at 4:40 PM, JohnElliott said:

Well, Linux is my main operating system and the one I wrote JSWED on, so it ought to be possible to build it (I use Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS). So I'd:

• Install the SDL 1.x compatibility libraries. In Ubuntu these are the libsdl1.2 and libsdl1.2-dev packages. I think libsdl-image1.2 and libsdl-image1.2-dev may be required as well.
• Install libxml (packages: libxml2 and libxml2-dev)
• Downloading the source code for JSWED from the link @jetsetdanny gave.
• Unpack the archive into a directory.
• Open a terminal window. Use cd to change to the directory where you unpacked jswed, and type ./configure && make && sudo make install

If it built and installed without errors, then typing jswed at a command prompt will launch it. 

Thanks for the tips, but I did not know I needed the SDL1.x compatibility libraries. I'll check it out on my MX Linux laptop later. MX Linux is based on Debian Stable btw.

[Cheez26]

@JohnElliott Well, I keep getting errors despite having dependencies installed and ready-to-go.
Is there anything I'm missing?

Here's what I keep getting btw:
 

g++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I.   -DJSW_LIB_DIR=/usr/local/share/jswed -I/usr/include/SDL -D_GNU_SOURCE=1 -D_REENTRANT -DTMPDIR=/tmp -DJSW_LIB_DIR=/usr/local/share/jswed  -g -O2  -I/usr/include/libxml2 -MT fontform.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/fontform.Tpo -c -o fontform.o fontform.cxx
fontform.cxx: In function ‘void se_png_error(png_structp, png_const_charp)’:
fontform.cxx:127:24: error: invalid use of incomplete type ‘png_struct’ {aka ‘struct png_struct_def’}
  127 |         longjmp(png_ptr->jmpbuf, 1);
      |                        ^~
In file included from fontform.cxx:26:
/usr/include/png.h:437:16: note: forward declaration of ‘png_struct’ {aka ‘struct png_struct_def’}
  437 | typedef struct png_struct_def png_struct;
      |                ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
make[2]: *** [Makefile:924: fontform.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/cheez26/jswed-2.3.7'
make[1]: *** [Makefile:960: all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/cheez26/jswed-2.3.7'
make: *** [Makefile:643: all] Error 2

Keep in mind that I'm using a derivative of Debian Stable instead of Ubuntu 24.04 and whatnot.

[JohnElliott]

That's apparently caused by the version of libpng in use. I think it should be possible to replace

png_ptr->jmpbuf

with 

png_jmpbuf(png_ptr)

and see if that helps. You may have to do it in several files.