I've long been interested in computer generated graphics, especially when the computer does all the work. Back in the 16-bit days I remember something of a craze among magazine cover disk makers for including fractal landscape generators. These were a lot of fun. One of the modern day descendants of these programs is Terragen, which is capable of generating amazingly realistic and beautiful landscape images.

Sadly, although Terragen is free for personal use, it's not open source and there is no Linux version. Enter WINE - the Windows compatibility layer which allow some Windows program to run under Linux.

In the past, I've found WINE to be difficult to get to grips with - my previous experience is that almost everything I try to run through it doesn't run at all (often failing during the installer), or runs so badly as to make it unusable. However, in the last few weeks, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that a few things which I had previous been unable to use started to work. Terragen is one of these programs. I still had to fiddle around a bit, but after minimal intervention it more or less runs. It certainly runs well enough to get a good feel of the software, and to generate some pretty landscape images.

Installation

To install Terragen, download the Windows version from the Terragen download page. Save this in your $HOME/.wine/drive_c directory.

Now open a terminal and enter this command (change the tgiinstall0943.msi filename to fit the version you have):

$ cd ~/.wine/drive_c
$ wine msiexec /i tginstall0943.msi

Go through the installer as you would on a windows machine. I just accepted all the defaults.

Before you run the program, you'll need to copy a few of the native Windows .DLL files to your $HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 directory. Note that you need to have a legitimate Windows license to use these files! You can find them in your existing Windows installation (if you dual boot), or you can download them from dll-files.com. The files you need are:

• msvcrt.dll
• msvcrt20.dll
• msvcrt40.dll
• msvcrtd.dll

Once you've copied these files to WINE's system32 directory, you need to run winecfg and tell it to use the native version of these libraries. Run winecfg, and go to the Libraries tab. From the combo box labelled "New override for library", select each of the files above and click the add button. When you're done, your winecfg window should look like this screenshot:

.

Running

OK, you should be all set. To run Terragen, enter this command from the terminal:

wine "c:\Program Files\Terragen\terragen.exe"

Here it is running on my system:

And here's a nice landscape I knocked up in just a few minutes:

Caveats

As with many programs running in wine, not everything works quite perfectly. If found it was impossible to exit the 3d preview mode, and saving Terrain layers didn't work. Apart from that it;s pretty functional, and not overly slow. If you like fractal landscape generators, it's well worth a try, especially given that this is an area in which there is little F/OSS software.

I have tried to use the landscape generator script for blender. Although it has some nice features, it's not as easy to get to grips with as Terragen (not least because I'm a newbie with blender and the interface is hard on new users). I'm sure some blender professionals can whip up pretty amazing landscapes with this, I'm simply not there yet. Terragen is designed with landscape generation in mind and nothing else to get in your way.

My Setup

I'm running WINE version 0.9.20 on Kubuntu Dapper Drake.

Enjoy